Customers appreciate the convenience of ordering online — and it shows. According to eMarketer, half of Canada’s population (19.2 million people) are ‘omnichannel digital buyers’ looking to engage with businesses online, in stores and on social media.
If you have an online store, you should be thinking about how to make shopping as easy as possible so your customers buy more products more often. If you don’t have an online store yet, it’s time to get started.
When you’re thinking about your online store, there are two things to keep in mind: You want to have a great e-commerce platform to build on, and you want to be able to take payments easily.
You probably know that Square makes taking in-person payments easy for you and your customers. Well, Square also integrates with a variety of e-commerce platforms to provide seamless online payments.
Using the same payment system for your brick-and-mortar and online stores allows you to get a better view of how your business is performing without having to manually reconcile your books and inventory. By seeing all your sales (online and in-store) in one place, for instance, you can more easily determine what inventory you have in stock, where it’s selling best, and when might be the best time for a promotion or sale.
To ease the integration of Square and your online store, we’ve partnered with some of the most popular e-commerce platforms, which cater to all levels of know-how.
If you’re building an e-commerce site yourself, these template-style platforms make it simple to create a beautiful site, regardless of how much technical skill you have:
- Wix: Unique website templates with polished designs and flexibility to control your site’s aesthetic.
- Weebly: A full-featured, drag-and-drop website builder that enables sellers of all sizes and types to easily build a professional online store.
- Ecwid: A set of tools that allows you to create a complete online store or start selling on your existing website. Ecwid works with any web platform, including social media sites, as an embedded shopping cart.
- BigCommerce: A solution for sellers who need a more sophisticated operation, particularly those in retail. Inventory automatically updates when you make a sale online or offline, helping you avoid overselling and manual reconciliation.
If you already know how to code or work with a developer, these platforms offer more customization options (which could be important for your business):
- WooCommerce: An e-commerce plugin that turns your WordPress site into an online store. Sync your online and offline items and inventory to make selling across channels painless.
- Magento: An advanced commerce platform for larger businesses, with complex settings and options to help you scale.
- Or build a custom site and connect Square payments using our Payments API.
If you integrate one of these e-commerce platforms with your Square account, you get everything you love about Square, including simple and transparent pricing, and deposits as soon as the next business day. And because security is very important when you’re selling online (and off), Square helps protect you with fraud detection, dispute assistance and chargeback protection for qualified transactions up to $250 a month.
If you’re ready to connect Square to your existing site to get your business online, visit the E-Commerce section in the Apps section of your Dashboard.
Related Articles:
* Everything You Wanted to Know about Square APIs
* Seven Ways Technology Can Help Your Business Grow This Year
* Accept Payments from Your Computer with Square Virtual Terminal