Square for Retail

The ease of use for this product is amazing. I love how you can make a sale with the virtual terminal by either swiping a card or sending an invoice.

The fees per use can be cumbersome. However all pay portals have some sort of fee to use their product.

Square easily handles transactions for our church book stall. It provides up-to-date inventory and online reporting for tax purposes. You can easily add sales, promotions, and other tailor-made functions.

What I like least about this software is the hardware. We utilize the Square Terminal, which was attractive as a portable register in that it takes credit cards via swipe and chip, but also prints receipts. The optional scanner is even nicer to use. However, for the scanner to work, the terminal must be plugged into an outlet, which robs it of its portable nature. Additionally, adding inventory via the Terminal is cumbersome and slow. Imagine typing in inventory titles using a small smart phone that is slower than a smart phone.

Square pretty much takes all the leg work out of setting up a POS system for any business, but I'll speak specifically as a small business owner.
-If you're a first time small business owner, save yourself the headache and just go with Square; you might be able to get a lower merchant fees rate with another service, but then you have to deal with the hassle of setting up a separate POS register, possibly a separate app you'd have to setup on an iPad if that's what you plan to use, setting up the merchant account, etc. With Square, it's all wrapped into one easy setup.
-Easy to setup on an iPad, create a catalog of items to sell and process payments
-The item catalog screen is very user friendly and customizable
-Doing refunds is easy
-Reports are incredibly easy to run
-Square integrates with QuickBooks online, so it's been seamless to link all my Square sales to my accounting books and makes my tax filings much more accurate
-Creating invoices is also easy and gives a professional look to my invoice emails
-Ability to create forms that require signature, so no need for another digital signature service (unless you need more details, see Cons below)

-I wish you could have the same virtual terminal on the iPad on desktop as well. There have been times when my iPad crapped out and had to use my laptop, and it's not the same experience.
-If you're using the signature service for forms that you need to send out, it only records the signature itself and nothing else. Either it's a user error on my part, or they need to update it, but it needs more customization.