Tag: izettle mobile payments

Mobile payments for homeless magazine powered by iZettle

Vendors of the publication can now accept transactions over a smartphone or tablet.

iZettle, a Swedish company that provides social and mobile payments services, has now entered into a partnership with the magazine called Situation Sthlm, which is a publication that is sold in Stockholm by homeless people as a part of a program that provides them with the opportunity to earn money.

The transaction business is now working with the magazine company to help to make those sales easier.

iZettle announced that it will be working with the magazine by providing the sellers of the publication with smartphones and card readers. This will allow those sellers to be able to use mobile payments technology to accept payments on the spot, from the buyer’s credit or debit cards. No matter where the seller may be, as long as he or she has a cell phone signal, it will be possible to accept these digital transactions, instead of having to rely wholly on cash.

This agreement is the result of a successful mobile payments trial program that has now been completed.

Mobile Payments - iZettleThe trial using the mobile payments services ran for a full month through five sellers who were provided with smartphones and a card reader from iZettle. This gave them the ability to expand the acceptable transactions from cash to credit and debit, as well. To use the service, vendors simply plug the card reader into the smartphone. The customers could then swipe their cards and either sign on the device screen or use a PIN to be able to complete the purchase.

The smartphones that are used for the mobile payments program are collected – along with the card readers – from the central offices every day at the same time that the sellers obtain the magazines that they sell.

iZettle provides both the hardware and the mobile payments software in this agreement so that the sellers would be able to convert their tablets or smartphones into a type of credit and debit card terminal that works on the go. They also provide their services to other merchants and are compliant with EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and VISA) standards in addition to the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards).

Mobile payments from iZettle are moving into another European country

mobile payments izettleThe latest addition to the company’s availability is in Spain, raising its number of E.U. countries to seven.

The increasingly popular mobile payments startup from Sweden, iZettle, has just announced that it is taking its first steps into Spain, which has boosted its availability in the European Union to include seven different countries.

The service provides small businesses with a way to receive credit card transactions over smartphones.

The company is already offering mobile payments options to small businesses in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. It has also brought Visa transactions to Finland, Norway, and Denmark as of November 2012. They were able to accomplish this goal following the settlement of an issue between the two companies that had been outstanding.

The mobile payments will be expanding to Spain with an eye on small and struggling businesses.

The expansion into Spain is meant to provide small business owners who “are hurting” with new mobile payments options, said an mcommerce news release by the company. At the moment, there is no subscription fee for the company’s services and there is no minimum monthly fee. Instead, it charges a flat 2.75 percent per transaction.

The service works for either Android or iOS devices, and the mobile payments are compatible with all of the major credit cards including Amex, Visa, and MasterCard. This places iZettle in direct competition with a number of other companies that are offering comparable services within the European small business marketplace.

For example, there is a German startup called Payleven that is providing mobile payments services for Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Another example is Elavon, which is also headquartered in Europe and has just recently expanded into Ireland as of October, after being active exclusively in the United Kingdom until then.

Among the most recent mobile payments companies to make its way into the European marketplace is a company from Holland called Adyen. It is similar to iZettle in that it functions on both iOS and Android, but it is designed for large retailers so that they can make a point of sale in any location that there is an employee, in order to reduce lineups at the checkout counters.