Square vs. VeriFone: THE SMACKDOWN

Why is Verifone on the attack?

Verifone's claim: is "In less than an hour, any reasonably skilled programmer can write an application that will "skim" – or steal – a consumer's financial and personal information right off the card utilizing an easily obtained Square card reader” because Square’s card reader doesn't encrypt card data internally.

Verifone encrypts the magnetic stripe data on the device so unencrypted card data is never stored on your phone. The truth is that there are many other ways to steal credit card numbers (for example, taking a picture of the card, or just writing down the card number) and there are plenty of easily available, cheap card skimming devices if your goal is to steal the actual magnetic stripe data (which could be used to make a very realistic copy of the original card).

Read our full take on this issue.

FeeFighters’ Take

Don’t be persuaded by Verifone’s attack. Both options are good, depending on your needs. Consider the following:

• Cost is the most important consideration for most businesses when choosing a payments solution - and whether or not Square of Verifone is cheaper will depend on your situation.
• Square works with the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, while Verifone only works with the iPhone
• Square has some neat features, like SMS receipts and a beautiful UI
• Verifone’s device looks more robust and is larger than the Square dongle.
• Verifone device is easier to swipe. In our experience, the Square device took 3-4 swipes on average, and Verifone took 1-2 swipes. This makes a difference, as it can be annoying to the customer to wait for the device to swipe.
• Square is much easier to setup - they make the process incredibly simple. Verifone requires a traditional merchant account, which isn’t that big a hassle to get (a lot easier with FeeFighters!) but it still is more time-consuming than setting up a Square account.
• If your customers will tend to have a lot of Amex cards, you will need to set up an account with Amex billed separately. With Square, your Amex transactions can be processed like any other card.