Developer Night Recap

A few weeks ago, we invited a small group of local developers to come visit the Square offices and take a figurative peek behind the curtains to see how our APIs are made, and what we are working on in the near future.

We’re so excited about the things we are working on that we wanted to share them publicly—so everyone who is building with Square can share in our excitement!

Hosted Checkout (beta)

An example of the hosted checkout screen mockup

You can currently connect your custom-built POS app to Square payments, but sometimes you want to start accepting payments as quickly and as easily as possible—without writing a custom integration. Hosted checkout allows you to use a pre-made payment form hosted by Square to finalize purchases people make on your site. Since Square hosts all of the payments forms, you won’t need to use https on your website (though it is always a good idea!).

e-Commerce Itemization (beta)

Right now, if you use Square’s e-Commerce APIs, all of your sales show up as a “Custom Amount” in your dashboard. We know we can provide more detail, and that doesn’t let you leverage any of the inventory capabilities that non-API sales utilize. As e-Commerce itemizations get released, you’ll be able to pass an itemized cart with the transaction creation, or create new items on the fly that will be associated with the transaction.

Items v2 (Catalog)

Items are at the core of many types of businesses, but keeping track of all of the different variations, discounts, and taxes can be complex, and isn’t done very well in the current items V1 API. In the new version, we’re creating a broader concept of an item *catalog *that will help you manage items (and all their variations & discounts) across locations. The new catalog endpoints will also allow batch uploads and changes, something that has been a top ask from developers. We’re listening!

Webhooks v2

Our current Webhooks implementation is limited. You are notified of changes, but then it’s more work to figure out what has changed and in what way. Shifting more APIs to the v2 framework means that Webhooks is getting an upgrade, too. Webhooks v2 will add relevant information into the notification payloads, as well as offer notifications for all of our APIs—not just the existing transactions, items and customers.

We’ll announce the beta tests and releases of these features in the coming weeks. To make sure you hear about them, be sure to follow us on twitter (@SquareDev) and keep watching The Corner.