Doing business now means you must have an online presence, even if you also own a brick-and-mortar shop. Fortunately, Square Online makes it easy to set one up, with its potent combination of e-commerce tools and web hosting. The service boasts compatibility with point of sale (POS) systems, as well as good uptime in our testing and a robust app store. Square Online charges transaction fees and lacks a true image-editing tool, but you can use it to quickly set up shop and sell physical and digital goods online. However, Shopify and Wix Stores, our Editors’ Choice picks for e-commerce platforms, offer slightly better experiences.
What Does Square Online Cost?
Square Online has four e-commerce tiers: Free, Professional, Performance, and Premium. With the free tier, you can sell unlimited products, and automatically sync item, inventory, and order information with Square Point of Sale (POS) or Square Reader hardware. You can also integrate your store with Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest to expand your shop’s audience. You can’t use a custom URL with the free version, however; you must use one of Square’s branded domain names. In addition, your storefront will feature a few Square ads.
Want to ditch the ads? The Professional plan builds upon the free tier by removing Square’s ads and branding and letting you use a custom domain. In fact, Professional lets you rock a custom domain for free for one year. It’s priced at $16 per month (or $12 per month, billed annually), which is cheaper than Wix Stores‘ entry-level premium tier that starts at $23 per month. You also get customer coupons, inventory management, in-store pickup options, unlimited storage, unlimited monthly data transfers, and other features that serious businesses need.
The $29-per-month (or $26 per month, billed annually) Performance plan lets you recover lost business with abandoned cart emails, enjoy discounted shipping labels, and see customers post reviews to your site. Square Online gives this tier’s subscribers priority customer support.
The top-of-the-hill Premium plan costs $79 per month (or $72 per month, billed annually), which is more expensive than Wix Stores’ $56-per-month, top-tier store plan. Designed with robust businesses in mind, Premium features a real-time shipping-rate calculator, discounted shipping rates, and lower transaction fees.
That’s right: transaction fees. Like Shopify, Square Online charges 2.9 percent and 30 cents for every online credit card transaction (except at the Premium tier, where the fee drops to 2.6 percent and 30 cents). If you’d like to keep that money in your pocket, check out Ecwid, an e-commerce platform that forgoes such fees.
Building a Square Online Store
Like PinnacleCart, Shopify, and Wix Stores, Square Online is an easy-to-use and highly customizable website builder. Setting up an online presence is as simple as selecting a business type, inputting your relevant business information, choosing a site URL, and selecting a theme. Square Online boasts extremely clean, contemporary site designs that look good in both desktop and mobile browsers.
Adding pages, categories, social media links, and other expected site elements is as simple to do here as it is with, say, a WordPress-powered website. The big, e-commerce difference is building product entries. Fortunately, that’s easy, too. You select an item type (for example, physical, digital, donation, or membership), give the product entry a title (like, say, Felt Hat), and then add a price, item description, and image. Square Online doesn’t possess much in the way of image editing; you can crop an image, but that’s about it. However, Square offers a product shooting service (starting at $9.95 per product) that takes professional-quality snaps of your wares.
On the upside, Square Online’s stores include features that help customers interact with your business. For example, they can sort products by name or prize or sign up for your business’ newsletter. There are numerous ways to track your success, too. The categories include payment methods, item sales, traffic, and unique visitors. Those mentioned metrics alone give you a good understanding of visitors and purchases.
If you wish to create a a promotional blog, Square Online gives you that option via Stories. Though not as featured-packed as, say, a WordPress blog, Stories lets you quickly create posts that contain text and images. You can also create dedicated pages.
Accepted Payments and Add-ons
Square Online accepts all major credit cards, Square gift cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The e-commerce platform also accepts Square POS, a system that makes it simple to import your orders, items, and inventory.
In addition, Square Online supports an application programming interface (API), so developers can create third-party add-ons outside of the Square App Marketplace. If you don’t want to do that, the Square App Marketplace contains dozens of apps in 16 categories. Accounting, Booking & Scheduling, and Loyalty & Rewards are just three of these categories.
Good Uptime
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be unable to find you or access your products or services. We used a website-monitoring tool to track our test store’s uptime over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings the online shop and sends us an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute.
The testing data reveals that Square Online is a dependable e-commerce platform. In fact, Square Online achieved a 100 percent uptime rate during all but two days; on those two other days, Square Online measured 98.2 percent, which is still quite good.
Limited Customer Service
Square Online’s customer support team is available to help, but not around the clock. So, you must catch the squad either Monday to Friday (9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST) or Saturday to Sunday (11 a.m to 8 p.m. EST). If you have a serious problem and need to chat with a Square representative of business hours, this might be extremely frustrating. If you have a Square Online premium tier that offers priority phone support, you don’t get extended hours; you simply move up in the call queue. Shopify and Wix Stores, on the other hand, offers 24/7 phone and web chat support.
That said, Square Online’s support squad is friendly and knowledgeable. When we asked help representatives, either via phone or by web chat, questions about the company’s bandwidth offerings or how to accept payments, we left the conversation satisfied.
A Square Deal
If you already use Square’s POS devices, Square Online is a no-brainer, as the environments, naturally, pair well together. Plus, the store-building tool is easy to understand, and features satisfying design flexibility. On the other hand, if your focus is more on Square Online’s web hosting and e-commerce combo, there are slightly better options. Shopify features around-the-clock support and Wix Stores doesn’t charge transaction fees. Both Editors’ Choice picks have the options you need to get your business online without much hassle.
For more on e-commerce, check out Building an E-Commerce Website: 8 Technical Aspects You Need to Know and How to Secure Your E-Commerce Website.
