An Analysis on the Square Cash App in App Store

Bella Wei
Stratifyd
Published in
6 min readAug 23, 2016
Square Cash Logo
Venmo Logo

Did you read our analysis on Venmo? If you didn’t get the chance to, you can read it here — An Analysis on the Venmo App on Google Play.

Venmo is one of the most popular apps on the market for transferring money, but it’s not the only one that does what it does. The Square Cash, Venmo, and PayPal apps all let you do pretty much the same thing: pay or request money from others. Not only can you do this within the app, but you can do it via web browser or even email. While these apps are fundamentally similar, they each have their own special features that make them stand out.

Social Sharing — Pro or Con?

Most people believe Venmo is different than others because of its social features. Venmo is the only one out of the mentioned apps that lets you see your friends’ payment activities. While some users enjoy the social aspects of Venmo, some remain unsure. They question, is it too much? If you make public transactions on Venmo, you’re literally showing everyone your activities. Although you can turn the feature off and makes your transactions private, some argue that this feature shouldn’t have been there in the first place. However, a lot of users, especially the younger generation enjoy the social aspect of Venmo. They love seeing what their friends are doing and they even comment on each other’s activities. Venmo makes money transactions more like social endeavors, and it’s up to you if you like it or not.

Square Cash App

If you’re not a fan of Venmo’s social aspects, you have other choices if you want a money transferring app. Square Cash is a popular option.

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Square Cash looks similar to its competitors, it helps you send and request money just like other apps. Nonetheless, Square Cash is adored by many users for its simplicity and anonymity. Square Cash’s biggest feature is that you don’t need to set up an account to use it, and all you need is a debit card or a credit card (3% fee). This convenience is perfect for people who’re looking for a simple, no-frills way to transfer money. It’s similar to using cash — it’s fast and private. We’ve already analyzed Venmo with Signals, we decided to use Signals to examine Square Cash’s user feedback in the App Store?

Data Analytics on the Square Cash App

Signals allows you to analyze data easily with its built-in data connector!

Data Analytics on Square Cash App

Sentiment

We can easily see that Square Cash is a popular app and is rated quite high by its users. With 2.44 positive sentiment value, we can affirm that Square Cash satisfies the majority of its users.

Sentiment on Square Cash App

Category Overview

Square Cash App Major Categories of Feedback

Let’s first take a look at the Category Overview. These categories are automatically created by Signals’ machine learning, taking the major themes in the app comments textual data and organizing them into the most common topics. You will see the circled categories where some users mentioned Square Cash’s competitors, such as Google Wallet, Western Union and personal checks. Google Wallet is also a popular money transferring service, and what’s special about it is it’s linked to other Google services, Gmail, for example. Google Wallet allows you to send or request money through email, but you do need a Google account to use this service. As for Western Union, it has shifted its focus to oversea money wiring and money orders. The reason why a lot of people have moved on from Western Union for sending money is mainly because of the fees, and even when you want to send money internationally, there’s PayPal. For simple and quick money transfers, not many people want to write checks. Let’s say if you’re simply splitting a dinner check with a friend, it seems like a bit of a hassle to write a check of $20. There’s no doubt that more and more people opt for money transferring apps instead of writing paper checks.

Buzzword

Buzzwords in Square Cash App Comments

Key Takeaways from looking at Buzzwords

  • Parents use Square Cash to send money to their children in college. We see more than one buzzword that’s related to children in college, and interestingly, it’s not really about college students sending each other money. Upon further investigation, we learned that it’s how parents send money to their children nowadays. For a lot of parents, it’s simply to use Square Cash since no account registration is required. Moreover, it offers more privacy than Venmo, which is important to many people. While college students love using Venmo for its social features, parents enjoy the ease of use of Square Cash.
  • People mainly use Square Cash for casual money payments. We see Buzzword like “split tab”, “split bill”, “rent”, “utility” and these are all considered casual spending. Just like Venmo, Square Cash has a relatively low transfer limit, which is $3000 for Venmo and $2500 in Square Cash’s case. With a limit of $2500, Square Cash is aimed for everyday miscellaneous payments between friends and family, and not really for large transfers.

Room to Improve

Negative sentiment on Square Cash App
  • Customer service can be better. There more than a couple complaints regarding Square Cash’s customer service. Some users think it’s unprofessional, unhelpful or just plainly bad. No company can please every single customer, but this does show that Square Cash needs to put in more effort in educating its customer service representatives.
  • Technical issues. We do see some complaints about technical issues but because Square Cash, like other apps, updates and fixes bugs regularly, it’s very likely that the technical issues have been solved. Furthermore, some users point out that Square Cash doesn’t offer a way to get your money back if you accidentally send it to the wrong person. This may seem insecure to a lot of people, but in Square Cash’s defense, this is basically like handling cash and you should always confirm before you send it out.

To conclude, Square Cash is a great solution for people who don’t want to spend time setting up an account or for people who want a simple money transferring service with more anonymity than Venmo. Do you use Venmo or team Square Cash? Or , are you an avid Google fan so you use Google Wallet? In the end, they all do what they do very well, it only depends on your feature preferences.

If you are interested in using our Signals platform to perform a data analysis on your products, contact us at clientsupport@stratifyd.com for a free trial.

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