Hi @ebeth55. First, a little explanation to help clear up your confusion.
Square for Retail includes a physical POS platform. It is used in brick and mortar stores so that your employees can ring up sales and handle other day-to-day functions in your physical store. It sounds like you may not need that, as you already suspect. Square Online is purely for your customers to go to your web site and shop in your online store. You can upgrade either, or both, of these, but you have to do so separately.They have different subscription tiers because that are different Square products that have different purposes. Most often, those purposes overlap, but not always.
Think of it this way. When you set up your Square account, you have to specify if you are a Retail, or Restaurants, or general (POS) seller — you need to choose the experience that best suits your business. In your case, that’s Retail. You need Retail functionality — either the free tier or a more advanced tier with more functionality. Then, if you decide to add an Online Store, you have to specify whether you only need a basic store for your customers, or a more advanced store, and that’s where the plans/tiers for Online come in.
To upgrade your Square Online store from your dashboard, go to Online. You can see in the screen shot I’ve included below an Upgrade button (circled). Click on it and you can upgrade to a paid Online subscription.
Having said that, you should think carefully about whether or not you need Square for Retail plus. You might not need the POS functionality, but there are other features that you might need or want. Here’s the help article showing the difference between the plans. If you need any of the functionality in the “Plus” column, then it doesn’t matter if you are an online-only store or not — you’ll need Retail Plus.
Most likely, you will need the paid tier in both Retail and Online, especially if you want things like abandoned carts, etc. I know you posted here to look to save a little money, but you can’t do that and have the best of both worlds.
I hope that helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.
Hi @ebeth55. First, a little explanation to help clear up your confusion.
Square for Retail includes a physical POS platform. It is used in brick and mortar stores so that your employees can ring up sales and handle other day-to-day functions in your physical store. It sounds like you may not need that, as you already suspect. Square Online is purely for your customers to go to your web site and shop in your online store. You can upgrade either, or both, of these, but you have to do so separately.They have different subscription tiers because that are different Square products that have different purposes. Most often, those purposes overlap, but not always.
Think of it this way. When you set up your Square account, you have to specify if you are a Retail, or Restaurants, or general (POS) seller — you need to choose the experience that best suits your business. In your case, that’s Retail. You need Retail functionality — either the free tier or a more advanced tier with more functionality. Then, if you decide to add an Online Store, you have to specify whether you only need a basic store for your customers, or a more advanced store, and that’s where the plans/tiers for Online come in.
To upgrade your Square Online store from your dashboard, go to Online. You can see in the screen shot I’ve included below an Upgrade button (circled). Click on it and you can upgrade to a paid Online subscription.
Having said that, you should think carefully about whether or not you need Square for Retail plus. You might not need the POS functionality, but there are other features that you might need or want. Here’s the help article showing the difference between the plans. If you need any of the functionality in the “Plus” column, then it doesn’t matter if you are an online-only store or not — you’ll need Retail Plus.
Most likely, you will need the paid tier in both Retail and Online, especially if you want things like abandoned carts, etc. I know you posted here to look to save a little money, but you can’t do that and have the best of both worlds.
I hope that helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.