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Square Announces a Beta Version of Tagging Locations With Custom Attributes

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Updated on March 14, 2023

For those of you that are curious about coding, Square just announced in January 2023 a beta version of custom attributes on locations API. Adding to a Square developer’s toolkit, the ability to add zones, regions, and other location attributes to help organize a business better.

The beta version means the product is still being tested and could result in some bugs before the product is fully finalized. But you can go in and use it straight away if you want, just be aware that it might take some tweaking from Square before it’s super effective. But you should be able to give feedback as you go to make the product better.

What Is An API?

To put it super simply, an API is a set of tools that allows apps to talk to each other and share data. The main point of APIs is to cut out repetitive processing work and make it more user-friendly. API stands for Application Programming Interface. Essentially it is communication between two systems, it sets out a range of rules for one system to collect information on another.

To break it down further, imagine you’re a business owner of a toothbrush company and you want information on new business articles in the US, and in particular, you want to know about toothbrushes and toothpaste. You’d create an API with all articles published from today on new businesses, and add a query of “toothbrush” into your line of code.

Then you would be able to easily access the data from those articles.

What You Will Be Able To Do With Square

What this announcement means is, if you can code, you’ll be able to add extra functionality to your applications. You can add either application-specific or seller-specific location metadata like regions or zones.

If you have an app like Google Maps or another GPS system that stops working, you could use location APIs to solve the problem by allowing an app to request that data, and adding it to a data pool. Then a developer can come in and update the location without having to reconfigure an entire app.

Other Custom Attributes You Can Use

The development team at Square also announced other custom attributes with other APIs, helping to solve more business problems. These are:

Orders API
Customers API
Bookings API
Locations API

The bookings, orders, and locations are all in the beta version. While customers’ APIs are good to go!

Orders API and bookings API might sound the same but they work on a different level from one another. Orders is an app-level API, while bookings is a system-level API. An order API allows restaurants, among other businesses, to connect users to the food they want from a specific restaurant.

While a booking API allows, for example, travel companies to do the same thing – but booking a form of travel to a certain place. Lastly, a customer API would be useful for more customer-facing features, like logging into an account.

This shift will surely open the platform up for businesses to fine-tune their websites and ultimately make them more user-friendly for visitors. Might be worthwhile to wait until they are no longer in the beta phase to start using them, but keep your eyes on this exciting update from Square!

Further Information

Square Online Store Review – learn about all the different web hosting providers we’ve tested.
Best Website Builders – check out our list of the very best web builders.

Written by:

Jacqueline Renouard Writer

I’m a writer at Website Builder Guide, having joined the team in March 2022. Before joining I had my own freelance content writing business and now I work to test builders and write the content you read here on the site – so you can create a website that best suits you and your needs. Over my first year here I’ve tested all the builders you’ll read about, shaped the weekly newsletter content, written social media content, and scripted YouTube videos. I’ve also created demo websites to help showcase the builder’s capabilities so you can pick the best option. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to pitch articles for the site like the Best Writer Websites and write guest posts for the likes of Digital Information World, using my degree expertise in Film to share tips on video optimization.