Connecting Square for Retail Point of Sale

From Spiffy Stores Knowledge Base

Connecting your Spiffy Store to a Square for Retail Point of Sale system is a very simple task, and you'll be able to set it up in a matter of minutes.

Firstly, you'll need to make sure that the you have access to the Square Sales Channel feature.

Go to the 'Preferences -> Sales Channels' page. This will show you if you currently have access to the Square for Retail Sales Channel on your current plan. If necessary, you can subscribe to a Point of Sale add-on to give you access to a single Point of Sale sales channel.

Signing up for a Square for Retail account

You should first make sure that you have a Square account and have signed up for the Square for Retail Point of Sale product. You can get started here -

https://squareup.com/au/en/point-of-sale/retail

Make sure you go through and finish the setup for your Square account and do the basic configuration steps for your Point of Sale system.

Activating the Square for Retail Sales Channel

In order to connect your Spiffy Store Square for Retail Sales Channel to your Square account, just click on the Activate button. You'll be taken to the Square site, and you'll be prompted to login to your Square account. Once that has been done successfully, you'll be redirected back to your Spiffy Store Sales Channels page.

Your Square for Retail Sales Channel should now be active.

Configuring the Square for Retail Sales Channel

The name of your Square account should appear in the Account: field. Next to the name, you'll find an edit link. Click on this to edit your configuration.

You have two options to configure.

  1. The default location for your Point of Sale system can be chosen from the drop-down if you have more than one location defined in your Square for Retail account.
  2. You can specify the products that you want to synchronize with your Square for Retail point of sale system. The default option is to synchronize all products, but you can also choose to synchronize only the products in a certain collection. You can create hidden collections to manage the specific products that you want to be available on your point of sale system, and you can even use Super Collections to build dynamic collections of products (such as all products with the 'POS' tag). You can also choose to disable synchronization by selecting the 'No Products' option.

Click the Update button to save your choices.

Performing an Initial Synchronization

Once you've activated and configured your Square for Retail Sales Channel, you will need to perform an initial synchronization to push all your selected products to the Square system. This is done from the Products page. On the right-hand side of the page, you'll find a set of action buttons, and in that list there should be a POS Synchronize (Square) button.

Click on this button to initiate the synchronization task. This will be done for you in the background, and you'll be sent an email showing you the results of the synchronization. Please be aware that the actual synchronization may take some time, depending on how many products you need to synchronize and how busy the Square servers are.

If you are synchronizing a subset of your products using a collection, then all products that are not in that collection will be deleted from the Square for Retail Point of Sale system. If you select No Products, then all products will be removed from the Square for Retail Point of Sale system.

This initial synchronization generally only needs to be done once. Once the products have been pushed to the Point of Sale system, any changes to the product, will automatically be reflected in the Point of Sale system. This extends to products being deleted or created, variations being updated and even new images being added to a product.

Fixing Problems

Once a product has been synchronized, a POS tag should appear next to the product's title so that you know it has been synchronized.

If there's a problem with a particular product, you're able to force a synchronization for just that product by going to the product page, and clicking on the POS Synchronize (Square) button.