Square Launches Online Storefront: Square Market

Square Inc. now allows its merchants to establish an online store through the Square Register app.

The new Square Market website charges merchants 2.75% per online sale, the same rate Square charges for card payments made with its portable card reader, according to Square's website.

The store listings on Square Market resemble the listings in Square’s mobile apps, with simple tiled interfaces and dedicated locations for a map, store hours and promotions. 

The pitch is ease-of-use: if a merchant has created an item listing on the Square Register app for in-store sales, that existing product listing can be synced to its Square Market page. Merchants can review in-store and online sales with the same dashboard.

The Market pages also allow businesses to embed posts from their Twitter accounts.

Though Square has been aggressively pursuing larger merchants with products such as the Square Stand point of sale card reader, the Square Market site appears targeted to smaller stores that may not have their own websites or may want to reach a wider audience than their current websites serve.

Square teased the product launch on June 25 with a post to Twitter indicating it would be “entering a new market” the next day. This, paired with comments its executives have made about its international ambitions and its recent entry to Japan, led many Twitter followers to guess that it was set to announce a move to the U.K., Mexico, Russia or Brazil.  Rivals such as PayPal have already made headway in some of these regions with their own mobile card readers.