Amazon is preparing to launch its mobile-based credit card reader in August to take on Square and PayPal, claims a Sunday Times report.
9to5Mac, with a copy of leaked Staples documents, reports that Amazon is planning to introduce ‘Amazon Card Reader’ costing a mere £5.90 ($9.99), likely to be available from the week of August 12th. However, Amazon is yet to officially confirm any plans.
According to the report citing unnamed sources, the new reader is not the only foray of Amazon’s into mobile payments as the company’s Lab126 hardware division is also separately developing another mobile payment related product focusing on biometric fingerprint scanners, as the company is planning to push into the mobile payments world in a “comprehensive way.”
The diagrams in the Staples documents show that the new Amazon Card Reader will be placed on the store shelves, beside the PayPal and Staples solutions for mobile payments, suggesting the credit card reader is a bit closer to reality than any kind of speculations.
The report follows the launch of a new mobile Wallet app, dubbed Amazon Wallet for Android and FirePhone earlier last week that allows users to scan cards with their smartphones and save it in the cloud.
Currently, Square and PayPal are dominating the mobile card reader market, making it a fiercely competitive space, for Amazon to lure customers away.
However, this is not the first instance that Amazon is rumoured to be working on mobile payment products. Earlier this year, Wall Street Journal reported that the company was working on a point-of-sale system using a Kindle in conjunction with a mobile credit-card reader.
