Important changes to your Square Online site categories
About the changes to your Square Online site categories
We recently notified you of upcoming changes to your Square Online site categories. The home for site categories is transitioning from Square Online to Square Item Library in Dashboard to enable you to view and manage all categories from one place. This means that, starting later in 2024, categories displayed on your Square Online site will need to be managed from Square Item Library rather than Square Online. Additionally, if you choose, you can use the same categories for in-person and online selling. You’ll no longer need to create and manage your online categories separately.
Before you begin
All historical data from the Square Online version of your category report will no longer be available after the Square Online reporting changes take place. Be sure to download any historical category data you’d like to retain as soon as possible. To learn more, check out these Important changes to your Square Online reports.
Understand the changes
The home for your Square Online site categories is moving to a new area of your Square Dashboard, where you can find all the item categories you use throughout Square. This includes Square Point of Sale and Square Online.
Note: To view website categories, you’ll no longer need to navigate to your Dashboard > Sales channels > Online > Items > Site Categories. Instead, navigate to your Dashboard > Items & orders > Items > Categories.
The new hub includes the ability to:
- Use the same categories for in-person and online selling
- Create, edit and delete categories
- Rearrange categories in the order they should appear on your site
- Manage channel visibility to control what sites and other online channels the category should appear on
- Manage availability using time-based categories
- Add search engine optimization (SEO) information
- And more
For details, check out how to create and edit item categories.
- Existing: Your existing categories, and any items assigned to them, will remain unchanged. After you transition your Square Online site categories to Square Item Library, all existing categories and site categories will be managed from one place, but items assigned to each category and all associated data (like Category sales reports) will remain the same.
- Duplicate: By default, you can continue managing your categories for in-person and online selling separately. Click on the Channels filter to view categories that are either only visible on your Square Online site or the categories that aren’t. If you’d like to de-duplicate your categories manually, the bulk actions for category channel visibility and deletion will be useful.
The Favourites grid on your Point of Sale will remain completely unchanged. However, Square Online site categories that you move to Square Item Library will now display in the Square Point of Sale and Square Appointments apps in Checkout > Library, and in the Square Retail POS app in Checkout > All Items.
All Square Online site categories that you move to your Item Library can be managed from Items > Categories in the Square Point of Sale, Square Retail POS, Square Appointments and Square Invoices apps.
- Reporting in Square Reports: Your Category sales reports will remain unchanged. As part of this update, it will now be possible for items to belong to more than one category. If an item belongs to more than one category, you can specify which category should be its Reporting Category. When the item is sold, the item’s sale will be attributed to its chosen Reporting Category in the Category sales report so that sales aren’t double-counted.
- Reporting in Square Online: Category sales reports in Square Online will be removed as part of the separate Square Online reporting changes. If you’d like to retain your Square Online category sales reports history, be sure to download your data prior to moving your Square Online site categories to Square Item Library.
The categories that transfer from Square Online to your Square Item Library cannot be used for category-based order routing with printers or Kitchen Display System (KDS) devices at this time. The existing categories that you use for category-based order routing with printers or KDS devices will remain unchanged.