Square Canada Launches Two New Canadian Products, Opens Toronto Office

Square Canada announced the launch of two new products for Canadian sellers yesterday: Online Store, which allows sellers to create a free customizable e-commerce site, and Build with Square, a collection of APIs available to sellers.

“Square is very, very committed to Canada,” said Cathy Vigrass, Head of Canada at Square, “Our business is growing really rapidly here.”

Online Store provides sellers with a drag-and-drop visual editor through which they can build their e-commerce site. It does not have associated hosting fees or domain purchase fees, but like other Square solutions takes a percentage of each transaction.

Build with Square’s featured APIs are Register and eCommerce. Register gives sellers with a third-party iOS point of sale system the ability to process payments with Square hardware. eCommerce allows sellers with their own e-commerce site to integrate Square for processing online payments and tracking sales in a Square dashboard.

On the same day, Square Canada celebrated the opening of their new office space at 5000 Yonge Street. Its occupants are mainly hardware engineers from Kili Technology, a Toronto startup acquired by Square a little over a year ago. Kili was founded in 2013 by Afshin Rezayee and Greg Wolfond as a low-cost mobile system-on-chip (SoC) solution for retail. The team moved from an office at York Mills Centre to the new office, which currently accommodates 40 employees and can house up to 60.

Chris Gorman, Head of Office Experience at Square says the office, in keeping with Square’s other locations, is built on the ideal of “excessive levels of transparency.”

Within the office there are large screens that live stream views of the San Francisco office straight to Toronto, and there is a Beam telepresence robot that can be used remotely to wheel up to someone and say hello via video chat. The office is all open concept.

“Globally we don’t have one single enclosed office,” said Gorman, adding, “We want to democratize the space, so that you’ll naturally stumble upon people and have conversations that wouldn’t otherwise occur.”