Square Unveils New Developer Tools Aimed at Enhancing Checkout and Reducing Friction

Aiming to help developers address friction at checkout, Block Inc.’s Square unit late Thursday announced several new tools for its Square payments platform. The announcement was made at Square Unboxed, Block’s annual developer and partner conference.

The centerpiece of the new tools is Cash App Pay for Developers, which enables developers to add the Cash App Pay payment method to their Square-powered online checkout flow with a few lines of code using Square’s Web Payment SDK (software developer kit). The smoother integration capabilities can help developers reduce friction at checkout for the 70 million active Cash App users in the United States, Block says. Cash App Pay for Developers is available in the U.S.

Cash App Pay, which launched in 2021, can be used at Square merchants and allows consumers to initiate a payment from their Cash App wallet by scanning a Quick Response code or touching a button on their mobile device. Cash App, which launched in 2013, includes features that allow users to pay each other, invest in stocks, and buy and redeem Bitcoin.

One merchant segment expected to benefit from the new tools for Cash App Pay is health care. “Enabling patients to pay with Cash App for their health-care services and prescriptions allows health-care organizations to further increase financial accessibility and inclusivity, especially for the growing population of patients that primarily utilize non-traditional banking,” John Bona, co-founder of Reference Health, a payment platform for health-care organizations, says in a prepared statement. “Health-care organizations need to accept any and every form of payment the patient is willing to use—including supporting accepting payments from the growing category of mobile payment apps.”

In addition to the tools for Cash App Pay, Block also introduced two new application programming interfaces—Bookings API and Checkout API—to help developers and partners build and enhance commerce solutions for Square merchants. The Bookings API enables developers to leverage Square Appointments within their apps. As a result, developers can create and manage bookings, search availability of staff members, and send automated text and email reminders, among other features.

The new API will give sellers the opportunity to list their services on their platforms, while being able to see that appointments booked from these platforms are automatically entered in their Square Appointments POS. “This launch includes robust APIs for our larger demand-gen partners, as well as APIs for businesses to customize and integrate their booking experience across their buyer surfaces,” a Square spokesperson says. Bookings API is available in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Checkout API is a way for developers to integrate into their workflow a hosted checkout page that works via text, Web site, internal dashboard, and in store, with minimal code. The new version of the API offers flexible configuration and supports Afterpay, a buy now, pay later provider acquired in January, Cash App Pay, and Square Pay. Checkout API is available everywhere Square operates globally.  

“It is a much simpler way to implement online checkout than fully piecing together all of Square’s APIs in a custom checkout,” says the spokesperson. “Our latest API version is even simpler to integrate and introduces much more configurability. Plus, the API comes pre-built with flexible payment methods like Afterpay and Cash App Pay.”

Finally, Block is testing new features for Terminal API, which launched in 2020. The features unlock new omnichannel use cases and include order itemization on the Terminal device, delayed capture to authorize a payment upfront and collect funds later, card-on-file for recurring purchases, and app fees so developers can monetize services for payments processed via Terminal API. The new beta features are available in the U.S.

In an address at the Square Unboxed conference, Vijay Vachani, Square’s head of partnerships and developer platform, said more than 900,000 active sellers are using partner integrations on Square’s platform, a 10% increase year-over-year. He added partners are seeing more profitability by leveraging Square’s platform, with a 150% growth of payouts year over year.