Square has announced its acquisition of Caviar for an estimated $90 million
Mobile payments firm Square has announced its acquisition of San Francisco-based Caviar for a speculated sum of $90 million. Caviar is a food deliver serviced focused on servicing high-end restaurants. Those using the service can have gourmet meals delivered to their homes or office, and Square believes that such a service is ideal for its mobile payments platform. As mobile commerce grows more prominent, consumers are becoming especially interested in purchasing services from their smartphones and tablets.
Square has managed to find success in the mobile commerce field where many others have failed
Square was launched in 2009 and has since become one of the largest payment firms in North America. Over the past year, the company has been launching new services to better accommodate a growing mobile consumer base and has begun entering into new markets in Japan and elsewhere. As Square continues to grow, it is seeking ways it can diversify the value of its services and products. The company has found success in the food service industry, where its Square Order app has seen a great deal of use among consumers.
Caviar finds the majority of its revenue comes from group orders
Caviar may be a company that caters to a relatively small niche, but it has become somewhat popular in large cities. The service charges a $9.99 deliver fee, the entirety of which goes to its delivery staff. Caviar also charges an 18% gratuity on every order. These fees make Caviar an expensive service, but the majority of its revenue comes from group orders and the service allows multiple people to add to an order using a shared link.
Caviar may soon make use of mobile payments technology from Square
Square may soon equipped Caviar with the ability to accept mobile payments more effectively. The company may begin using Square’s payment technology in the near future and delivery staff may be able to accept payments from physical mobile devices for those that do not want to spend money online. Time will tell if Square will find success with its latest venture.
The credit card giant has now backed the smartphone payment solution that is accepted at most POS terminals.
It has now been announced that Visa is investing into LoopPay, which is a mobile wallet app that is designed to provide consumers and retailers with a mobile payment solution that is already accepted at a majority of point of sale terminals among retailers.
The LoopPay mobile app has been created to allow people to make mobile payments with smartphones.
This eliminates the need for those consumers to have to bring their plastic credit cards with them because they can use the mobile wallet within their device to pay with those cards in a digital manner, instead. The app uses a traditional setup for a smartphone based payments service, and provides the consumer with a small dongle that plugs into the device in order to allow users to be able to swipe their virtual cards when they reach the cash register to pay for their products at a retailer’s checkout counter.
In this way, the LoopPay mobile wallet doesn’t require any changes to be made to the retailer POS terminals.
To work with the LoopPay mobile payments software, retailers can simply continue to use the point of sale terminals that they already have. This helps to be able to span the gap that is currently present in the majority of smartphone based wallet services in the United States retail market.
Typically, in order for retailers to be able to receive mobile payments, they would have to change their terminals in order to accept some specific form of technology. At the same time, those that already accept certain types of smartphone friendly tech, such as NFC technology based readers, are compatible with only a small percentage of devices that are currently used by consumers.
As this service allows retailers to keep their systems and simply provides consumers with a dongle to use, this overcomes the compatibility challenges that have existed among many mobile wallet services until now. In this, Visa has already announced that it is upgrading its VisaCheckout program. Therefore, their investment into LoopPay will give the company the opportunity to make an even larger impact on the smartphone payments sector.
