Square: POS Made Easy through Innovation

Carl Perry, Developer Platform Lead

The days of using bulky card swiping machines are in the past, as businesses are opting for smaller, more compact and easy to use devices. Payments are critical to a commerce platform, but going beyond just the payment aspect is what San Francisco-based Square is doing. The firm has revolutionized the payment system; by enabling its clients to accept payments from customers across all their revenue channels while offering security and PCI Compliant products and integrations. By incorporating Square’s unified commerce solution, businesses can get complete visibility into their customers’ transactions.

Today, businesses piece together various hardware and software solutions to run and scale their business and the complexity of running various systems in parallel is often ineffective or uneconomical. With Square’s platform, businesses are able to integrate Square’s omni-channel payments solutions into their existing systems. Businesses can choose to implement Square’s holistic solutions, or they can select specific hardware, software, or services to integrate with their business. For example, Square recently launched their first end-to-end POS solution, which combines Square’s trusted payments, POS software, and dedicated hardware. Additionally, Square has seen retailers successfully deploy mobile line-busting solutions during busy holiday times, which are integrated with their business-critical systems.

Businesses can utilize Square to simplify and deliver a true omni-channel experience for their customers. Whether integrating Square with a business’s existing legacy system through Square's Platform, or fully leveraging Square's platform, hardware, and software, the options we offer for businesses are endless

By giving businesses the freedom to run Square’s POS software on any additional payment terminals at no extra cost—the cost of implementing Square into businesses’ ecosystems scales linearly as they expand. The platform delivers a better omni-channel customer experience, enabling businesses to collect rich transactional data in real-time to make faster, business-critical decisions. The moment a sale is made, the products and inventory are updated, and the updated figures can be seen across Square’s ecosystem and any integrated back-end systems. Square’s open platform enables businesses, solution providers, and developers to extend that data into additional or existing solutions being used to run their business such as SalesForce, Netsuite, and Oracle— extending the usability and value of their existing assets and investments.

Square partnered with SAP Business One to help large businesses find a single all-encompassing solution to efficiently run their operations. When Rifle Paper Co., a stationery and lifestyle brand began using Square’s products, it was a small business that was based out of the home. It has since morphed into an international brand and needed to integrate back-office functions to help manage its online, retail and pop-up sample stores. Square’s integration with SAP Business One, gave Rifle Paper an easy to manage, multi-channel business in one place.

Square is constantly updating its ecosystem to help simplify its customers’ businesses. In the past year, the firm added the Apple Pay for Web integration, for improved checkout speeds and Touch ID authentication, negating the need for entering card details where Apple Pay for Web is accepted. Square also released a new catalog API that supports large product catalogs for sellers, giving them the ability to catalog products across different locations such as pop-up stores and shipping facilities. As Square expands its services and solutions, these new functionalities are provided at no additional cost.