thread Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout? in Payments Troubleshooting

How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

AscendancyZine — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 18:47:09 GMT

I'm selling digital goods that need to be emailed. I've gone through what feels like a million help articles and even turned to chatgpt in my desperation before coming here.

How on earth do I make the Email Address field "Required" during checkout? One would think it'd be under Settings>checkout>advanced settings. One would be wrong.

Thanks for any help!

Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

TheRealChipA — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 01:33:38 GMT

Hey there @AscendancyZine. Before I hazard to give you an answer, please clarify. Are you wanting to make the email address for a receipt required? Or the email address for for the email collection screen (iPad only)? Or are you trying to collect an email address somewhere else. I might have a way to do what you want, but I need to see what you are seeing, first?

Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

AscendancyZine — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 02:00:05 GMT

Hello! Not sure what the right choice is, so I'll post a screenshot of my test purchase. This was when I tried to checkout from my online store. I don't actually care about a phone number, I guess that's just required no matter what? But I do need their emails when a buyer checks out from my store. My goods are all digital and I need to be able to email them the PDFs that they've ordered from me.

Does that help explain what I'm looking for? Please see the attached picture for reference!

Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

TheRealChipA — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 02:56:54 GMT

@AscendancyZine Actually, the screen shot and the description of your business were what I needed. I’m going to give you a possible work-around, as well as a suggestion for you to submit to the Square Online team. First…..

Currently, there is no way to force online checkout to collect an email address. The phone number is required, as you see, but that might be a good thing for the work-around I’m aging to suggest. Before I get into that, Square has a Feature Request Board for us to submit ideas for features. I recommend that you go there and ask them to give us an online checkout setting to require email addresses. When you do that, please post the link to it as a reply here and I’ll definitely support/upvote it.

Next, you said you sell digital goods. If you are at all interested, there are third-party apps in the Square App Marketplace that help you automatically fulfill digital goods. I’m betting that they require email addresses for obvious reasons. The best one I’ve found is SendOwl. It has a monthly subscription fee plus a per-order fulfillment fee, but to my way of thinking having your fulfillment being automatic is more than worth that. I’m just putting that out there. Just build their fees into your prices.

Lastly, my work-around, just in case. You can create a modifier set that is type Text Modifier. You can attach this to all of your items and require customers to enter it. Of course, there are a couple of minor drawbacks:

Text Modifier boxes do NOT verify that there is a valid email address. But in this day of auto-fill that might not be a problem.
There is not automatic “reenter email address for verification” function. If you want that, you’d have to have TWO text modifier boxes, and it still won’t compare them. Such is the nature of work-arounds. This is why having a phone number is good. You can always call the customer if they don’t match and verify.

Anyway, if you do this, you can export a CSV of your item details each day, fix whatever email address issues crop up and then send the products. It’s not perfect, but it is very workable to my way of thinking. Personally, I’d use SendOwl, but of course that is up to you.

I hope all of that helps. If you have more questions, fire away! And don’t forget to submit the feature request and post the link to it here.

Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

TheRealChipA — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 02:55:34 GMT

@AscendancyZine One more word of advice, in case you decide to do the SendOwl 7-day trial. Square has a very strict policy of us not using our own credit/debit cards for purchases. This is because doing so violates the card-issuer’s (Mastercard, etc) policies of us not doing cash advances to ourselves. So, if you decide to do the 7-day trial and do test purchases, add a coupon code of 100% for you to use for testing. That way you don’t have to actually charge any of your cards. Keep this in mind whenever you are testing things out. Square’s limit is around $1 for test transactions to our own cards. Word to the wise.

Re: How Can I Make the Email Address Field "Required" During Checkout?

faheem — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 04:42:32 GMT

@AscendancyZine an email address is already required for checking out. Try checking out without one; you won't be able to do so.