Business owners looking for easy payment solutions for their businesses often come across one top name, Square. The platform provides users with multiple solutions when it comes to mobile payments and other financial services.
In addition to these, Square also offers those users powerful tools, often free of cost, to manage their business better and get detailed analysis and reports. Approximately 24 million users trust the platform with their payment solutions. It makes Square one of the top names in the market for mobile payments.
One of the main reasons the platform started working in the first place was to allow merchants to use their solutions for mobile payments. Ever since then, the platform has evolved to providing various unique products and services to merchants.
Despite all of its unique features and services, the platform has some weak points. While most of its users disregard these weak points, some others consider it a dealbreaker. Especially given the nature of the platform’s solutions, these weaknesses can make the platform difficult to use.
5 reason why should not use Square
The weaknesses of the platform give rise to many reasons not to use it. Among these, the top five reasons include the following.
1) High fees and charges
Square charges its users both a commission-based and a fixed fee for every transaction they make. While the fixed fee is negligible, the commission-based charges are high. The standard charge per transaction is 2.6% of the transaction value and a $0.10 fixed charge. For most small businesses, these fees are low as the value of their transactions is not high.
However, for medium or large businesses, the fees can become high, especially for high-value transactions. Similarly, other services and solutions that the platform offers also have a similar or high fee structure, which businesses may not afford. Therefore, these types of businesses usually steer away from using Square.
2) Limited availability
As of now, the services that Square provides are only available in 5 countries. These include the US, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, and Japan. While these are all major economic countries that promote startups and small businesses, they are not enough, especially for businesses that expand beyond these five geographical locations.
The platform also isn’t available in some territories in the US, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Users can still access the dashboard or tools provided by Square using the app. However, it does not allow them to make transactions or accept payments in other countries. Therefore, for businesses that want to process payments outside the limited locations, Square is not an option.
3) Stability issues
Due to its integrated solutions, merchants can use various Square products effortlessly. However, sometimes, there are also some stability issues with them. Once one of the products or services stops working, it can render all other products useless. Similarly, the platform depends on internet connectivity to work. When there are internet issues, the platform may also stop working.
Similarly, some of its products, such as the Square Reader, may stop working and not read cards. Due to that, users have to manually input card details, which is an added hassle. Therefore, users have to face stability issues when using the platform and its services.
4) Not suitable for high-risk businesses
Another issue due to which users should consider not using Square is its unsuitability for high-risk businesses. High-risk businesses consist of those that have a high chance of chargebacks. While Square does have a high-risk merchant account, it does not make the platform better for high-risk businesses.
The issue with high-risk businesses is that Square may consider them fraudulent and freeze their transactions or accounts. In circumstances where these issues occur, the platform also doesn’t provide any support, which makes it even harder for merchants to resolve these issues.
5) Unsatisfactory customer support
As mentioned above, Square doesn’t provide any customer support to users whose accounts have been frozen or blocked. However, that isn’t all that is wrong with their customer support. For a platform with millions of users and given the nature of its services, customer support means a lot. Similarly, some ways to contact the platform may cost users extra, such as phone calls.
Users complain of late response times and unsatisfactory answers from Square’s customer support department. Similarly, some users complain that customer support hasn’t been able to help them with technical issues in the past.
Conclusion
Square is one of the top names in the mobile payments industry. The platform provides many solutions that make it one of the top choices among users. However, there are some problems or weaknesses that the platform also has.
These may include high fees, limited availability, stability issues, unsuitable for high-risk businesses, and below-par customer support quality.
