Important changes to your Square Online site categories

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 > Online > Online > Items > Site Categories. Instead, navigate to your Dashboard > Items & orders > Items > Categories.

The new home 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 optimisation (SEO) information
• And more

For details, check out how to Create and manage item categories.

• Existing: your existing categories, and any items assigned to those categories, 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 (such as 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 also display in the Square Point of Sale and Square Appointments apps in Checkout > Library, and in the Square Retail Point of Sale 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 Point of Sale, Square Appointments and Square Invoices apps.

• Reporting in Square Reports: your Category sales reports will remain unchanged. As part of this update, it’ll 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, make sure to download the data prior to moving your Square Online site categories to Square Item Library.