What Is Square Online?

Square Online, you can create a professional website to showcase your business online, sell your items, and accept payments using Square. Together with our easy-to-use website builder, spend less time setting up Square Online, an d more time focusing on what matters most: your business.

Best For

Fit for anybody who wants to construct a retail store, add online ordering for a restaurant and also enable in-person pickup, or offer online appointment booking to your professional services.

The Way to Establish a Free Square Online Store.

Square Online offers a free ecommerce site for restaurants, retailers, service businesses, and nonprofits. Any seller, from cellular companies to multi-store operations, can quickly open a Square Online store, listing products available, process payments, and deliver orders through traditional shipping methods, curbside pickup, or local shipping. On top of that, the information from your online. store syncs using Square’s backend reporting for accurate data management between online and in-person sales.

Square Online’s free store is straight forward to establish, and we’ll walk you through it in 10 simple steps.

1. Create a Free Square Account

The very first step in creating a Square Online store is launching a free Square account. This account provides you access to this Square dashboard, which is where the online store controls reside, along with other small business tools such as order management.

2. Choose First Shop Settings

As soon as you have your free account setup, get started with building your online store. Square guides users through the entire process with automated prompts, so there is no guesswork or technical skills required. At this point, you have the option to choose from restaurant, retail, service, or nonprofit templates. From there, the automatic prompt will ask how you want to fulfill orders.

3. Design Your Square Website

Once you choose the order fulfillment options and whether you want a single or multi-page website, the automated prompts will direct you to the Square Dashboard. This dash is where you can choose to view video tutorials, or dive directly to the Setup Guide for building your store. For this instance, we chose a multi-page retail store.

4. Prepare the URL for Your Online Store

Once you choose the design settings for your site, Square will prompt you to prepare a domain name or URL for your site and online store. There are 3 choices:

• Purchase a domain name through Square for $12 annually: This choice also requires upgrading to a paid Square Online plan.
• Join an existing domain name: it’s possible to buy a domain from another service like GoDaddy or even Bluehost and join it to a Square Online store. Note this alternative also requires updating to a paid program.
• Use a complimentary Square subdomain: For instance, if you’ve got a pet shop named after your pet, Andy, you may set your domain as https://andythepitbull.square.site for free.  

5. Fill  in Homepage Details

When you have chosen the simple style settings and features of your site, you can begin entering information into every section of your homepage. Use the navigation bar on the left to work your way through the Header, Main Banner, Featured Products, Contact, and Footer elements. For every single page section, you can change or add text and place the font style.

This setup is straightforward, and Square arouses you through the majority of this procedure, so building the most important page of your site is very fast and painless as it seems. Additionally, there are limited options concerning customizing individual components. By way of example, you can’t opt for another template, free-range resize elements, or drag text boxes to set them in another place.

6. Add Items to Sell

Through your Square store, you may sell physical and electronic products, in addition to food and drinks, memberships, services, event tickets, or collect gifts. No matter which kind of store you select at the start of your installation process (retail, restaurant, service, or nonprofit), every one of these options will be accessible to you

It is possible to add products individually, or you can upload products in bulk using an Excel or CSV file. In case you’ve got more than a couple of products, use this method to save a lot of time. If you already use Square POS, your items will automatically be transferred on to a Online Store, though you will be able to choose whether you wish to offer each item for internet sales.

To upload bulk:

• Visit the main Square Dashboard
• Click on”Items” (maybe not Online Store)
• Download Square’s Excel or CSV template
• Fill out the spreadsheet with your current stock and save the document
• Upload the Excel or CSV file to Square to import your library

7. Set Shipping Rates

To send goods, you ought to enter the address you’re shipping from, choose your destination regions, and set shipping prices.

• Transport From: Square will automatically populate this area with your store’s address, however you can alter this if needed.
• Destination Regions: Add the regions you ship to (such as the United States or the United States and Territories) and exclude some areas that don’t match your company.
• Shipping Charges: To get up and running quickly, place one flat delivery rate. You can always add promotional shipping choices or customized rates later.

8. Insert Pickup and Delivery Choices

After adding your products and placing shipping costs, it is possible to empower curbside or in-store pickup and order delivery. To allow order pickup, you will need to confirm your store’s time zone, set specific hours at which customers can place online orders for pickup and delivery, and set estimated prep times. Setting a precise prep time is significant because that is what Square uses to reveal customers a pickup period when they place the order.

9. Set up Checkout Policies

Square Online shop is automatically set up to accept online payments through Square, including credit cards, debit cards, Square gift cards, and Apple Pay. You might even utilize Square to produce and send invoices for orders. Square’s standard transaction fee for online payments is 2.9% + 30 cents. Should you upgrade to a paid plan, you are going to get lower processing rates and can set up PayPal payments.

10. Preview and Publish Your Site

Now your Square shop is prepared to launch. Give everything a final check by clicking on”Preview” on the upper right corner of the site editor. Be sure to toggle back and forth between the desktop and portable versions to be certain they both seem great. Prior to printing, you can even share the trailer by means of a link. Once you’re satisfied, click”Publish” on the top right corner to take your website live.

Features

Some features are available on all programs including the free one. This includes:

• Products with merchandise alternatives: Fill your online store with an unlimited number of products, whether imported in the in-store selection on your Square POS platform or created especially for site visitors. Since you’re able to track stock levels, you are able to display”only a few left” and”out of stock” badges automatically as well as an”available” badge.
• Image library: A cool library of free images provided by Unsplash is integrated in the web editor. Anyone who’s tried creating a professional site will know how hard it is to find quality photographs to align with branding — making it so much simpler.
• Shopping cart function: Any multi-product online store needs a cart so that people can continue browsing after adding a product and go to the checkout to pay when ready. Square understands this is vital, so it’s included on all plans.
• Customisable shipping Prices: Pick between a flat-fee shopping cost, free shipping over a certain Trade amount, or Sending fee based on weight, Quantity of items Purchased or the Trade total.
• Coupon codes: Coupon codes (e.g. a top banner with the message”input STUDENT10 at checkout for 10% student discount”) are great for encouraging impulse purchases while the customer is browsing the site.
• Present cards: This isn’t a given in free payment methods, but retailers can accept and market Square provides gift cards on the web.
• Contact kinds and pop-ups: All of reputable websites are contactable in some way or another, and Square Store empowers this through contact forms. It’s also possible to display a pop-up to allow customers to be added to a mailing list, verify visitor age, provide a coupon or create a statement.
• SEO alternatives: Add keywords to images, meta names and meta descriptions to goods, among other things. Just because it’s a totally free ecommerce builder does not mean that you can’t compete on Google.
• Instagram, Facebook and Messenger integration: Let’s face it you can’t avoid social websites if you sell online! And Square lets you join and sell out of Instagram (‘Shopping on Instagram’) on all programs. You could even connect Square using Facebook or put in a Messenger chat on your site.

Square Online Store Pricing

Rating: Great

Square Online has a unique pricing structure. Many merchants may use the platform completely free of charge. If you only require 500MB of storage, and you don’t mind processing your payments exclusively via Square, you can use the completely free plan. You’ll only pay the typical credit card processing fees.

Here’s a Fast breakdown of pricing for Square Online.

Free Plan

      Square Online’s Free plan prices $0/month and includes:

• 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (via Square)
• Infinite products
• Automated inventory, orders and things sync with Square POS
• Instagram integration
• Pinterest integration
• Free SSL security
• 500MB storage
• Rental direction

Professional Plan

Square Online’s Professional plan costs $16/month or $12/month (billed yearly ) and includes everything in the Free plan, plus:

• 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (through Square)
• Infinite storage
• Remove Square advertisements
• Merchandise badges
• Use a custom domain.

Performance Plan

Square Online’s Performance plan costs $29/month or $26/month (billed annually) and includes everything in the Professional program, plus:

• 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (through Square)
• Accept payments through PayPal
• Product reviews
• Shipping calculator
• Shipping tags
• Great shipping discounts
• Abandoned cart mails
• Integrated Facebook advertisements
• Priority support
• Advanced eCommerce statistics.

Premium Plan

Square Online’s Premium plan costs $79/month or $72/month (billed annually) and includes all in the Performance plan, plus:

• 2.6% + $0.30 per transaction (via Square).
• Finest shipping discounts.
• Real-time shipping calculator.

SEO In Square Online Marketing Tools

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It pertains to how well your site is designed in order to have your merchandise recognized by Google. Any small company knows that word of mouth is one of the most powerful advertising tools, but in the event that you can get your merchandise to rank on page one of the Google search results for popular’key words’ (such as’winter candle’, in our case), then you’ll see your earnings.

Often, some simple tweaks are all it takes for Google to realize your merchandise is exactly what it is. Even the Google bots are smart, but they can not read pictures, and will not be able to distill your beautifully-crafted merchandise descriptions the way a human brain would.

Pros And Cons Of Square Online

Pros:-

• Simple Installation.
• Can always check payment online.
• You may produce an item listing when using it for immediate sales and set default prices for things.
• Ease of use for customer
• simplicity of use to the business
• Low cost of usage for the Company
• Easy for new employees to learn how to utilize.
• Banking connection is quick and payments processed timely
• It can easily work from any smartphone or tablet.
• Fantastic reporting capabilities

      Cons:-  

• Cost of goods sold
• Bluetooth apparatus has infrequent drops that could be a little frustrating.
• Difficulty getting the app to connect on the iPad.
• Charge for more workers
• The interface gets cluttered with those services even if you don’t sign up for them.
• Maybe make it in different colors?
• Sometimes the swiper does not read the card strip.
• Prices is a flat rate which is expensive when you are only starting out.
• No real image-editing instrument.
• Lacks integrated blog instrument.

Customer Service Team

Square Online’s customer support team is available to assist, but not around the clock. Thus, you must grab the group either Monday to Friday (9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST) or Saturday to Sunday (11 a.m to 8 pm EST). If you’ve got a serious problem and will need to talk using a Square representative of business hours, then this may be exceedingly irritating.

If you have a Square Online premium grade that features priority phone support, you do not get extended hours; you move up in the telephone queue. Wix Stores, on the other hand, offers 24/7 phone.