Amazon has its hands in a great many things, like tablets and smartphones now just to name a couple, and even a new competitor to PayPal, Google Wallet, and other apps of the like, which lets users store their card data within the app to make purchases outside at local retailers without having to bring their physical wallet and cards with them. The new service, called Amazon Wallet appropriately just launched last week. It seems that Amazon isn’t content with stopping there however as there are now reports of some documents that could suggest they want to launch a competitor to Square, the easy electronic payment method that includes a tiny card reader that can be interfaced with a smartphone or tablet to take payments.
The evidence comes from some internal documents from Staples which has the Amazon Card Reader listed as a product alongside the PayPal Here Card Reader and Staples own generic card reader brand, but other than that there is no official word from Amazon themselves about this device being launched in the near future. Staples may be looking to put up signs and other types of store advertisement for the card reader the week of August 12th, which makes it possible that we could see this device launch from Amazon in just the next few weeks.
Right now Pay Pal and Square pretty much dominate the market when it comes to mobile card readers for taking payments, and there are other smaller companies with apps that offer a similar service like Intuit and EMS. Amazon would make for the absolute largest company to put out a card reader though and it would be interesting to see how they plan to compete against some of the other brands that are already out there offering the same thing. It’s a possible scenario that they might have a way for the card reader to also interface with one’s Amazon Wallet account although there has been no mention of it yet so far but it would make sense. Would you use an amazon card reader to take payments over alternatives like Square or PayPal? We suppose that would depend on what they offer for rates and fees for using their system to take payments for stuff.