How to Use Square and WooCommerce for Point-of-Sale
WooCommerce is the most popular way to build an online store. Square is the most popular way to build a point-of-sale solution in many countries. Why not bring the two together?
That’s the idea behind the new Square for WooCommerce plugin. This was the most popular requested feature by WooCommerce customers.
Here’s an overview of how the Square integration works with WooCommerce. If you enjoy this tutorial, check out WooCommerce Explained, the comprehensive (and best-selling) introduction to WooCommerce.
To get started, you’ll need a WooCommerce site, plus a Square account and one of their card readers:
- Buy and download the WooCommerce Square integration.
- Install the integration via the your WordPress dashboard > Plugins > Upload Plugin.
- After installation, you’ll see a black “Connect with Square” plugin.
- You’ll now be taken to Square.com and will be asked to grant permissions.
- Click “Allow”.
- Click to be redirected back to your WordPress site.
- Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Integration.
- You’ll see the Square sync settings. You can choose to sync Categories, Inventory, Images and more.
At the bottom of the screen you can also do a manual sync:
It’s worth taking time to understand how these sync settings work:
- Auto-sync is only available for inventory. You will need to manually sync changes for categories, images and other items.
- Square only allows one category per product, so WooCommerce will be forced to chose one per product also.
Also, pay attention to the direction of the sync:
- Any changes you make to your inventory in WooCommerce will be immediately synced to Square.
- Any changes you make to your inventory in Square will be synced hourly to WooCommerce.
So there is a difference here. WooCommerce to Square is automatic, but the other direction is hourly. It’s worth reading through the WooCommerce documentation.
Using Square for online payments
You also decide to use Square for online payments so you don’t have to use different gateways for online and offline payments.
- Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Checkout > Square.
- You can enable Square payments on your site.
- If you check “Create Customer” your online customer will also be synced to Square.
Here’s how a credit card checkout form will appear on your site:
Overall review
This is a good start and should encourage many retail sellers to consider WooCommerce. There are some limitations to consider.
- Not all data is synced between WooCommerce and Square.
- The extension is only supported in the US and Canada.
- This a good but somewhat limited first version. Expect a lot of extra features soon, particularly if it proves a popular product for WooCommerce.
Overall, WooCommerce Square is a very useful product and works well.
At the end of the day, you’ll probably need to choose whether Square or WooCommerce is your primary tool. Both of those systems have a lot of overlap in terms of reporting, customer data, email marketing and so on. You will need to choose whether to use Square or WordPress features for those tasks. I suspect that if the majority of your business is online, you’ll rely on WordPress. If the majority of your business is offline, you’ll stick with Square.
But if your business is both online and offline, Square for WooCommerce is a great place to start.
In the information gathering phase…considering square for my brick and mortar pos and already have wordpress/woocommerce for online boutique. Question regarding a retail clothing store. Right now I have a brick and mortar store with an old school cash register and looking to convert to a pos system but I want that pos to intergrate with my already up and running online boutique through wordpress/woocommerce. Brick and mortar is my main source of selling…right now when I sell an item I have to physically go into wordpress and remove stock. I want a system to intergrate the two and it looks like square may be a great option. On the website, 90% of products have variations, will the variations sync in square? Can I sync all simple and variable products from existing website to the Square POS?
What obstacles do you see me incountering?
This blog is really remarkable. Keep sharing more useful and conspicuous stuff like this. Thank you so much.
Great article thank you I am new to Square for websites but this makes things a lot clearer thank you!
Great stuff, will looking forward to some more postings….