Tag Archives: technology

Square ( SQ ) is intensifying its offense against PayPal ( PYPL )’s Web checkout products. With details in a blog post early Wednesday , Square says that it has created a new tool that can process payments from any website after the seller adds several of lines of code. Called E-commerce API (application programming interface), it marks the first time that Square has offered sellers the ability to put a Square checkout page on any website. Square’s announcement mounts pressure on PayPal, which already is facing stiff competition from tech titans such as Apple ( AAPL ) Pay and Google’s Android Pay, among other offerings. Google is a unit of Alphabet ( GOOGL ). Prior to Wednesday, Square offered its merchants two Web checkout options using its own prebuilt store and two third-party options for using websites prebuilt by BigCommerce and Weebly. But the San Francisco-based company did not have solutions for merchants who opted to build their own websites. Square has more than 2 million merchants and is adding about 100,000 every quarter. PayPal has more than 13 million sellers. Both companies charge 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction in the U.S. for website sales. Square — which is run by CEO Jack Dorsey, who is also top boss at Twitter ( TWTR ) — also is announcing Register API, a method to integrate Square’s payments processing into any iOS point of sale. Square says that it’s adding Register API in recognition of the fact that some sellers have specialized needs for point-of-sale applications. Square stock closed up 2.5% at 13.74 on Tuesday. The company has an IBD Composite Rating of 51, where 99 is the highest. Wedbush analyst Gil Luria said that the stock’s recent volatility is largely because the company has a small float — relatively few shares are traded publicly. The float will change once the lockup period expires in May. Luria also has previously told IBD that Square is popular among short sellers.