How to use Square Terminal as a customer facing device while using Square Handheld for the vendor

[EricLivesay]

I have a Square Handheld and Square Terminal. I have seen online that it's possible to connect the two and use the terminal as a customer facing device. But everything I'm seeing says I need to contact support and have them activate it on my account or device. I just called support (foreign speaker) and they told me this wasn't possible. But I have seen 3 different websites that says it is all I have to do is have "Connected Terminal" added to my account or activated. Does anyone know how to do it? I can see a way to do it from my phone POS but I want to use the Handheld which is superior.

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

@EricLivesay So Im not sure what the "3 different websites" are that say you can do this, but the fact is that currently you can not.  The Connected Terminal setup is restricted to a tablet or mobile phone that uses one of the standard App Store POS apps.

I verified this by also firing up Square AI and asking it if I could use a connected terminal as a customer-facing device for Square Handheld.  It's answer was "The Square Handheld device does not currently support using a connected Terminal as a customer-facing device."

Which means that if you want this configuration to work, you'll need to head over to the Feature Request board and submit a request.

Also, a question.  Why can't you just use the handheld as your customer-facing payment device?  If was designed to be that, with some restrictions (like no swipe cards).

[EricLivesay]

Thanks for the response. I went on Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. It was an AI generated response. But it sounded so convincing because it gave me step by step instructions on how to do it. And all the steps were there except the part where "Connect Terminal" was in the settings on the Handheld. That's AI for you I guess. 

My setup is that I have a custom wooden kiosk box that holds my custom made cash box. Attached to that is my Square reader that's in a custom wooden housing that all you can see is the card slot, you tap to pay through the wooden cover. "Tap Here" is wood burned into a circle where you tap to pay. Lots of people comment on it. I have a tablet inside my kiosk that I pull out when I make a sell and the square reader is far enough to the front of the table that customers don't have to lean to get to it. All my shelves and tables are custom too. I just like selling art on art I guess. But the idea was to use the handheld to scan the barcodes on my items and make any necessary changes to prices or add discounts and service charges, etc... then build in the terminal to the front of the wooden kiosk at the same angle as the terminal so that the customer has a display to see a running tally of the items and prices of their purchase, like in a real store.

This would be a great feature to add to the Handheld. Since it's not, it's a lost sale to Square because I'll be returning the Terminal but keeping the Handheld. I'll submit a request to the link you provided.

Adding screen cast/mirror to the handheld would be a good idea too. You can use one tablet, as the vendor, as the main input device, then have another tablet facing the customer and mirror the screen from the first tablet to the second one. The customer can see everything that they're buying. The only issue is that if the signature screen pops up they might try to sign on that tablet. I've seen it done in person on a few different occasions and it works great. I just don't have 2 tablets or I might try that. 

[TheRealChipA]

@EricLivesay As a fellow seller, I love hearing how others are leveraging the Square hardware to do innovative and creative things.  You have an interesting setup there, and if you are so inclined I'd love to see some photos of it.  Anyway, yes please submit the request.  When you do, come back here and post a link to it.  I'll definitely upvote/support it and I'm sure others will as well.  For myself (and ice cream shop with LONG modifier lists), the Handheld is a great idea that won't work because of all of the scrolling required.  But it has its place in the ecosystem and adding what you are describing is definitely another idea of "outside the box" thinking that Square should always be listening to.

Oh, and if you haven't already, fire up Square AI the next time you are researching options and ideas.  I've been part of the seller team beta testing it and I am a strong Champion of its help functionality.  As an active seller here in the Community, I believe that Square AI has great potential that we have only just started tapping.  And it's not just good for reliable help research, but also for getting great insights into our sales data that used to involve hours of CSV downloads and spreadsheet manipulation.