Square Boosts E-Commerce Offerings With Its New Square Checkout Service

Seeking to leverage its brand while boosting its presence among Web merchants, merchant acquirer Square Inc. last week introduced Square Checkout, a Square-hosted system that enables consumers to pay online while providing merchants with access to the company’s technical and business services.

Consumers usually don’t know, or care, which processor handles their online payments. But San Francisco-based Square believes it has built enough brand equity from its mobile-payment and point-of-sale services over the past seven years that it can increase the sales of its merchants, or sellers, by putting a “Powered by Square” notice on the payment pages of merchants that use Square Checkout.

The service is the latest extension of Build With Square, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that Square introduced in March 2016 for software developers who work with its sellers. Build With Square integrates POS and online-payments capabilities with APIs for such functions as inventory management, sales reporting and analytics, and employee management.

“Since then, we’ve worked closely with developers and our sellers to identify how we can make it easier to start selling online while harnessing the power of our APIs,” Matan-Paul Shetrit, a product manager at Square, wrote in a blog post. “One of the pieces of feedback we keep hearing from sellers is: Both buyers and sellers recognize, trust, and love the Square brand; can Square bring that trust online?

Shetrit said that with Square Checkout, “we are enabling sellers to leverage the trust consumers have put into Square at a crucial point of the payment flow?—?entering their credit card details online. By clearly stating that the checkout experience is powered by Square, we are looking to bring the same trust buyers experience in stores to their online purchases.”

On the back end, Square claims the new service will simplify checkout processing for its merchant users; for example, a seller’s site won’t need secure sockets layer (SSL) certification. Merchants also will get, through one integration, access to the processor’s reporting tools that list items purchased, taxes, and discounts, and enable merchants to track sales and see a buyer’s purchase history. The service also provides access to standard Square services, such as next-business-day deposits and chargeback protection that potentially covers up to $250 in chargebacks monthly.