They must be popular in pockets of people here and there, because I've never used either of them or seen them in the wild. I had to look up what Venmo was a week ago when someone mentioned it here. As far as I can tell, it's a "hipper" version of PayPal except it's not supported by web stores or anywhere else I might buy something. So cool I guess--I'm probably just an out of touch old fogey--I don't use Snapchat either.

Venmo - which in my experience is ubiquitous - is for sending money to and from friends and acquaintances (often for things like dinners, drinks, tickets etc), not for e-commerce (although my landlord takes venmo). Using PayPal would definitely be an 'old guy' tell.

That's very interesting, among my social circle (low 20's Northeast New England Area) Venmo has an implicit monopoly on the service. I doubt any of my non-cs friends have even heard of Square's offering.

Some of the trendier merchents have Square in my neighborhood. I'm in NW Maine. I just bought some alpaca wool and the nice lady swiped my card through a Square device attached to her phone. The pie lady takes Square too. I think the new coffee shop, down in the village, now has a real merchant account, but they did use Square. I've never even seen Venmo.

Err... I'm old, but we have hip and trendy tourists?

Ah well... Another anecdote for ya.

I believe Venmo is squarely in the market of peer-to-peer money. IIRC I don't believe they have any business offerings.

Square, meanwhile, is offering both business and peer-to-peer options.

It might be a generational thing, but it does seem like Venmo has cornered the p2p market.

That would absolutely explain why I've never seen it. In my generation, if I invite people out, I expect to pay the bill. There is no bill splitting. If I'm paying someone, I've probably got cash.

Yeah, I even have a landline. I did mention I'm old. ;-)

Venmo is definitely king in Seattle, but people really don't understand how risky Venmo is for Craigslist and Facebook transactions. Since its F2F, if the person who sent you money contacts Venmo, that money will be returned to them without the ability for the receiver to get a word in edgewise.

Really? I've tried to contact Venmo in the past about an errant send and they told me I was out of luck.

Contact your bank and reverse the debit transaction, like an errant check, you have rights when it comes to reversing a transaction. Most fraud is committed during the settlement period though, while Venmo holds the money: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm...

Venmo isn't obviously profitable either, last I read PayPal was still trying to sell it to B2B merchants. Seems like more of the same problem -- lots of momentum, little monetization.

Well, how do you monetize such a service without Google Wallet, Square Cash, and <insert new entrant of the week> eating you alive? Everybody is running away from Visa/Mastercard processing and toward ACH (Dwolla & Popmoney) or debit based systems (Google Wallet, Venmo), and any fees essentially force whatever volume you have to jump to a competitor.

Worst case, you'll see people using online bill pay to mail eachother's banks checks as that is free and low effort. People just don't want to pay to move money friend to friend, and the US is an anomaly with our extremely high credit card processing charges, where we're at 1.5% to 2% in interchange, the rest of the world is below 1%.