Square Processes One Million Dollars US In Payments Daily

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If you’ve ever been to a farmer’s market, or a flea market, or the like, then you know that nine times out of ten, cash is king. But people are less inclined to carry cash these days, instead favoring credit or debit cards for any of a host of reasons. That’s why things like Square, the mobile payment processor, exist, and they’re really taking off. Square’s just reported that it now takes in over a million dollars US every day in payments. That’s pretty good by itself, until you consider that, just last year, it took a week to process a million.

And it’s small wonder the company’s doing so much more business–the number of merchants signing up to use Square processing went from 30,000 a month last year to fully 100,000 a month this year. They’re seeing some very hefty upticks in merchants getting on board with Square payments, so it’s certainly not surprising that they’re seeing substantial upticks in the amount of cash they process.

It’s actually pretty simple, how the whole thing works–basically, you get a small device that plugs into your various smartphones and some tablets (there’s actually a laundry list of them available, starting with iPhone and iPad and going all the way to Dell Streak), and then that device in turn will scan a credit or debit card, then go back through your phone or tablet to make the transaction. Square, in turn, charges 2.75 percent of the transaction for every swiped card, and if you key it in, it’s 3.5 percent plus an extra 15 cents.

So if you do a lot of mobile business–selling door to door, or at places that may not have reliable electrical connections–then you may want to become one of the steadily growing numbers of merchants who uses Square to handle their payment processing. Cash may be king, but debit and credit cards are increasingly becoming the power behind the throne.