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If you run a little business and would like to start taking payments by card, iZettle is by far the cheapest, easiest and newest way to do so. For £20 you get a card reader that attaches to an iPhone, iPad or Android mobile, then away you go. It’ll be just like working in Tesco.
iZettle is launching with mobile network EE here, which will be selling the device, and including £20 of credit toward transaction fees, in some of its physical branches. In return you get a little card reader able to accept the ‘chip & pin’ cards offered by Visa, Mastercard, American Express and the Diners Club, with an upper limit of £5,500 a day. Which should just about cover an emergency plumber call-out.
For little businesses and the self-employed, it sounds like the perfect way to take money off people without having to march them to a cashpoint. iZettle says 4,000 people have already been using it in the UK as part of a beta test that’s been running over the summer, with users happy to pay a 2.75 per cent commission fee for the convenience of taking plastic. [iZettle]
What a great name, it just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it?
:-/
i can see people getting this to pay themselves with their own credit cards, so they can get cash, without getting hit by the high cash withdrawal fees of a credit card.
Muggings may become interesting too
, will muggers have to go round with an accepts visa, mastercard and american express stickers on them
I’d be interested to know more about the technical side of this as it appears to use the dock connector rather than the microphone/headphone jack that Square uses. I assume that this also means it won’t work on iPhone 5/iPad 4/iPad Mini?
‘iZettle works for the iPhone 3GS and newer, iPad, and the latest versions of the iPod touch. For the iPhone 5 you will need to use the lightning adapter or the audio jack reader.’
‘It is not allowed to use iZettle on a device which has been jailbroken or rooted.’
Now I can start skimming credit card pins with the fingerprints people leave on the screen
Works best for a greasy hamburger vendor
Sounds interesting, one more step towards the cashless society
Some of us are already cashless