Square For Retail VS Square POS

Square For Retail offers more item management at the register, including a more customizable POS interface, barcode scanning, and item exchanges, all available on the free plan. Most importantly, you can search for items, item variants, categories, and customers across one or multiple locations from the checkout screen or your admin dashboard. This makes it way easier to sell items and invoice customers when you have a catalog of items available.

Square POS is a more basic, general point of sale app that’s used mainly for taking payments or donations. You can search the Square POS app for items and take sales that way or simply enter a dollar amount and charge people using a card reader.

Note: If you need more from your retail system than what Square For Retail can offer, check out more of our best retail POS systems for more customizable options.

Square POS and Square For Retail allow you to sell unlimited items and display products across all ordering touchpoints (in-person sales, eCommerce sales, online marketplace sales, sales in different locations, etc.) If you want niche inventory management software, you may integrate Square POS with a dedicated inventory management app.

The free Square For Retail plan includes automated inventory tracking, auto-generated SKU numbers, barcode scanning with an iOS camera, item exchanges, and advanced item search by category, variant, and/or customer.

The Square For Retail Plus plan offers these additional advanced inventory management features:

• Automated purchase order generator
• Vendor management and sales reports by vendor
• Advanced POS reports such as cost of goods sold reports and profit margin reports
• Cross-location orders and returns
• Bulk order receiving and bulk item transfers
• Stock breakdowns/conversions (e.g. case to individual pack)
• Barcode printing
• Inventory history and counting tool

If you need more inventory management features than Square For Retail offers, look into these best POS systems with inventory management.

Both software apps allow you to bring your own tablet/smartphone devices to use as checkout registers, either using tap-to-pay or the $49-$69 Square contactless card reader. While Square POS and Square For Retail can both be Apple POS systems, only Square POS works on Apple and Android devices. You can also access Square’s web-based user admin dashboard from any browser and manage your inventory, sales data, online store, and more from one centralized place.

There are also proprietary Square hardware options, such as the Square Terminal and Square iPad stand.

Check out our guide to Square hardware for more information on Square’s terminal and hardware accessory offerings.

Note: Square has an excellent hardware warranty (1-2 years, depending on the hardware), and the company will honor it whether you purchase directly from Square or a physical seller.

Both Square For Retail and Square POS include the free version of Square Online, which allows you to build an online store. You can sell a variety of items, collect contact information, embed contact forms, create “about us” and informational pages, build individual product pages that can be grouped into categories or galleries, and more.

Both POS apps can be integrated with the free version of Square Invoices, one of the best invoicing software for small businesses. Retail and service businesses can send estimates, one-time and recurring invoices, invoice tracking, schedule payment reminders, charge late fees, and charge a card on file.

Read our Square Online review for more information on how to sell online using Square.

No matter which POS software you sign up for, you can sell on places like Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Etsy with Square-built integrations. You also have the option to sell on eBay, Amazon, Faire, and more using a third-party inventory listing/syncing software like the Trunk app.

Square also offers free Square Checkout Link software, which you can use to generate a link to pay for an item, service, or open-ended checkout price for things like suggested donations. You can embed your generated links in a text message, email, or URL on a Facebook or Twitter post, as a buy button on a blog post, and more, so you really can sell anywhere and on any platform.

Square’s omnichannel platform functionalities make Square one of the best POS systems with eCommerce features.

Square POS integrates with several other software, including other POS systems, as a payment method, so you can build a custom POS solution and just use Square to take payments.

Square For Retail also offers several integrations, but not as many as Square POS.

Both Square POS and Square For Retail integrate with the rest of Square’s products, including Square Payroll, Square Loyalty, Square Marketing, and Square HR Manager.

Read our Square Loyalty review for more information on whether Square offers the best POS loyalty programs for your business.