While Square has long focused on small businesses, it's making a bigger push to attract and retain larger customers, says Christine Loh, Square's general manager of e-commerce.
It's not a major change to focus on upmarket customers — which Square defines as those generating more than $500,000 a year in gross payments volume — Loh said, but it grew more important amid ongoing economic uncertainty. In recent months, other e-commerce software providers, including Shopify, have also placed more emphasis on larger sellers as a way to hedge their bets.
To cater to larger sellers, Square doubled down on features like preordering capabilities and loyalty program integrations. The more value Square can provide for sellers as they grow, the more likely those sellers are to keep spending and stay on the product.
"We want to make sure we're scaling our product to match the growth," Loh said. "But then also larger sellers, I think especially during this challenging economic time, they don't want to deal with piecing together a bunch of complex solutions. And what Square does really well is we try to simplify a lot of complexity in our overall ecosystem."
Square continues a trend that started during Covid-19 lockdowns, when many online sellers needed more advanced e-commerce capabilities to make up for their physical locations being forced to close. Square saw many upmarket sellers joining during the pandemic's early days, Loh said. Now that many consumers have returned to shopping in stores, those sellers' needs have evolved.
In its shareholder letter for the fourth quarter of 2022, Square's parent company, Block, said that it sees large sellers as holding the biggest opportunity for it going forward. It also said that retention was greater among sellers with larger payment volumes and those that used more of its software products.
"What's nice is as you build for upmarket, not only do you help acquire new sellers that are larger, but you help our existing sellers grow with the solution," Loh said.
Building for sellers of all sizes
Loh, who first joined Square when it acquired Weebly in 2018, works to make sure that online sellers — no matter the size of their business — have all the tools they need to succeed on Square. Before Weebly, Loh spent more than 10 years in e-commerce at Walmart.
"Walmart has the luxury of having huge teams to build systems," Loh said. That's far from true for the smaller sellers she works with at Square. "Smaller businesses cannot hire their own marketing, cannot hire their own logistics, their own supply chain, all of that. It's really interesting to take a lot of that complexity and to make sure that it is accessible for a seller of smaller size," she added.
Still, Square's largest customers could benefit from a more streamlined e-commerce system, Loh said.
"Really they should be focusing on their core business growth versus trying to figure out how to do a bunch of integration and get the system integration together," she said. "It's a very rewarding experience to think about how to simplify that for our sellers."
Analysts say that supporting large businesses could offer good value at a time when many are tightening their belts. Like Square, Shopify has been making that move, and in January, it announced the launch of Commerce Components to appeal to large enterprises.
"Most startups go out of business, and if you're only serving startups and small businesses, then your business model could suffer in some ways," Rick Watson, the CEO and founder of RMW Commerce Consulting, told Insider at the time of the launch.
