WePay Takes On Square

In payments, brand matters, more so now than it ever did, and for SMBs adopting mobile commerce initiatives, speed matters too – speed to market and speed to accepting payments in any manner customers desire.

Considering the fact that a majority of transactions for these smaller merchants still take place in person, at the point of sale, it is crucial to have technology in place that does the heavy lifting across several functions, from hardware that interacts with customer cards to back office reconciliation of payments. 

To that end, WePay, which offers payments as a service for online platforms that include FreshBooks, GoFundMe, and Constant Contact, is announcing today (May 16) that it is offering white label point of sale solutions that can enable the in-person transactions for the SMBs who wish to accept payments anywhere they encounter a customer.

By offering the white label option to its software providers (who in turn can offer it directly to their business customers), WePay enables payments acceptance to any online and physical channel that software platform’s end customer does business. Now, any of WePay’s platform customers can provide branded card readers to their customers without taking on any of the attendant costs of building or maintaining such hardware or software.

In an interview with Karen Webster before the announcement, WePay CEO Bill Clerico said that the debut of the new reader “allows anyone to compete with Square.” Clerico contends that software companies that serve small businesses shouldn’t have to refer those companies to a third party to accept in-person payments – but rather offer that service under their own brand as part of their solution.

“Obviously the movement that is called integrated payments has been happening for a while,” Clerico noted, “but 90 percent of commerce happens in-person.”  The push to offer a white label reader, he continued, “is really a switch from online integrated payments to omnichannel integrated payments.”

The initial launch is being done in tandem with FreshBooks and Infusionsoft. At the point of sale, in an in-person transaction, offline data is synced with the merchant’s software tied to its payments platform, and thus eliminates the need to conduct any manual data entry.

The technology, itself through the reader, plugs directly into iOS and Android devices, which in turn allows the merchants to accept payments across both EMV chip cards and magnetic stripe cards.  The company said today that software companies and platforms need only add some code to their software and also their mobile applications in order to integrate the reader.

Clerico told Webster that the pricing is set at 2.75 percent per transaction plus a $0.30 fee, and additional pricing tied to technology implementation itself is determined by the number of readers ordered and also the level of customization that might take place at a given merchant.

“The main value proposition,” said Clerico, “is that [merchants] can send invoices out using the software, and can get paid online, or get paid using mPOS and get all the reporting in one place that is tightly integrated within the software. Before these businesses had separate accounts to do invoicing and reporting. SMBs would have their Square account, their PayPal account and they had to keep track of all of it. We think it’s much better to have all the data in one place so that the business can focus on sales and growth and not administrative details and manual account reconciliation.”