Apple will begin selling mobile payments company Square’s devices in its U.S. retail stores this week. It will be Square’s first large-scale in-store retail promotion and a major score for the company, TechCrunch says. Square allows merchants to process and credit card transactions via a tiny swiping device that plugs into the headset/microphone jack.

The company has been billing itself as living up to the original promise of mobile payment devices - that is, giving anyone the ability to pay for a product or service via their smartphone. It is appropriate for the coffee shop to someone selling a sofa off of Craigslist, co-founder Jim Dorsey has said a number of times.

Defacto Wallets

The mobile device has become familiar enough to consumers that they are now willing to view it is a defacto wallet. Other mobile payment permutations can be expected to arise as more initiatives such as Square become commonplace. An analysis by Oracle/ATG analysis finds that growing numbers of consumers are interested in purchasing a product by checking out on their mobile phone while in a store, according to the tech companies’ survey (via Marketing Charts).

In general remote mobile payment for both physical and digital goods should substantially grow in popularity during the next several years, a study from Juniper Research on mobile commerce strategies shows. The worldwide market for remote mobile payment of digital goods, already expected to reach a healthy estimated $1.65 billion by the end of this year, is forecast to reach more than $2.5 billion by 2014. In particular, mobile payments for physical goods will treble within three years as sites such as eBay Mobile and Amazon Mobile are used increasingly. (via MarketingCharts).