This would have been nicer had it launched about 3 weeks ago. Square-wallet gift cards would be great easy holiday gifts.
(it also seemed like an obvious feature ever since Square launched. Running loyalty and gift cards is one of the ways to get out of the 1-2% gross margin ghetto for just processing visa/mc, which is one of the big problems with a payments startup. Even if you process hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, it's hard to make enough from the fraction of a percent left over after variable costs to cover your fixed costs, let alone turn a profit. Yet, even on day one, you need huge scale and high reliability.)
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This would have been nicer had it launched about 3 weeks ago. Square-wallet gift cards would be great easy holiday gifts.
(it also seemed like an obvious feature ever since Square launched. Running loyalty and gift cards is one of the ways to get out of the 1-2% gross margin ghetto for just processing visa/mc, which is one of the big problems with a payments startup. Even if you process hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, it's hard to make enough from the fraction of a percent left over after variable costs to cover your fixed costs, let alone turn a profit. Yet, even on day one, you need huge scale and high reliability.)