Last year, Amazon announced the launch of its own mobile card reader. Called Amazon Register and worked the same way as Square where small businesses owners could use a tiny card reader to accept plastic for buying thing with only a phone or tablet.
To get small businesses attention, Amazon offered lower rates than both Paypal and Square and charged merely 2.5% per action, compared to Square’s 2.75%. And sometimes to lower it down to 1.75% per action.
Now, few months after the launch, Amazon is announcing the death of Register and stopped, on last Friday, selling the $10 card reader that the service relies on. And also released a statement on the service’s page says that businesses will no longer be able to process purchases with Register on February 1st, 2016.
The mobile card reader business continues to grow and there’s a good number of competitors like Square and Paypal. But it seems that the Amazon strategy to undercut its competitors’ rates and announcing promotions that offer away the readers for free couldn’t bring to the company the amount of user base needed to sustain the business.
