<story><title>Card.io - fast and easy mobile credit card scanning</title><url>https://www.card.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>socmoth</author><text>(Full disclosure, I&apos;m a stock holder in Square)&lt;p&gt;There are two good reasons Square doesn&apos;t do this that I can think of off the top of my head.&lt;p&gt;First, CNP vs CP card processing rates. &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_not_present_transaction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_not_present_transaction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every credit card has the CC number encoded in to the back of the card, but in addition to that, it has a couple bytes of extra information. That extra information qualifies the merchant for a lower processing rate if they SWIPE the card. That means, when you take a picture, you are paying closer to 3.5% instead of 2.75% for every transaction. (rates quoted are square&apos;s cp vs cnp rates)&lt;p&gt;Some merchants are extremely sensitive to this, other aren&apos;t. The larger a merchant is, the more likely they are going to care. On the other hand, no merchant wants to lose a sale, 3.5% of a sale is still better than 100% of a lost sale.&lt;p&gt;The other reason is based on UX. It feels really weird to have someone take a picture of your credit card using their cell phone. The apps that use this technology might be doing anything with that image.&lt;p&gt;Otoh, more people should take credit cards!&lt;p&gt;(edit: Sidenote, Square considered doing this before the swiper was invented, during the very first month or so. Doesn&apos;t mean it is a bad idea, just that Square moved away from it in favor of a swiper.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Card.io - fast and easy mobile credit card scanning</title><url>https://www.card.io/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>mmettler</author><text>Hi gang, this is Mike from card.io.&lt;p&gt;socmoth, CrazedGeek, and tbgvi are right that this is considered a CNP transaction and rates are higher. However, our focus is on mobile developers, not retail merchants. By taking friction out of the mobile checkout flow for those developers (because customers don&apos;t have to type out their cc number), conversions are higher, and thus revenues are higher.&lt;p&gt;Regarding the user experience: folks are used to scanning barcodes with RedLaser, business cards with CardMunch, and checks with PayPal and the Chase mobile app. If we can make credit card purchasing easy and fast on the phone, that&apos;s a good user experience.&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the feedback!</text></comment>