Mobile payments are slowly becoming a thing - the capability for small businesses to take payments through mobile devices has becomed a paved the way for easier, faster and much more convenient transaction methods. Square has been making it their business, and they're going public soon enough; there's Intuit's QuickBook and Amazon has recently joined in the fray when they launched Amazon Register a little more than a year ago. However, as of recent reports, the e-commerce giant has announced that it has discontinued its mobile card reader service.
Last Fall, the e-commerce giant announced its own mobile card reader called the Amazon Register to compete against Square. It operated similarly to the competition - it allowed small businesses to use a small plastic credit card reader to accept payments. However, Amazon offered their services with fees below Square, and it ran several promotions to sweeten the deal to attract customers.
However, as of Oct. 30 of this year, Amazon has stopped selling its USD $10 plastic credit card reader. Furthermore, existing customers of Amazon Register can still use the service until Feb. 1 2016, according to the official website of the service.
According to reports, Amazon Register is operating only on very minimal margins, and the competition made by leading services from Square and PayPal have also made the e-commerce giant undergo promotions to win other customers with lesser processing fees and free card readers. However, it didn't gain too much traction than they had expected, and most likely, Amazon isn't profiting on Register and the company may be losing money from the service.
Amazon on the other hand didn't offer an official statement as to why they discontinued the product. All that came in was announcement that they will be discontinuing the service. Moreover, the news comes alongside the announcement that Amazon is also discontinuing its daily deals site called Amazon Local.
