Today, Square announced a new suite of solutions designed to give sellers a competitive edge this holiday selling period. With new features including Square Online’s Themes and Square for Retail’s AI-generated product descriptions, Square sellers can now further enhance their customer engagement across more channels and access additional automated tools to set them up for a successful holiday sales season.
To supercharge sellers’ online presence, Square is introducing Themes, a pre-built set of 19 high-quality site design templates for Square Online. Combined with additional customizable features such as colors, fonts, layouts, and buttons, sellers can create nearly infinite combinations of designs to make a unique and on brand website. Whether a retailer, restaurant, or beauty and personal care service, sellers and agency partners can select a theme that best fits their business to quickly get a website up and running, while also having the flexibility to personalize their site for a professional look that elevates the customer experience. Nearly a quarter¹ of consumers refuse to shop from a business without an online presence, making it crucial for sellers to bring their brands to life in an authentic and engaging way. Additional new features from Square Online offer even deeper customization to give sellers more control and flexibility to change their site design to match their brand aesthetic, including ‘Shop All’ pages; product detail pages; mega menus for larger catalogs; visually-engaging scrolling marquees and embedded native videos; and customizable buttons, custom fonts, and icon sets.
“With Square Online’s latest features, I have been able to customize my site with my brand’s fonts, colors, and high-res photos of our pastries. When customers come into the store and they experience this magical wonderland with purple walls, all of this is also echoed on our website,” said Kyra Bussanich, Founder of Kyra’s Bake Shop in Lake Oswego, Oregon. “I am not a web designer, I am an entrepreneur and a pastry chef, and Square Online is so easy to use, functional, and design-forward. It’s automatically optimized for mobile which is how so many of my customers access my site, and on top of that, our sales numbers doubled when we switched to Square Online.”
Additionally, Square is putting generative AI into the hands of retailers ahead of the holidays. Automatically generated descriptions help retailers write compelling titles and descriptions for new products, which appear across all sales channels at once. For sellers with large catalogs, this automated feature removes the manual back-end work required to describe and list each item for sale – ultimately improving operational efficiency and giving sellers time back to focus on other tasks.
“Square’s auto generated product descriptions feature has completely transformed my business. Typically, it is a manual and time-consuming process to write compelling descriptions, especially when we have more than 30 new items coming in every day. The more I use this feature, the more the descriptions have evolved to become specifically tailored for my business. We’re already expanding our inventory for the upcoming holiday rush, and now I have the ability to draft far more engaging content for my customers in half the time,” said Randy Fulk, Co-Founder of Korie’s Kloset.
Inventory Solutions to Keep Operations Organized and Never Miss a Sale
As sellers prepare to introduce seasonal inventory, Square for Retail is launching additional new features designed to streamline inventory management – thus saving precious time for sellers.
- Sellers can now simplify their inventory by easily archiving old items, ensuring their assortment is organized ahead of the holidays and updated with ready-to-sell seasonal products.
- Previously available only through Dashboard, Square for Retail is enabling barcode label printing from the Point of Sale and embedding the functionality deeper into operational workflows like purchase orders and inventory receipt to make it easier for sellers and their teams to prepare their products for sale.
Fulfillment Tools That Make Gift Giving (and Getting) Faster
The holidays are a particularly demanding time among consumers as they look to receive packages in a timely manner, with Square tracking over 6 million² packages shipped out by sellers last season. With efficiency and speed top of mind for retailers this season, Square has introduced a lineup of enhanced fulfillment management tools, enabling retailers to operate at max efficiency and deliver omnichannel orders at scale.
- The new Shipments Page will streamline omnichannel order fulfillment, enabling sellers to centralize their shipping tasks at scale for in-store orders, Square Online purchases, and Square Subscriptions – all from a single place within their Square Dashboard.
- A new integration with Shippo further reduces the complexity of order fulfillment and empowers sellers to optimize their margins and grow their shipping operations.
- Enhancements to Square for Retail’s checkout interface can help sellers increase their service speed to customers by integrating multiple fulfillment options – such as in-person sales, ‘Buy Online Pick Up In-Store’, shipment, and more – spanning across locations and auto calculating taxes based on order shipping destinations.
Maximizing Customer Engagement and Retention Through the Holidays and Beyond
To cut through the competition during the holidays, Square has also rolled out new customer engagement features dedicated to expanding consumer touchpoints for sellers.
- In preparation for the comeback of more in-person holiday events, Square is introducing House Accounts, a deferred payment account that business regulars and corporate clients can easily charge purchases to. When a seller is ready to settle up, they can quickly create an invoice for the outstanding balance and receive payment online via credit card, ACH payment, or Card on File.
- To maximize brand reach and customer touchpoints, sellers using Square’s Text Message Marketing can now include images and GIFs to engage with customers who prefer to shop or receive messages through their mobile devices.
- When it comes to gift buying, Square has also made it as easy as possible for businesses to drive revenue. With Retail Bundles, sellers can offer multiple items into a single holiday gift basket, enabling customers to easily purchase relevant items focused on a common theme – all while ensuring accurate inventory counts across locations and channels for sellers.
- Besides physical products, sellers can now offer Group eGift Cards, making it easier for individuals to contribute to a group present while increasing value loads. Sellers simply offer the option on their gift card page and buyers will receive a link that can be shared to contributors.
“Retailers choose Square because our technology helps automate critical operations within their businesses, and scales with them as they grow,” said Roshan Jhunja, Head of Retail at Square. “As their needs become more sophisticated, they can tap further into Square’s fully integrated ecosystem of tools. We remain focused on providing sellers with the technology they need to unlock new growth channels and maximize their sales during the holidays and beyond.”
