Square Jumps into Automation, Adds IFTTT Integration

Payments company Square is entering the world of Internet automation, adding support for popular service IFTTT this week.

The integration, announced on Thursday via the IFTTT blog, enables Square users to create recipes based on Square triggers. For instance, receiving a payment through Square can activate your recipe, as can issuing a refund to a customer.

Some neat sample recipes include adding a new row to a Google Sheets document for a transaction, or creating a celebratory GroupMe message when a payment is received.

At this point in time, it doesn’t seem like business owners would get a lot out of tying Square to IFTTT. The above recipes are cool tricks, but aren’t necessary. Square does a nice job keeping track of all transactions, and emails are sent when payments are swiped or received through the Web. As Square continues to mature as a Web payments processor (as opposed to a mobile payments processor that does some stuff online), we could find see this integration becoming more and more useful — for example, we could see push notifications when items are out of stock, or emails when customers don’t make it all the way through the checkout process and require some assistance.

For now, Square’s integration with IFTTT will likely please those with some time to kill, but won’t really do much to automate tasks for already-busy entrepreneurs. You can turn a light on when you get paid, but this silly act won’t trim any of the work from your day. And, really, isn’t that what all of this automation stuff is supposed to do?

You can check out the Square IFTTT channel here.