PayPal is set to announce a major new payments service tomorrow. According to a GigaOm report, it plans to introduce a dongle that will compete with Square and Intuit's GoPayment product.
This would be another move by PayPal to expand from online transactions into real-world payments. But if tomorrow's announcement is anything like the point-of-service offering PayPal rolled out recently to get people to use PayPal for in-store purchases, I'm not overly optimistic.
I tried out PayPal's point-of-sale offering recently at the local Home Depot in San Mateo, and I was far from impressed. Instead of swiping a credit or debit card to pay, you can enter your phone number and a PIN to pay with your PayPal account. PayPal's goal is to introduce the service at a number of big box retailers, but for now, the service is being tested at several Home Depot stores.
Entering my phone number and PIN took longer than it takes to swipe a credit card. This is something that the many companies going after the retail payments space don't understand: Swiping a credit card is not a problem for people. The credit card companies make their money by taking a piece of every transaction. So they've made it super easy to do so.
read more. Includes photos of the terminal & process.
