Square Online’s Holiday Season Update Brings Dozens Of New Features

The most important new feature Square Online has added is 19 website builder templates for sellers to use. Each of these templates is designed around a certain industry, such as restaurant, beauty, personal care services, or retail, meaning users can create their website with the added support of seeing what a professional online site can look like.

Further developments to the themes include “Shop All” pages, mega menus for larger catalogs, scrolling marquees, and embedded native videos; plus customizable buttons, fonts, and icon sets.

Previously, users had to choose from a set of differently colored templates that were all the same design. Any major customization had to be done by the user in the editor. Having an example to work from – one that has also been optimized for a specific industry – will save the time it takes to create a website, while also cutting down on the easily avoidable mistakes you can make by building a website from scratch.

Like many other builders over the past few months, Square Online has added AI tools to its platform in the form of automatically generated item descriptions. According to Square Online, this will help retailers write compelling titles and descriptions for their products. The descriptions will appear across all sales channels, and allegedly remove the manual back-end work of writing each description by hand, a handy time-saver when pressed with the demands of the holiday season.

Square for Retail is Square Online’s online commerce package, providing a range of tools for users to facilitate both offline and online retail better and more effectively, such as its patented Point of Sale system. This new holiday update comes with a number of improvements to Square for Retail’s inventory management in order to save time and money.

The first is the ability to archive old products. Square Online states that this will be especially useful for the holiday season, as it enables users to have their products organized ahead of time and updated with ready-to-sell seasonal products.

The next new feature is barcode label printing. Previously only available through Square Online’s dashboard, Square for Retail now brings this to its Point of Sale systems. It will also embed this process into more operational workflows like purchase orders and inventory receipts, allegedly making it easier for users to prepare their products for sale.

Buying products for the holiday season means nothing if you can’t actually get them delivered. With this update, Square Online has streamlined its Shipments Page, allowing orders from every sales channel to be accessed from a single place in the Square Dashboard.

Additionally, Square Online has enhanced its checkout interface, adding a number of new options for customers, such as “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store” and location-based tax calculators – increasing service speed.

All of these new features are supported by integrations with Shippo, an ecommerce solution software.

A busy holiday season means competition with other sellers. Square Online has included a number of new customer engagement features that will aim to get your business seen above the crowd.

The pandemic prevented many in-person events from occurring, but with this holiday season Square Online predicts a return, so business regulars will now be able to charge their purchases to a new House Account at their leisure. Sellers will then be able to create an invoice for the outstanding balance and receive online payments via credit card, ACH payment, or Card on File. This allows sellers to be present and shift as many products as necessary without having to worry about overhead costs.

Another feature added for customer engagement is Retail Bundles, allowing customers to buy holiday gift baskets of similar products or products centered around a similar theme. This not only drives up revenue, but Square Online can keep track of each product’s inventory across multiple sales channels.

Finally, in regards to retention, Square Online’s Text Message Marketing will be getting updated with users now being able to send GIFs and images. Sellers will now also be able to offer Group eGift Cards, making it easier for customers to contribute to an individual present.