DoorDash adds new subscription tier for college students, Etsy sellers go on strike

Yahoo Finance Live looks at several of today's trending stock tickers, including Block's new point of sale payment systems for businesses.

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Welcome back, everyone. It is time for our Triple Play-- the three tickers that we are watching for you this afternoon and the moves that they're making. So my pick is SQ, formerly known as Square and now Block.

Now, it's actually trading near session highs at the moment. You can see it's at $125 there, up just over 1.5% there. Now, it was struggling, though, in early trading and it has been down for the past five sessions. But today, the company that's known for its seller-focused ecosystem that worked with Apple's iPads has introduced its next generation of Square Stands for its point of sale system.

Now, the upgrades include things like tap, chip, and pin payments as well as a smoother user experience. Now, contactless and chip and pin payments made up 85% of global cashless hardware transactions on Square's platform last year. Now, the software also got an upgrade to be faster and more transparent. Apple, the iPad obviously pairing with it, not faring as well today-- that's also on a five-day losing streak.

BRAD SMITH: You know, it's interesting-- as we're continuing to think about ways that Square point of sale as part of the broader parent company Block is continuing to try and look at some of the trends, the insights that they can extrapolate from this move away from-- or this accelerated move from cash and more towards digital payment solutions, and where Square can play a critical role, excuse me-- you know, one of the huge efforts that we've seen from Square is just leveraging the devices that people already had in their hands as they were launching in those small blocks that they could connect into these devices, now to the point of, hey, we can have a larger point of sale solution that people are willing to upgrade into.

Now, the critical part of that is you mentioned Apple a moment ago-- Apple is looking to getting into this, but also take out some of the other devices that are annexed to an Apple hardware solution as well, looking to expand the iPhone's capabilities to accept contactless payments. And so that's where this really gets interesting in terms of Apple, the install base that they already have, which Square was a beneficiary of in their early launch and being an accepted and compatible accessory for that point of sale now to the point where Apple is getting even more involved in this point of sale and transaction solutions area.

And we'll see exactly where Square is able to retain some of their market share, on that front particularly. One of the companies that I'm watching here today is ticker symbol DASH. It's DoorDash. And it is down on the day. However, there's an interesting play that they're putting forward here is they are adding a new different-- different type of tier for subscriptions.

And it's going towards college students here. Now, what's critical about this is they're trying to offer them some fast and affordable ways to get everything that college students need. And we know that this type of demographic and profile, busy, on the go, doesn't have time to always run to the store, heavy class schedules, what not, and everything in between.

And so for $4.99 a month, as opposed to the higher tier at, I believe, $9.99 a month, they're going to get kind of a discounted access plan. So that's particularly interesting for me. And we'll see if DoorDash is able to get more sign-ups at the college level that creates even more customer lifetime value as well at the end of the day.

DAVE BRIGGS: Available to all graduate and undergraduate students-- that is a slam dunk. They will absolutely win with that. As a father of three kids, they will all jump on that deal at $5 a month half price. All right, my play is Etsy-- ETSY, of course. Because as of today, the online marketplace raising its seller transaction fees from 5% to 6.5%-- may not sound like a lot. It sure is to those sellers.

As a result, thousands say they are essentially going on strike. They're going to put their accounts on vacation mode. But they're also urging all of the buyers out there to stop using Etsy as for right now. They have a petition going around that supports this strike-- right now, north of 50,000 signatures that support their strike asking them to take away that extra fee that added 1.5%.

So we'll see where that strike goes. For the next week, they have that on-- from today through next week. We'll see how that impacts the bottom line at Etsy. As for the stock price, up on the day just over 2%-- just about $2 a share. It's been a rough go this year, though, for Etsy-- down 43% year-to-date.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah, that's a great point, especially considering some of the sellers, they not only sell on Etsy-- it's not exclusive for them. They can also take some of their products to other platforms and see where they're able to also bring over some of those customers that they've engaged with over the years. So we'll see where this strike gets resolved with Etsy as well.

Those are the three tickers that we're going to be watching going into the close of today's trading activity. But coming up on the other side of this short break, a new study from Redfin diving into the housing market-- findings show that purchases for vacation homes may be decelerating, which could provide a much needed price reprieve for home-seekers.