PayPal Advances Its U.S. POS Ambitions With a Launch of the All-in-One Zettle Terminal

PayPal Holdings Inc. early Tuesday said it is making its new Zettle Terminal available to U.S. merchants generally following a rollout in Europe last year.

The $199 device represents the e-commerce payments giant’s latest thrust into physical shops and restaurants and builds on technology acquired when it paid $2.2 billion in 2018 to acquire the Stockholm-based point-of-sale technology company Zettle, then known as iZettle.

The latest development is also a follow-up on a strategy PayPal laid out in July last year to base its thrust into the U.S. POS market on its Zettle technology, which the San Francisco-based company began introducing that month.

But the new device faces stiff competition in the U.S. market from players such as Square, a unit of Block Inc., and Clover, a unit of Fiserv Inc., not to mention a panoply of POS technology vendors serving key specialized markets such as restaurants.

The all-in-one Terminal includes a touchscreen and is small enough to be easily moved about a store or dining room. It is also “ready to go right out of the box,” PayPal says. The device includes a SIM card that is already loaded and enables both cellular and WiFi connections. It can be fitted with an integrated barcode scanner, PayPal says, and attaches to dock with a printer to run out receipts.

PayPal adds it is also introducing a capability for Terminal that will allow merchants to access the funds collected on completed sales “within minutes.” Further details about that feature were not immediately available.

PayPal has entertained POS ambitions for years, some of which have worked out better than others. In 2012, the company launched its own Square-like dongle for small merchants, PayPal Here. Beyond occasional tweaks along the way, not much has been heard of that product for some time. At the same time, PayPal struck a deal with Discover Financial Services to run POS transactions on the Discover Network. That deal was initially stymied by First Data Corp.’s refusal to handle PayPal traffic. First Data, now part of Fiserv, later relented.

PayPal made a much more promising move in 2016 with a deal to gain access to Visa Inc.’s token engine, a crucial step in bringing PayPal to physical merchants. It has followed that up with similar arrangements with Mastercard Inc. and other providers.