EXCLUSIVE—Payments provider PayPal is now offering two new card readers for small and medium businesses, allowing owners to accept payments with more ease and efficiency, the company announced today.
The two card readers join the two existing readers currently on offer by PayPal—a simple mobile card reader that plugs into a phone’s headphone jack, and a larger chip reader.
The two new readers added today are Chip and Swipe, and Chip and Tap; and were designed with capabilities focused on small businesses, Chris Gardner, head of in-store for PayPal, told Bank Innovation.
“SMBs [have] been an increasingly big market; they want a wireless reader, they want longer battery life,” Gardner said. “Our smaller retail partners can get set up and start accepting payments same day.”
PayPal does not disclose the number of businesses currently using its readers, said Gardner, but the amount of merchants on PayPal’s proper infrastructure network numbers in the millions.
The two readers differ in terms of price and the amount of payment methods they accept—the first, Chip and Swipe, costs $29.99 and accepts card swipes and EMV chips, while the second, Tap reader also accepts contactless taps and costs $59.99.
Price is going to be the main difference when picking between the two, Gardner acknowledges, but the Tap reader does also allow a business to accept a variety of mobile payment methods, including Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay—although, not Venmo, which “does not yet [have] in-person modality,” according to Gardner. Venmo payments can currently be used for e-commerce purchases, another factor that went into the design of PayPal’s readers: rather than mourn the death of a physical store, Gardner said, it’s all about a “blended experience.”
“It’s all about the blending of use cases, it’s becoming harder and harder to keep them separate,” Gardner said of physical and online retail. “It’s becoming experimental, it’s all about our personal experiences–it’s part of the fabric of our social experiences.”
Both readers are wireless and no bigger than “a deck of cards,” according to PayPal, making them ideal for businesses that might be more “mobile,” Gardner said, including the growing number of workers who are part of the gig economy.
“That’s [definitely] a segment of our customers, and growing,” Gardner said of gig workers. “From drivers, landscapers, craft fairs—the [readers] work well for people who have a business that might be more mobile.”
To learn more about in-store and online payments, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to request an invitation.