Square adds 'market item embedding' to make super-simple mini stores everywhere

Mobile payments company Square is making selling products online as simple as embedding a YouTube video in your blog.

The company unveiled the Square Market — an online storefront for small businesses — two months ago. Now it’s adding “market item embedding” to allow everyone to embed items for sale on their websites and blogs. The result is that a simple link to your handmade beeswax candles becomes a simple buy-now opportunity.

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Which means that if you can copy and paste, you can sell online.

Companies like Shopify have made building and launching online stores super easy. But for some small businesses, the hassle of building and managing an entire e-commerce initiative might be too much, when all they want to do is sell five items. That’s the niche that Square is targeting.

To start embedding products, of course, you’ll need a Square Market account, and you’ll have to have set up at least some of your products for sale there. Once that’s done, you can embed them into a blog post, on a website, or in a Tumblr feed simply by clicking the embed icon, copying the HTML, and pasting it into your site.

Helpfully, Square Market will show you a preview of what your item will look like on the site.

Interestingly, as the Square engineering blog highlights, those with just a little more technical skill can include the Square Market embed script in their site headers and then simply link to items for sale with a basic HTML link, plus a CSS class of “sq-market-embed,” to achieve the same effect.

Adding an item to your site will allow visitors to buy it, of course, and sales will be completed on the Square Market.