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Following a just-fine debut earnings report earlier this month, San Francisco-based electronics payments company Square—best known for its credit card reader for mobile phones—is releasing a new set of tools that let merchants sell online to complement the ways it lets them sell offline.
Square’s new E-commerce API will let sellers, whether they already use Square to take credit cards or not, process payments on their own websites. It’s reminiscent of a similar service from payments darling Stripe, but aimed more at small businesses than well-funded Silicon Valley startups. Square's new API is designed to let merchants track online and offline sales in one place.
Another new tool, Square's Register API, lets merchants customize any iOS point-of-sale app to suit their specific needs—something the company says should be especially useful for certain types of retail, like bike shops or wineries, which may have very specific requirements for their inventories.
Square says its ultimate goal is to eliminate the hassle sellers face of having to cobble together their systems from across a range of hardware, software, and payments processing options. From financing to payroll to payments to point-of-sale, Square is saying it wants to be a one-stop answer.
“What we hear from customers is that more and more of them want to be able to sell both offline and online, and they’re looking for solutions that will enable them to seamlessly do both, and have a consolidated view of their business,” says Alyssa Henry, who runs Square’s seller division.
Merchants, Henry says, should be able to pick and choose from a range of services depending on need, whether that’s online or offline, without having to sacrifice the ability to stretch into a new strategic direction. You can start as a seller with an offline store, then decide down the road to branch out online, or vice versa.
And that seems like a smart move at this point in Square’s life as a company. In the crowded field of payments, it's tough to keep growing. And Square is under more pressure than ever to do just that as a public company. By offering a range of services beyond its core business of payments processing, the company is hoping to jumpstart the “virtuous cycle” of growth it described back when it went public last October. For shareholders, growth is among the greatest virtues of all.
