It’s always puzzled/annoyed me that it was so difficult to integrate Square with WooCommerce. Now, at last, that situation seems to have been rectified with a new extension from WooThemes that promises to do exactly that.
If you’ve ever swiped (or chipped) your card at a food truck, craft fair, farmers’ market, small retail store, or any number of other small businesses, you’ve probably used Square, the dominant player in this super-useful niche. They’re the company that makes those ingenious white plastic squares (get it?) that plug into phones and tablets to allow quick and painless credit card payments. There are lots of competitors now, but Square was the first company to do it well, so they quickly came to dominate that market, and now it seems like it’s theirs to lose.
One factor that I thought might, indeed, eventually lead to them losing: it was always tedious and cost-prohibitive to integrate Square payments into WooCommerce, a leading WordPress eCommerce system. This meant setting up a separate account with another vendor to provide a payment gateway (often Stripe, which has come to similarly dominate that space). The result: two systems, which then either required time/effort/money to integrate or—far more often—no integration, just a tedious manual process to reconcile the two worlds of payment. With the likelihood of cash/check/other offline income methods, this could quickly become incredibly tiresome and annoying to manage.
I haven’t yet implemented the new extension on a client’s live site, but the tech sounds promising. If you’ve been looking to solve this problem, drop me a line and let’s see if it’ll work for you!
