PayAnywhere’s Mobile Credit Card Reader Stands Out - owenswhearour

Payment posting swipers

are popular at CES this twelvemonth, and they've certainly have been pop up at storefronts over the yore twelvemonth or sol. PayAnywhere intends to outpace the touristy Square app aside offering plush features for business owners and addressing consumers' security concerns.

Like Square and Intuit GoPayment, Pay Anywhere gives away its card-swiping accessory for unpaid with app registration. From there, it charges a 2.69 percent tip per transaction, turn down than the fees both for Square (2.75 per centum) and Intuit GoPayment (2.7 percent for lineup swipes and 3.7 percent if you manually key in the card number).

[Related story: Squarish vs. Intuit GoPayment, Compared]

The app is for sale on iOS and Android (including 7 and 10-inch tablets), with the latest version approaching in deuce weeks along with a new BlackBerry app.

A presentation of the app on the CES depict level showed a elliptic user interface. It lets you entrap a point-of-sale (POS) system with fixed items–useful, for instance, if the restaurant you run offers the same menu all day. Merchants can log in from anywhere and receive alerts for duplicate proceedings Beaver State unusually high receipt averages, which is smashing if you oversee a number of employees.

PayAnywhere is PCI-compliant and encrypts data at every transaction, important if your customers are hesitant about entrusting their credit-card information to such a new technology. In contrast, Square received a hand-slap in early May 2011, when security system company viaForensics found that the app unsuccessful to securely computer storage the last quaternary digits of a client's course credit card keep down.

Some other big perk is that PayAnywhere lets you record transactions offline, processing them when you'atomic number 75 connected again–which neither Paid or Intuit's GoPay can offer. And, you rear set up the app to print hard-copy receipts for customers on thermal paper (great for restaurants, again), or from any radio printer, or have a copy of the receipt emailed to the customer. PayAnywhere doesn't store email addresses with credit card numbers, which is good for security, although haunt customers power be soured off away having to input their email at every transaction. Finally, all your transactions can Be imported into QuickBooks from your mobile device for accounting.

For more blogs, stories, photos, and television from the nation's largest consumer electronics show, check unsuccessful PCWorld's all-or-nothing coverage of CES 2012.