Square and Tuckly

The open one

Among the POS systems in this directory, Square is the exception. Anyone can create a free Square developer account and start working with its APIs the same day. There is no partnership agreement to sign before reading the documentation and no certification panel to pass before a sandbox is unlocked. Square’s developer platform lists Orders, Catalog, Inventory, Payments, OAuth and Webhooks among its APIs, and those six are exactly what an ordering site needs to talk to a POS.

That is why this page is more optimistic in tone than the Toast or Lightspeed pages. It is still honest about status: the connection has not been built.

What Square is, for a restaurant

Square started as a card reader and grew into a point-of-sale platform. Square for Restaurants is the restaurant-specific version, with table and ticket management, kitchen display and a menu structure of items, variations and modifiers. Square also sells Square Online, an ordering website product with a free plan, so a restaurant on Square already has one ordering option in the box. Tuckly would be an alternative to that, connected to the same POS.

What the connection would do

Orders in. When a customer orders on your Tuckly site, the order would be created in Square through the Orders API, so it appears on the kitchen display and in Square’s reports as a normal sale.

Catalog out. Items, variations, modifiers and prices from Square’s Catalog API would populate the ordering site, so a price change on the POS reaches customers without a second edit.

Inventory. Square’s Inventory API tracks stock counts. Where you use it, a sold-out item could hide on the site automatically. Where you do not, you would mark items unavailable in one place and have it reflected in the other.

Status back. Square supports webhooks, so when an order is updated in the POS, Tuckly would learn about it and move the order along.

Payments are a separate question. Square’s Payments API could process online orders in the countries where Square supports payment processing. Square lists those as Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, and states that elsewhere its APIs allow only external and cash payments. If you are in one of those countries, using Square as your gateway as well as your POS is a reasonable option. If not, another gateway handles the money and Square records the sale.

Authorising access

Square uses OAuth for third-party apps, which means you would grant Tuckly access from your Square account rather than copying a secret key out of a settings page. You can revoke it the same way. That is the model we would use.

Costs you should know about

Square’s card processing fees are set by Square and published on its regional pricing pages, in each country’s own currency. Square for Restaurants has a free plan and a paid Plus plan whose price differs by country. Those are Square’s numbers at the time we checked, and they are Square’s to change. Tuckly’s charges are on the pricing page and include no commission on direct orders.

In the meantime

Direct orders do not wait for the integration. They arrive on the Tuckly order screen, and staff enter them into Square as they would a phone order. Once the volume makes that tedious, the integration pays for itself. If you are on Square and want it built, say so on the contact page with your country and the number of locations. Open APIs mean the distance between enough requests and a working connection is shorter here than almost anywhere else in this directory.