Hello, we’re the team behind GoodAPI And we’ve helped build donations and Climate Impact programs on different e-commerce platforms.
We’re looking to bring Roundup Donations to the Square Platform and I can see that the terminal API doesn’t allow actions to be added to the existing SquarePOS. I was wondering if there’s a way to add a GoodAPI tile to the SquarePOS so that when an associate asks the customer, “Would you like to round up and donate 65 cents to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation?” They can click on our tile and automatically add that in.
We take care of all donations, disbursements, filings and registrations of the IRS And I’m looking to simplify donations for the Square community.
There isn’t currently a supported public API for adding a custom app tile to Square POS that reads the active sale and automatically adds the calculated round-up donation. You’re correct that Terminal API doesn’t extend the existing Square POS flow. If you want the round-up done automatically, you’d need your own checkout app built on the Terminal API or Mobile Payments SDK.
So we’re a registered fundraiser in the United States and can take care of all the back-end operations including nonprofit vetting, donation disbursement, filing, bonds, registrations, and making sure all the nonprofits are in good standing with the IRS.
Building our own checkout app on the terminal API doesn’t really work though, right? Because most customers that we’re working with are already using SquarePOS. And SquarePOS doesn’t allow third-party checkout apps as far as I understand it. We would need to build a whole POS, correct?
as an example, on Shopify we have a POS UI extension which allows any customer to add our tile onto their POS and from there they just click round up, we automatically calculate the amount and it adds the round up product to the order.
At the end of the day, we just want to make it really easy for customers on Square to round up and we take care of all the backend operations around fulfilling that donation.
Your understanding is correct. My earlier suggestion would require a separate checkout workflow, not an extension of your merchants’ existing Square POS. You wouldn’t need to rebuild every POS feature, but it wouldn’t meet your Shopify-style requirement.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no supported public extension for automatically calculating and adding a round-up donation to the active Square POS cart.
Yeah, we were happy to build the Square app itself and this back-end service that can read the current order subtotal, calculate the roundup and do all of that matter handling. But it seems Square just doesn’t make this feature possible at the moment. Is there anyone in partnerships we can talk to to discuss this further?
Because…a lot of Square customers have been asking for this.
Thanks for your valuable feedback here. I’ve passed this along to our team. I can’t give a timeline, but we’ll update this thread if anything changes. Again, thank you so much for your feedback!