I’ve mentioned elsewhere that when I first started taking card payments from my pupils, I chose iZettle. Everything was fine (without anything to compare with) until the time they updated their app and it wouldn’t run on my smartphone. They basically told me to get stuffed – effectively almost killing my business overnight – which prompted me to switch to PayPal. By the time they came back and admitted they had made a mistake, it was too late.
Ironically, I would have chosen PayPal in the first place if their staff hadn’t been so incompetent at the time, but the bad information I was given had ironed itself out by the time iZettle screwed up, and the switch was easy.
PayPal is much better than iZettle ever was. The main plus point being that any money you take can be in your account within minutes, as opposed to the “several working days” (aka a week, if you have bank holidays and a system fault to deal with at Easter or Christmas). PayPal is 24/7, whereas iZettle was 24/3 if you were lucky, and 0/7 if you weren’t.
So it was with interest that I read this article reporting that PayPal has purchased iZettle.
The language is suitably business-like, and it isn’t possible yet to say why this has happened, given that iZettle was apparently ready to list itself on the Swedish stock exchange. Surprisingly, it had targeted being “in profit” for 2020 (compare that to PayPal, which has been “in profit” since the Age of the Dinosaurs). However, I get a number of hits from people who are having problems with iZettle judging by the search terms used, so I have my own opinion.