Now you can use Square without the need for an online store. The online payments service announced Square Online Checkout on Thursday, which lets sellers create a link or button so they can accept payments without having to build an online store.
Sellers can post the link anywhere online, including email, text message, an existing website, or social media channels. “A checkout link can be added to your Instagram bio, in a direct message, or within a Facebook post,” the company said in its announcement. “This allows you to sell featured items and services or provide a way for supporters to donate via your social media channels.”
Buyers only need to enter three pieces of information to complete a purchase, and they can use all major credit cards and debit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, to pay you.
Sellers pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, and there are no contracts, monthly fees, or start-up costs. Square explains that data security, dispute management, and fraud prevention are all included in the flat processing rate.
Tech publication VentureBeat sees the new service as a challenge to PayPal and wrote, “While Square is perhaps better known for point-of-sale software and devices that allow offline merchants to easily accept card payments, it has been pushing deeper into the online realm in recent years.”
Here’s how Square Online Checkout works for sellers:
1) Create a link for any goods or service you want to accept payment for.
2) Give the link a name and a price.
3) Share the link by pasting it into an email, social post, Instagram bio, text message, etc. Or save the link as a button and put it on a website, blog, portfolio, etc.
4) Customers click the link and get taken to a simple checkout page requiring only three pieces of information: name, email, and payment details.
“All your customers have to do is click the link, then enter their payment info. And just like that, you get paid — fast.”
Sellers can learn more on the Squareup.com website.
This isn’t exactly new but clearly Square needs to join the club parroting a useless link instead of fixing problems with their broken storefront. Like all of these link schemes, it only works for stuff you can manufacture or acquire on demand because it has no context of inventory. Tell you what, Square, I’ll use your awful storefront if you get off your lazy asses and implement calculated shipping. That’s the least you can do, seeing as how you won’t support Windows (the most widely used OS) and won’t implement an API that doesn’t rely on embedding a Chrome-only Javascript page. God, how many stupid pills do you take every morning?
Calculated shipping offered with their $72 plan.
The worst thing about Square, though, is that it doesn’t take PayPal.