How hard it is to pay for a business look at these four companies

Square,levelup and Clinkle, they can all prove a basic fact: it's really not easy to pay for this line! On a Saturday morning, you went out for a stroll. You spend all day shopping and you buy a lot of new clothes in order to match the latest spring fashion trends. When you're wandering around the city center, you may stop to buy a cup of coffee, a sandwich, and a box of gum. You may also walk into a hardware store, buy a few nails, and then go home and hang a picture on the wall. Finally, you walk into a Wal-Mart or Target supermarket and buy a brand-new laundry basket. All right, what do all these behaviors have in common? The answer is that everything you've just done has been spent. But in the process, how likely are you to take out your smartphone to pay for the bill? The concept of mobile payment has been launched for three years, so have you ever used a smartphone in a physical retail store? Now think about it, it seems that many products are also blown the hype. Let's go back to 2011, when, from the mouth of the entrepreneur, it seemed like a lot of technical terminology related to mobile payments, such as smartphone, mobile wallet, two-dimensional code, short-range wireless communication (NFC), etc. It is thought that these technologies will soon revolutionize the way people pay for their trades. However, it is not easy for consumers and merchants to really accept mobile payments, and the reality is always so brutal. For technicians, they want to subvert the way people pay, mainly due to two reasons, one is that they believe that money is essentially a data science; second, with technological advances and ubiquitous computer networks, they can offer a payment platform And to change people's basic payment behavior. In the end, however, every company trying to enter the payment industry has found an indisputable fact that the payment line is not as simple as it might seem. In the payment industry to strive for the four examples of the author here to lift the four examples, can be said in the field of payment are very competitive, the author of this first sell a case, do not disclose the specific names of these four companies. However, these four companies have different problems, and these problems, as well as other companies want to enter the field of payment trouble. When company A started, it was a game company based on user location information, and Foursquare somewhat similar, but they developed tepid, after several years, the company began to transform into the payment industry, they developed an app application, a set of merchant rules, and two-dimensional code. Today, the company continues to develop, but the size of their development did not meet the expectations of investors. Company B was founded more than 5 years ago, making credit card payments ubiquitous, the company developed a card reader to connect users ' smartphones and tablets, and the company raised more than 3Billion dollars in the current company B business development is very large, the product is certainly very popular, but although last year, the company processed 20 billion U.S. dollars of payment transactions and received 550 million U.S. dollars of revenue, but they were still in 2013, and the loss of more than 100 million dollars! Company C started as a Stanford University classroom assignment, and the founder of the company was a prodigy, and of course he was ambitious and confident that he could change the way people use smartphones to process payments. The company gained the largest seed-round financing in Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial history, but then the company fell into one after another debate, although they have made a lot of promises, but also the outside world to blow their hype, but so far, the company has not even a product release. If an entity merchant, without two-dimensional code scanners and no support for short-range wireless communications, what changes should smartphones make to provide payment transactions? Company D came up with a method. They raised more than 10 million dollars and launched their own products with partners. At first, the company and the tech community cheered, but soon they found that the company offered nothing more than a bridging product, and they had to be able to provide a more reliable solution. Do you want to know who the four companies are? Well, now is the answer. Company A is LevelUp, who is headquartered in Boston, and has developed a location-based Scvngr gaming application before dabbling in the payment area. Company B is square, and their boss is Twitter co-founder Jackdorsey, which offers a smartphone payment system based on a reader. The author of the mocking Company C, in fact, is Clinkle, the company was founded by Stanford graduate Lucas Duplan. Company D, called Loop, has developed an electronic dog and smartphone shell that allows users to make mobile payments by leveraging existing electronic magnetic-card scanners in the current POS system. Every one of these companies has a problem. For example, there is a problem with the income and profitability of the square company; LevelUp need a sales technology platform to achieve meaningful business expansion; Loop is actually using a transitional technology solution to attract consumers; Clinkle, well, at least you should actually develop a business in your own way. All these payment companies, it can be said, face extraordinary challenges. This is not the only few companies on the hard road of mobile payments. Google has also moved into mobile payments and has developed an NFC-based wallet, but they have not been able to achieve a major breakthrough, as expected, and certainly not to occupy physical retail outlets. Some network operators, such as T-mobile,at&t and Verizon, have also developed the ISIS mobile wallet using NFC technology, butIs that the product is basically dead. Throughout the payment technology ecosystem, we find that the vast majority of basic business principles are very difficult. LevelUp's Dilemma LevelUp Company is located in Boston, 2012, the company once famous. They have launched a new mobile wallet platform that can be paid in local businesses by scanning a two-dimensional code. LevelUp's goal is to create a 0-fee "world, LevelUp wants to make each payment transaction cost 0, while the vast majority of payment processing companies, such as Visa and MasterCard, have a rate of around 2.75%. LevelUp has recruited a large sales team and invested heavily in its app application, LevelUp the app is an open platform for retailers to provide payment services online. However, after 1.5, you can hardly hear any special news from the LevelUp company. You may occasionally find that the company still exists (and, of course, it may still exist in the Boston area), but you found that in 2013, LevelUp's chief executive, Seth Priesbatch, and his staff were virtually useless. Last week, Priesbatch invited foreign technology media ReadWrite to visit LevelUp headquarters, where he talked about the company's progress. The small-scale payment company, which is very candid and publishes numbers, admits it is not profitable and says it has to make some adjustments in the face of such brutal market realities. The following are some of the figures published by LevelUp Company: L IN the United States has 14,000 businesses to accept LevelUp, but some of them are not activated merchants L LevelUp and 50 pos manufacturers have cooperated to consolidate L average transaction amount less than 10 USD l According to LevelUp's incentive and loyalty marketing project requirements, about 10% of each fee is used to compensate the retailer's credit LevelUp rate of 2.5%, plus 10% of the transaction amount into an integral, for example, if you paid 100 dollars through LevelUp, 10% will be converted into points, that is, 10 points, and LevelUp will earn 2.5 dollars. L in the United States, businesses receiving levelup deal with about 600,000 transactions per month in the food industry L LevelUp. Priesbatch, chief executive of LevelUp, reckons they may be profitable after next year, but for now, LevelUp would prefer to be transformed into a Third-party payment service company. The dilemma of mobile payment when I talk about mobile payment companies, I ask the same question: Is it going to happen at the end of the consumer or at the merchant end? The question seems to be asking if there's a chicken or a first.Egg。 If you want to promote mobile payments on a large scale, then some powerful partners are essential, such as banks, payment handlers, business owners, and technology companies like Google Apple. There is also a need for strong sales force to allow entity merchants and POS providers to accept mobile payments. It's very, very difficult to generalize from the consumer side, and companies in the payment field need technical solutions to remove all the obstacles in between. For example, if I could use square or LevelUp wallet in a merchant and then go to another merchant, I would not be able to use the product. In addition to these difficulties, there are other potential obstacles, that is, payment network companies, such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and so on, they do not want to let the mobile payment in their own bowl. There are many problems with mobile payment, but the most basic one is the sentence mentioned at the beginning of this article: payment is not an easy thing. Promotion, revenue, consumer and merchant behavior, partners, sales, advertising, and others, these are the factors that change the payment industry, and of course, they are obstacles to the development of the payment industry. (via RW/fast carp)