Build With Square Means More Tools for Selling Online and Offline

April 1, 2024 by
Build With Square Means More Tools for Selling Online and Offline

Square made a name for itself on the strength of one simple plug-in dongle that allowed anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection to take credit cards and charge purchases to same.

With the growth of the mobile payments market, meanwhile, there are many more alternatives coming into play that allow for easy ways to pay a bill from just about anywhere.

Square is modifying its systems and offering Build with Square, a set of applications programming interfaces (APIs) that allow businesses to pick and choose just which Square services are wanted, or needed, instead of requiring the whole package.

A physical merchant, for example, could use the Register API to process payments through Square without having to actually sign up for the full Register system.

That wasn’t always the case, and now, anyone who’s using an iOS device as a point of sale can use Register by itself.

Those merchants who want to do more online selling can turn to Square’s e-commerce API, which is particularly useful for those who have already used Square on in-store operations, but want to expand to online operations as well.

This makes for a great prospect for larger retail shops who can now consider Square as an all-in-one option for both online and offline selling, as well as for smaller operations already using physical Square to go online.

Providing more options is a good way to ensure that more of a market is reached with the same basic program.

Square needed to respond to the changing payments market in some way, and bringing out a system that works as well online as it does off could give Square an edge it will need in the face of competition.

It’s somewhat similar, at least in a way, to what we’ve seen out of PayPal and more recently in Apple, trying to bridge that gap between online and offline, and all from one package.

Merchants should respond well to this, especially those merchants that were already working with Square; they no longer need to look for a separate solution in going online.

We’ll have a while to wait before we see how well this advance works for Square, but it’s a sound enough idea that should help Square hold its position in the face of a rapidly changing market.

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