Building a branded eCommerce or online ordering site is critical for driving customer engagement and conversion. Similarly to how you make an investment to build a well-designed, seamless shopping experience in-store, Square Online offers you the ability to do the same online.
With advanced customization features on Square Online, you can make your site stand out with a few quick updates. Check out five ways to leverage Square Online’s features to make your brand stand out.
1. Change your Order Online and Shop All layout
Square Online offers two types of shopping templates designed to display items that give your customers the best buying experience possible.
- Shop All is for selling physical items that you typically find in a retail store. This is also the best template for shipping.
- Order Online is for selling prepared food and beverage items from a menu that you’d likely see at a restaurant or food and drink vendor. This template best supports local delivery and in-store or curbside pickup.
You can now access new layouts to both the Order Online and Shop All templates. These new layouts were designed to better showcase the items for sale while also reinforcing your brand across the shopping experience.
Advanced Shop All Layouts
Tight Grid Layout
A clean, modern product grid that presents images with consistent aspect ratios and minimal spacing between items.
Mosaic Layout
An organic layout that prioritizes images with different aspect ratios while scaling them to fit in equal-sized columns.
Advanced Order Online Layouts
Photo Menus
A photo centric layout that highlights your quality food photos. Don’t have food photography? Take food photos with the Photo Studio app.
Large Menus
An organized layout that helps your customers shop larger, categorized menus of 100 items or more.
To change your Order Online or Shop All layout, visit the Square Online website editor. From there, navigate to Order Online or Shop All > Item list > Customize > Layouts.
2. Add Dynamic Banners with Banner Slideshows and Videos to the Homepage
The hero banner on your homepage is your first opportunity to grab a visitor’s attention. Try out two eye-catching features to welcome potential customers to your site:
- Banner Slideshows: Create a carousel of banner images to highlight multiple offerings, new items, sales, and more.
- Banner Videos: Add a video to one or more of your banners.
Edit your banners in the Square Online website editor > Home > Main Banner.
Learn more about adding a banner slideshow and banner video to your site.
3. Make site elements pop with advanced controls
Now you can customize various elements throughout your site that customers engage with. Customizing these elements not only provides delightful opportunities to reinforce your brand but also helps direct your customers to click in the right places.
- Buttons: Fully customizable buttons let you change the color, shape, border, drop shadow, text, and more to make them pop across your site.
- Badges: Whether you’re communicating an item is on sale, running low, out of stock, or ready to preorder, you can change the style, font, and color of item badges.
- Icon Sets: Icons don’t have to be boring and functional. With new icon sets, you can add style to even the smallest details of your site. Change your customer accounts, shopping cart, search bar, and more to better fit your brand.
- Spacing: Adjust the scale to customize your site width and margins. Adjusting spacing can make your site full width or you can stick to the default states for the most mobile-responsive site.
To get started, visit the Square Online website editor > Site Design (bottom lower left) > Site Elements.
4. Get your image size just right
Item images are one of the most important to get right on your site. Make sure your images look the best with custom image sizing that lets you tailor your photos to fit more aspect ratios. You can also auto crop or scale images to fit a specific aspect ratio.
Square Online automatically resizes your item images so they have the perfect size and configuration no matter where they’re displayed. Big images won’t slow down your site anymore. We recommend that you upload item photos that are greater than 2000 x 2000 to ensure clear, crisp imagery.
You can edit your item images in a variety of places in the Square Online website editor, including the Shop All or Order Online main template page, Item Details or Lists, and Item-focused sections like Featured Item or Similar Items.
Learn more about editing your images.