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Square Marketplace pros and cons

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Square logo to go with Square Marketplace Pros and Cons article

We recently built an online store using Square Marketplace on SquareUp.com/market for a retail client. In the process of figuring out how to set it up, we found very little information online. Consequently, we had to figure out a lot on our own. Therefore, we thought others might find it useful if we summarized our experience here. That’s how we came up with Square Marketplace Pros and Cons.

When the business owners approached us about building their online store they were an existing client for whom we had built other websites. They had already been using Square to process in-store payments, they wanted to begin selling online, and they specifically wanted to use Square Marketplace.

We should note that we are web developers with experience building online stores for a variety of businesses. Typically we use WordPress, which is exceptionally flexible, robust, and powerful. This was our first Square Marketplace store.

Square Marketplace pros and cons

PROS

  1. Setting up an online store using Square Marketplace is inexpensive. You can create your store with no upfront fee, no listing fees, no setup fees. Just a 2.9% + $0.30 fee per online sale.
  2. The setup is relatively easy.
  3. The store is visually appealing.

CONS

  1. Outside of the company’s own support center, there are few materials or customer reviews online. Consequently, questions not addressed in Square’s support center means you’re on your own to figure it out.
  2. Unlike eBay, Amazon, Etsy and other online marketplaces, the Square Market site has no search functionality. If a customer goes to squareup.com/market, they can browse by category (e.g. home, art & design, tech, fashion…) but it is not possible to search for a specific item, brand or business name. This means that it is solely up to the business owner to promote their store.
  3. While it is possible to organize the items in your store by category, the only way to change the order of items within a category is one by one using a drag-and-drop interface. There’s no way to sort by name, price or popularity. Stranger still, the interface for rearranging items is in the Orders section of the dashboard instead of the Item Library. We discovered this purely by chance, after searching in vain for other methods. (See our related blog post illustrating how to change the order of your items in the online store.)
  4. While the standard template is visually appealing, there are no customization options. This makes it difficult to carry through your own personal style and branding. It is not possible to change font family or color, background color or image, link color or style, or layout. (In the case of our client, the default layout and styling was very much in keeping with their existing aesthetic, so it worked out well.)
  5. Online shopping is limited to customers purchasing in the United States for delivery to U.S. addresses only. As a result, customers outside of the U.S. will not see a shopping cart option.
  6. The options for setting shipping fees are very limited, and there is no option for live shipping calculations.
  7. Square Marketplace is proprietary. If this company goes out of business or withdraws the service, you lose your store and all the work you put into it. The best you can do is export your product catalog as a CSV file.

If you are interested in learning more about Square Marketplace Pros and Cons, about selling online, about Square Marketplace or other options for setting up an online store, we would love to speak with you. Please call us at (518) 392-0846 or email [email protected].

EDIT: regarding the first item in our list of cons, there is now an online forum for Square users, Square Communities.

122 thoughts on “Square Marketplace pros and cons”

  1. With the Square store, did you find that you could capture a buyer’s information for future use? Do they have a way for you to download that, if you can?

  2. Thank you for this info! As a web designer and developer, I was looking for this exact info (and could not find much on the SquareUp site) after a client contacted me about a custom e-commerce WordPress site and then was told by SquareUp she could build a site with them free. I expressed possible concerns and now I see there are others. I bet you cannot use your own domain, right?

      • You can redirect your own domain to your squareup.com/market/your-store-name domain that you customize in the Squareup dashboard.
        However, I’ve found that Google Adwords will reject your ads if you display your own domain, not the squareup domain. The instant redirect looks suspicious to Adwords.

      • OK, I clicked on the “5333-promote-your-own-store” link, and it takes me to “https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5697”. Has the 5333 link been changed?

        I looked at the redirect you mention on Apr. 17, 2015, but all that does is put me on the Square Store…but your statement “but you can embed content from Square on your own website.” sounds like I could grab the store contents from Square and show it on my own website – but would I be able to control the layout and presentation? Would that then act as a link to the Store to process purchases? Square seems to be missing a great opportunity here to allow a website to be setup and communicate as a 3rd party sales portal. I used ZenCart to create my store, and it was easy and fast to link to PayPal. No real reason for Square not to do that – if just to compete.

        • Thanks for pointing that out. It looks like the Square knowledgebase has been reorganized with the launch of a new version of the Square online store on April 1. The original link redirects to an FAQ page which mentions that “you can continue to manage your embeds from Promote in your online Dashboard”. Unfortunately I was unable to find any more information about this in the knowledgebase – every search for “embed” and “promote” leads back to the same article.

          With embedding, you get control of everything else on the page, but not the embedded element(s). The exact behavior will depend on what you choose to embed. Last time I checked, the options for embedding included individual products, lists of products and Buy buttons.

          In other news, you now have four themes to choose from in the Site Editor.

          • Thanks for looking – hopefully I can find some info on how to “embed” the info. It does sound like what I am looking for, as long as I have full control of how it is displayed.

            The four themes might work – but it would help to be able to explore actual stores to see how others have used them…IS there a main page that shows a selection of stores? Every time I try to find one I get my logon page…

      • Can you really embed the store? or does it take over the whole domain? I’d like to embed my store on a certain page–not the whole website–it looks like it takes over the whole site.

      • I just started with Square. The setup was easy and I linked it without hassle thru my developer. They give you a special merchant phone and code to bypass any general questions. I kept my domain and integrated into my website.

  4. I took the plunge and setup my Square Marketplace site, and I’ve learned a few things since. You are completely alone, there is no SEO, or forced domain forwarding possible. It’s simple to setup and the fees are amazing. Yet, I’ve never made an online sale. I use Square to process my card payments for my services, but that’s it. So, I’m thinking unless you do have another website you are embedding your items into, it’s almost impossible to sell something organically. If the fees for Shopify weren’t so high I would likely have already left Square. Amazon, Ebay, their fees get greedier everyday and with the 15% margins I can make it’s not enough…

    • Hi Andrew,

      I do think you’re more likely to be successful with Square Marketplace if you have the ability to promote it through other channels, such as your own website. Square’s great strength is in retail POS, where they blow the traditional model (and pricing) away.

  5. Great information, in your research did you encounter a limit on what you could sell on the square marketplace site? I am trying to list 100+ items and it will not let me and I cannot find anywhere to troubleshoot it.

    • Hi Anna,

      That’s intriguing. I am not aware of any limit on the number of items you can list. Are you seeing some kind of error message, or is it just failing silently? Are you entering items one at a time, or are you doing a bulk import?

      • I see this is an old feed- but did you ever resolve it? I am way under 100 items, but it is just silently failing to add additional items.

        • Each 100 hundred items u can drag and drop to rearrange. I believe you have to set up a new section per square. I sale in their market. The lack of a system search feature is a deterent to organic and purposeful traffic directed to my site of > 400 items.

  6. Hi, nice conversation and comments. I’ve amde a weebly site but don’t want to pay cc charges plus weebly fee for e-commerce so investigating square online. Shipping calculation at weebly also only available at highest monthly subscription. I was told must be shipping into advertised price tag (ouch for optics!). Was thinking about either the embed per item/product concept or just one button directing buyers to the entire square e-store of our products. But I can’t figure out how my customers get BACK to my site. Does the square store open up in a second window? Even so, what would really be nice is a button on the square site to send my customers back to the products page (or any other page). Can code be embedded in the square site (not that I know what that code would be. . . ). Thanks!

    • Hi Jesse,

      If you put a link to your Square store on your own website, you can control whether it opens in a new window or the same window using the target attribute, just like with any link.

      I don’t know of any way to embed code in the Square store to bring people back to your site. However, you do get to put a website URL in your profile, in addition to social links, so if people scroll all the way to the bottom they will see those links.

  7. I have set up my site and have received several orders. The deposits aren’t showing up– is it safe to assume I need to click and “complete” the orders in order for the money to be deposited? It isn’t automatically deposited at the time the order is placed? Having trouble finding this answer.

  8. The Square marketplace is limited to the kind of businesses where you place an order and have to go pick it up within 120 minutes. there is no way around that. It also gives you 5 minutes to accept the order before it cancels it. No way around that either. Customers cannot place an order outside of your business hours, so you have to specify that posted business hours are only for the online store, not the actual brick and mortar shop. so, I wanted our customers to place orders for bread to be picked up on Wednesday before Thanksgiving day and that was nearly impossible. If a customer places an order outside of our business hours, we may not be able to accept within 5 minutes and it will therefore be cancelled. There is a shipping option but it is useless for my purposes. I am amazed at the lack of configuration that is provided. This marketplace is good for sellers of fresh and prepared foods. The order has to be accepted promptly and the customer has to pick it up within 120 minutes.

    • It looks like Square has an auto-accept option in the store settings; perhaps this is new. It looks like that perhaps addresses your concern here.

  9. Thank you for posting this. I have a brick and mortar store and am thinking about setting up Square Marketplace and embedding it onto my current website. Could you send an example of the website you used Square Marketplace on? It would be nice to see what you did.

  10. I’m a documentary filmmaker that’s just completed BluRay DVD manufacturing and want to offer sales (just the one product) of my film through my WordPress.com site. I’ve been swirling round and round in a sea of ecommerce information ambiguity for a week or more without a single clear answer. Frankly, I’m simply looking for advice on how to connect a page, a graphic, a button, a link … anything to a “shopping cart” secured page to gather credit information from my audience wanting to buy the DVD, have it all flow into my bank, and ship the product off to my customers. I’m going with Square card present tech for in-person sales and hoping they have similar (fair) options for online sales.
    Thanks in advance for your consideration and thoughts.
    JM

  11. I have a retail site that I have built using Wix. I have a Shop Now button that directs customers to my Square Online Store. I am trying to add sub menus on my Wix site, below Shop Now, that will direct customers to my various categories on the Square Online Store. For example: Tops, Denim, Shoes, etc. (Rather than directing to the whole store or individual products)

      • Hi Robert, that was my first thought and with a little testing it seemed like that would do the trick. Unfortunately, when I added the URL to my website, it redirects each time it hits my Square store, clearing out the address and defaulting to the top of my page.

        I saw another website that was able to do it, but they also had “market” in their URL, whereas mine is “store”.

        • Is your store live?
          Have you tried replacing “store” with “market”?
          Do the URLs work when you paste them into your browser’s address bar?
          Does Wix do anything strange with referrals?
          You may have to contact to Square/Wix support.

  12. Hi Robert

    I have a few issues. I work for a screen printing shop and we offer online stores thru square to a lot of our sports team for their jerseys/spirit wear. I know that there is an upgrade coming, but I have not upgraded yet. My option to create a new online store is now gone (the locations tab). Do you know if there is a limit to the number of online stores you can create? I currently have 9, but not able to create a new one. I wasn’t sure if there was a limit or if this a glitch from the pending upgrade. Also, I have two retail locations. But I do all the online stores under one square account. All order emails go to one retail location, do you know if there is a way to specify an email address per online store?

  13. Robert…All this information is a great help,I am in the process of researching the best e-commerce/online store/website builder, etc.. and honestly am no closer to a decision than when I started two weeks ago! It’s a bit confusing and this info does help clear some stuff up. I have a shop on Etsy, (for a year and a half) and my business has been good, but their fees are literally eating away at any chance of true profit. This is my only reason for planning my own online store. I sell at a vendor market in my home city once a month and use Square for that, which has been great, that’s why I was leaning towards them for the online store. Do you know of any other sites that are good for just making an online store/shop, one without a brick and mortar store. I’m willing to work at it, but don’t have a lot of technical knowledge.

    • Karen, after using WordPress for several years I’ve switched over to SquareSpace. WP is great, but you have to do a lot of maintenance to keep it secure not to mention getting SSL certificates and stuff like that. SquareSpace wraps everything into one and they take care of all the backend stuff so you can concentrate on what matters – making your site and store and keeping that up to date instead of the backend. Just my 2 cents. There are also competing sites like Wix or Weebly.

      • Hi Tim,

        Hosted platforms like SquareSpace and Shopify can be attractive if you’re willing to live with their limitations. We offer our clients a maintenance service for WordPress, and there are other managed WordPress hosting providers. That way you get the full power and flexibility of WordPress, without having to deal with maintenance yourself.

        SSL certificates are really a non-issue these days. The better hosting companies like DreamHost make obtaining and installing a signed certificate super easy. Alternatively, you can use a hosted checkout like Mijireh or FoxyCart, which takes care of all but the most basic PCI DSS requirements.

        • Hi Robert,
          Karen said she was looking for an ecommerce website builder, which is why I’m recommending SquareSpace (or similar product). WP is great, but it is still more difficult to use than one of those services and also does not have a “builder” without using the proper theme, which can take weeks to find the perfect one just by itself.
          The other thing that attracted me to SquareSpace was that they give you 1 year of free Google Business with email. That means I can use Google for all my email addresses.
          SquareSpace costs more money than a WP site, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I only started using it in December and so far it’s been great.

  14. The biggest problem I have with the Square online store is that I have to upload images 1 at a time…I sell one-of- a kind turned wood bowls, and have over 200 listed in my register by ID code, but with no image. This works fine when selling at an art fair where I have the product there – but the online customer wants to see what the bowl looks like.

    I can write my own website, but need a way to link that to Square for the sale (I use PayPal now, but that takes a lot of extra add-ons such as secure connections, which cost money). What I would like to do is when the customer sees a bowl they want, they enter the item into the cart, then when they are ready to checkout, the site can call up the Square Register, enter the items in the sale, and process the sale directly. All of the connection to Square – except the transaction details – would be invisible to the customer, and totally secure. Can this be done? I have experience writing the code to do this with other sites, but how do I get the Square interface to work?

    The attached website shows the bowls, but I need to totally rework the format…

    • Hi Stephen,

      You don’t need a secure certificate to use PayPal for checkout – that’s one of the main reasons to use PayPal. However, these days, with a good hosting company, obtaining and installing a signed certificate should be very easy and inexpensive (no more than $15/year). If your host is charging you more than that or making it difficult, you might want to shop around for a different host.

      We use DreamHost, and they have a trial program now for free certificates signed by Let’s Encrypt. We’re using a certificate signed by Let’s Encrypt on our WordPress in a Nutshell site and haven’t seen any issues with it.

      Square is not designed to work as a payment gateway for online stores hosted elsewhere. As far as I know, the best you can do is embed portions of your Square Marketplace store in your own pages.

      Beautiful bowls!

      EDIT: Square can now be used as a payment gateway with other online store solutions.

      • I have my site on GoDaddy – Not sure what it was, but I was told I needed some secure stuff with PayPal…That just expired, haven’t renewed yet. Sounds like I need to look into that when I get the chance.

        Thanks for the response.

      • You actually do need an SSL cert if you use PayPal and want to do something like add a header to your PayPal page or send users back to your website after making a PayPal purchase, otherwise the page gets flagged as not secure.
        Also, Google now loves sites that have SSL a lot more than sites that do not.

  15. I just recently setup an online store on Square. I used a domain name that I had registered with GoDaddy. I’m finding that when I go to the website or market the website to others, sometimes the page displays, “Business Cannot Be Found”. I called GoDaddy and they explained that everything was set up correctly to point the domain name to the Square site. They suggested I speak with Square about why the URL works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t work. For now, that is the only complaint I have. The fees are great. Once I receive an order and hit complete order, the money is in my account the next day. Any ideas on why the URL doesn’t work all the time???

  16. Thank you for writing this post! As a small business owner I’m always trying to learn and do as much as I can online. This helped alot.

  17. I recently set up a square market place for our art gallery. Do you know of it possible to set up an option to ZOOM in on the picture of a product? Also have you heard of they are updating a ‘search’ function?

    • Unfortunately I don’t know of any way to zoom in on an image in Square Marketplace. I also don’t know if there are any plans for a search function. However, these are both functions that other eCommerce solutions provide.

  18. Thanks for all this great info. I am wondering if I set up a small online store with Square (since it’s so inexpensive and simple to get started), will it be difficult to later transition to a more flexible online store choice (WP, Shopify etc) when my business begins to grow?

  19. Thanks for the great info. I am wondering if there is a way to create a field for customer text so I can sell personalized, engraved bricks through square. Our school foundation has a square account and I only have two bricks, BUT I need 14 characters from the buyer that sells me what to engrave on the brick. The school already has these bricks or I could use an online brick engraver.

  20. Hi Robert,

    First, thank you for the blog and the information platform you’ve provided for people trying to turn Square Marketplace into and honest website. Second, please forgive this long comment.

    This is the first time I’ve ever read a blog’s comments and responses from beginning to end to understand what others have gone through and reading your responses.

    My position before reading this was Square Marketplace would never be a full fledged website or even have the ecommerce feature of other tools, so I want to get a full featured website developed from WordPress and have SquareMarketplace embedded to provide eccommerce support for the site without actually being seen. I’m not quite sure if I read if this was possible at this time or not. Is it?

    I also ran into another problem with trying to use their tools to define a multi-pricing structure. I didn’t here it get addressed in the other comments, so could you read the note I sent Square to see if there is another way to address this the problems noted? They didn’t give a good response on my question btw. If you or anyone else have addressed this problem, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks!

    ====================== Email to Square support ==============
    Hi,

    I’m a fairly new user of square and the Marketplace. Offering this site actually helped get me off my butt and into throwing product out to see how it does without a lot of hassle and cost. For that I thank you!

    I’m wondering if your plan is for continuous improvement on the features and functionality of the site setup and tools. If so, I’ve run into a couple of issues/examples that I’m hoping you can improve on or recommend to me how to resolve it with the existing builder.

    Problem1: I have multiple prices for a given item, based on quantity. So Breadrolls sell at price breaks of 1-2, 3-6, 7 or more. I don’t have the ability to set a rule to enforce the minimal purchases for each SKU. For instance, if a person wants to get the lowest price, they can just choose the 7 or more price, but order only 1 unit. I’d have to reject the order, which wouldn’t look good.
    Request1: I’d like the ability to set pricing rules per Price/SKU.

    Problem2: Involves the use of Modifiers, but similar to problem1. I sell cookies. I have different prices based on quantity purchase, 6, 12 and 36. I want to offer modifiers like nuts or chips. The problem is similar to problem1, in that I can’t set the price for the modifiers based on the different price points. The cost of my modifiers would cost more for the increase in the pricepoint purchased.
    Result2: I’d like like modifiers specific to each pricepoint/SKU set. That way the modifiers fit the quantity purchased. I believe I can have multiple modifiers inside of an item, but again, the customer can just choose the modifier meant for “6” against and order of “36” and I can’t prevent it.

    So maybe I’m trying to use the tool in away unintended, but the only other way I could make the best sense of it’s use is to create and individual item for each price/SKU, but then that would create a lot of unnecessary items, make it harder for the customer to get through and offering multiple SKU’s per item would serve no purpose.

    Thank you for listening. I’d actually like to see y’all slowly grow Marketplace to offer the same features of a full website services like WIX, or Squarespace. Thanks again!!

    ChrisF

    • Hi Chris,

      Unfortunately I don’t know how to solve the problems you describe using Square Marketplace.

      You raise the possibility of building a site using WordPress with embedded content from Square Marketplace. While that can be done, it seems like a strange approach to me. I say this because the ecommerce tools available to a WordPress site offer so much more power and flexibility than anything you could do by embedding content from Square Marketplace. To put this in perspective, the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress, which is WooCommerce, is the most popular ecommerce solution across all websites, according to a 2015 survey.

      • Hi Robert,

        Thanks for your quick response. I’m certainly not married to my thought of using Square with WordPress. Let’s face it, I’m trying to take the advantage of the simplicity, the low swipe cost, and the tools available for swiping on the move. However, there are issues like I noted to Marketsquare and also the lack of shipping options, taking overseas orders, just to mention a few. So, I’m very open to best options that gives me the WordPress’ power and the eccommerce tools, comparative pricing and simplicity of Square. I’m open for suggestions or recommended reading for this challenge. Again, your site has been the best coverage for Square, that I’ve ever come across. Thanks Robert!!

        Happy Trails……

        • Hi Chris,

          Sorry for the late reply. The easiest way to get up and running with a WordPress online store is with WooCommerce and Stripe. The Stripe gateway for WooCommerce was recently made free, so all you pay are the transaction fees (2.9% + $0.30 last time I checked).

          • Hi Robert,

            No problem at all. The info is timely. I appreciate you responding.

            Happy Trails,

            Chris

          • THanks for letting me know Robert. That opens my possibility or confuses it more, either one.
            I’ve been talking to a developer friend about your recommendation of Woocommerce with Stripe. He’s a Woocommerce fan, but leaned toward Braintree. The difference is, you’ve had more experience than him, but I would like to ask why you choose Stripe over Braintree.
            As far as looking at Square now, I’m certain there many shortcomings when compared to the others, but I’ll go read and find out more. Thanks for keeping me posted!

          • I have nothing against Braintree, but I don’t see any reason to prefer it over Stripe. The WooCommerce Stripe gateway is free but the WooCommerce Braintree gateway is $79/year. If you (or your friend) happen to prefer Braintree, I wouldn’t think $79/year is that significant, but all other things being equal, it makes a difference.

          • Hi Robert,

            In a heads up comparison, if you’re saying performance and features are the same, yes , $79 is a deal breaker for me. Thanks again Robert!

  21. Ok, New to Square online store I did a test run and purchased an item but cant see any info on what or where to ship it to please help

  24. I I put in my brick and mortar hours, people can not purchase 24 hours a day? Am I reading that correctly? Should that section be left blank?

    • Hi Shauna,

      The Business Hours settings should only affect online orders for pickup. If you offer shipping, then you just need to think about the Ship Within setting.

      This time dictates how long you have before an order expires and the payment is automatically refunded to your customer.

  25. Hi, Lot’s of great info here. Perhaps you can help with this? I’m considering using Square to sell tickets to our events which customers could print out at home on their own. My understanding is that this is a new feature of Square’s recent update. (instead of only pick-up and/or delivery) I want our customers to be able to purchase tickets 24/7 automatically, but I can’t be online to OK the purchases within that time frame. Did I see this as in issue within the posts here? Do you know what I would engage when I set up the store to sell the tickets so it’s all automatic? Appreciate your advice. Thanks!

  26. Anyone have a solution for the “custom domain” settings. I have a GoDaddy domain setting up in my Squareup store. When I use the “test url” button it ways “Your domain looks great”. Sometimes the domain loads properly, and sometimes it doesn’t. It could even be 1 second it does, open another tab on the browser and it doesn’t.

    Any ideas ?

  27. I’m trying to set up my store and my banner looks hideously unlike my original. The color balance and tonal scale of the image in my banner in no way resemble my original. These kinds of shifts do not occur when I upload to Flickr or Tumblr, so it’s not a matter of having an uncalibrated monitor or something like that.

    I need to know if there are adjustments I need to make to my image to make it work. Do I need to embed a specific ICC profile in my image? Is it because I’m working on a Mac? A Square representative referred me to Canva to edit my image, but I have edited my images in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, two world class graphics programs. I need to have my previously well manipulated and edited images upload the way I have professionally edited them. I need to know how to prevent the online store from distorting my image. It will distort a Canva image just as much as it distorts a PhotoShop image, one thinks.

    Also, where can reasonably detailed instructions for setting up a page can be found? The only instructions I can find are hopelessly generic.

    • Hi Lain,

      I wish I knew what the problem is with your banner image, but unfortunately I don’t. The Square online store we set up had a simple banner image and I don’t remember running into any trouble with it. I assume your original isn’t CMYK – that could cause problems.

      As for setup instructions, the only definitive resource I’m aware of is the online documentation: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/topic/113

      • Thank you, Robert. I’m using .jpg images exported from PhotoShop, which operates in RGB as far as I can tell. Would I have better luck with maybe a .png or something?

      • Did you have any trouble with the banner image being responsive? Our banner incorporates text, which looks beautiful on desktop, yet on mobile it gets cut off. Any tips? Thanks!

        • Hi Julia,

          I don’t remember seeing a problem with the banner image getting clipped, but it was a while ago and the system has changed quite a bit. If your image meets the specified dimensions and you’re seeing a problem, I suggest searching the user forums or contacting Square support directly.

  28. Very informative thread. Do you think Square E-commerce can be a good solution for workshop registration payments? Could it maintain a simple d-base of client info, enable a customized confirmation messages, and incorporate discounts? Could it be used as well for collecting RSVP’s for free events? I don’t think we care if it’s embedded or if we send to an external page. We currently use Events Pro on our WP website and that interfaces to an external Paypal page.

    • Hi Elliot,

      It sounds like you need a lot of flexibility, which makes me think you might be better off sticking with WordPress. Also, in the past we were unable to find a way to export a list of customers from Square Marketplace, so using it to maintain a client database might be risky.

        • The Events Calendar with the Event Tickets extension gives you RSVP functionality for free events. For non-free events you could combine this with WooCommerce and your preferred payment gateway. I would also take a look at the WooCommerce Bookings extension, depending on your needs and preferences.

  29. Great article. I am an author and use Square as my POS at book signings. I currently use the base version of Ecwid for my online store but am looking for something that will allow me to sell my e-books as well. You have to step up to the next level in Ecwid to sell e-books. I have never done this before but looking at Square I can’t tell if I can sell e-books or not. Any suggestions? Not necessarily against paying for the service but I am a new author and will have to sell a few more books before I can start spending a whole lot! : )

    • Hi Mike,

      I don’t think Square has a mechanism for selling ‘virtual’ products like e-books. The solution that immediately springs to mind is Easy Digital Downloads, which is a WordPress plugin.

  30. Hi Mike, I finally set up my Square on line store to sell tickets to our event. When I tested buying a ticket, neither the order confirmation, nor the receipt, listed the date or time. I thought that info would have been auto-generated since it’s really important and usual practice for tickets. I did a workaround by listing the date and time on the ticket description line itself which originally only had the ticket level listed there (general admission vs. reserved, for ex.) Am I missing something? Appreciate it!

  31. I was wondering if there is a listing of functional website examples using Squareup’s platform. I am presently considering redoing mine. Most other website platforms have a listing of websites created using their particular platform.

  32. I just learned about squareup online store, and wanted to have a look of the stores, like a buying customer, but I can’t find any address/link to the site. How does the public buy things from squareup online stores?

    Also, what is the difference between squareup/online-store and the online store on squarespace?

    • There used to be a central location where you could browse all Square stores, but it doesn’t exist any more, so each store owner is responsible for promoting their own store.

      Square and Squarespace are completely separate companies. Square is primarily focussed on retail POS, supplemented with a hosted online store platform, while Squarespace is primarily a proprietary hosted web platform, which includes online store functionality.

      • squarespace is a rip off. upgrade 3 times for the basic e-commerce functions. more money each upgrade and hard to build. you will figure basic functions are not in your plan after you spend hours uploading.

  33. I have a Squarespace site and I use Stripe to process payments through my site. However I need to do in person sales and want to use my Square reader… but Square does not integrate with Squarespace. I’ve heard that one can embed Square into a Squarespace site but I can’t seem to find any code or anything… any ideas? Thanks

  34. I have already added custom text to my Square receipt, but that text does not appear on the digital receipt my customers receive after making a purchase at my online store. Any ideas for solving this? Thanks.

  35. Hi Robert,
    I wanted to update those following the thread concerning Squareup.
    After much reading of this website looking at various low-cost platforms I decided to get my Squareup website up and running.
    I began using Squareup during the Occupy Wall Street events.Paypal, my normal payment gateway was hacked for a brief time or they were suffering from a DDS attack. I wanted a backup. Squareup is simple and reliable. Paypals services have been not so good over the years.
    Anyway I went through the process that Squareup has . doing the inventory, selecting the template and the hosting changeover. After a few weeks I finally got it up and running. I need to fine tune it. And I will do that in the coming weeks ahead.I appreciate everyone who also had good questions and responses as it added to my knowledge base.
    I really appreciate Robert Trevellyan having this blog. It motivated me. I wish everyone well this year.

    Karl Muse
    http://www.musebelts.com

  36. Terrible customer service. Spent 20 mins (after waiting on hold for 20 mins to even speak with an account rep) on the phone speaking with a rep who obviously couldn’t fix my problem. When I asked to speak with a supervisor he immediately refused and claimed that since I wasn’t the account owner, he couldn’t let me speak to a supervisor. The “account owner” they have listed is our web/graphic designer (who technically isn’t even employed by our company) because he had initially set up the account. When I placed Van on hold to go get the “account owner” he decided to hang up.

    Spent another 20 mins on hold, only to speak with another rep who was much nicer, albeit just as unable to help as the first rep. She explained that the only way to get the name of the “account owner” changed is to set up an entirely new account, rebuild our entire store and start from square one.

    Orders refunding themselves without notification, the sloppy and, at-times obnoxious, back end navigation and their lack of customer service have all lead us to seek a new platform.

    The fact that they will let someone not even associated with the checking account linked to the processor open an account and list themselves as the account manager is absurd. All of the sales we have processed for this year have been recorded to the incorrect business tax ID and they have absolutely no way of fixing it. Obviously mistakes were made on our end, but as a paying customer we expect our vendors to be able to provide solutions. Instead of solutions, we received no help whatsoever. The second rep I spoke with even acknowledged that we were not the first people to run into this issue, yet Square refuses to adapt its procedures to appropriately accommodate their customers needs.

  37. How does one find other square market vendors online to see how they set up there store…There use to be a directory of many square market online vendors, but i do not see them anymore..

  38. Square Marketplace is okay, but not great. My preferred configuration is Square as my POS, and Shopify as my website. I connect the two with Squarify (http://squarify.io) and hence get the best of both worlds.

    • Hi carina,

      When we were working on our client’s Square Marketplace store, we didn’t see any opportunities to do SEO except by modifying the content (text and images). While content is the most important aspect of SEO, there are many other important aspects, such as page titles, descriptions and slugs. However, it’s been several years since we worked with Square Marketplace and their SEO features may have evolved in the meantime.

      • I use the Square online store. It has been about 2 years approximately since I open it. Because of the low cost it does not offer SEO enhancements or Analytical data collection. I wish it did. I love Square compared to PP. Far simpler and easier to use and no cost to the platform which I am grateful for. I am fully aware of the other pay-for options if I want SEO and Analytical enhancement.

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