Square Online is popular with many online merchants because it's easy to use and free to get started. It's a flexible platform that's suitable for mobile vendors, such as food truck and fair vendors, online retailers, restaurateurs, and brick-and-mortar boutiques. These are just a few of the reasons it's rated highly on Forbes Advisor's list of the best ecommerce solutions.
Keep in mind that even if you choose the free version of Square Online, you still have to pay a fee for payment processing for each transaction. With the free plan, you'll pay 2.9% plus 30 cents per sale. Square doesn't limit the number of products you can sell online, but with the free plan you can only sell on Square-branded sites or social media. Bandwidth and storage are limited to 500MB, which may limit how much you can sell on your site.
All plans offer credit card payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Square Pay, and Cash App Pay. You can also manage Facebook and Google Ads from your Square dashboard, create coupons for your customers, and use forms to capture leads and stay in touch with your customers. Square includes search engine optimization (SEO) tools to help you rank your pages and products in search engines like Google by entering SEO titles and descriptions to make them visible in search engines.
If you've already built a small business website and are using a separate POS system, you'll need to upgrade to a paid plan to use Square Online with your domain. If you pay annually, it might be worth signing up for Square Online's Plus plan for $29 per month. It has the same transaction fees as the free plan, but you also get a free domain for the first year and access to Square's website builder. The only downside to a Square site is that it doesn't have a blog, but you can post to Square's Stories section on the site, which acts like a blog. Upgrading to this plan also removes all Square ads from your business' online sales.
Square Online's top-tier plan is the Premium plan, which costs $79 per month billed annually. It offers all of the features of the Plus plan, plus real-time shipping rates for your customers, so they know exactly what their shipping costs will be. Perhaps the biggest selling point of this plan is its low transaction fees. You'll only pay 2.6% plus 30 cents per sale, making it a better option for merchants who sell in high volume.
