Square's Disruptive Payment Service About To Get A Huge Retail Boost From Apple
Mobile payments company Square has landed a big coup—sales placement on Apple's online store. And we've just confirmed with Square that the startup has a deal for in-store sales as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
Square, which sells a small dongle that turns an iPhone or iPad into a card-accepting point of sale, has secured sales placement on Apple's online store — and TechCrunch confirms the startup also has a deal for in-store placement in Apple's physical retail locations. Neither pickup by other outlets nor public reaction appears in the record, so this reads as a TechCrunch-sourced scoop whose significance rests on the distribution shift itself.
The move matters because Square's product lives or dies on how easily small merchants acquire the reader; putting it on Apple's shelves converts a direct-sales problem into an impulse-buy purchase next to the devices it plugs into.
First-order effects
- Square's customer-acquisition cost drops sharply: the card reader reaches buyers at the moment they are buying the iPhone or iPad it works with, without Square funding its own sales channel.
- Apple gains another third-party accessory that extends the utility of its devices into commerce, reinforcing the iPhone and iPad as business tools rather than consumer gadgets alone.
Second-order effects
- Rival mobile card-reading startups face pressure to match Apple-shelf distribution or compete on software and pricing instead, since the hardware itself is now commoditized at retail.
- Other consumer-electronics retailers gain an incentive to stock mobile payment readers, turning what was a B2B sale into a shelf-space contest among accessory makers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, acceptance hardware for small merchants migrates from direct enterprise sales into consumer retail channels — meaning whoever controls that retail access (Apple foremost) effectively gates which payment startups reach Main Street.
The trend: Mobile payments startups are winning merchant adoption through consumer-platform distribution deals rather than building their own salesforces.