Square Announces a Beta Version of Tagging Locations With Custom Attributes

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 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.

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.