Does this sound familiar? You run a distillery, and your best customers are the ones standing in front of you. They take the tour, taste four expressions, buy two glasses and a bottle, and walk out the door. Then nothing. You don't follow up, don't send them an invite to the next barrel pick, and there's not a heads up when the cask-strength release drops.
Meanwhile your Klaviyo account is humming along on your webstore data, and it has no idea any of those people exist.
The good news: Square and Klaviyo have a native integration, and it pulls in Square Point of Sale orders, not just online ones. No middleware, no developer, no third-party integrations. It's about a ten-minute setup.
The catch is that it only works as well as your email capture at the register.
What This Integration Actually Does
Klaviyo's Square integration syncs customer profiles, order data, and your product catalog from Square into Klaviyo. If you use Square POS, it brings in those in-person purchases too.
Once it's connected, you get:
- Customer profiles created from tasting room transactions
- Order events, like Placed Order, Ordered Product, Refunded Order, Cancelled Order, Fulfilled Order
- Your Square catalog, including items you only sell at the POS
- A source tag on every event so you can tell tasting room purchases apart from web orders
Step 1: Fix Your Email Capture First
Here's the rule that governs everything else: a POS order only syncs to Klaviyo if there's an email address or phone number attached to it that the customer gave you directly.
Cash sale, no email, no receipt prompt? That transaction is invisible to Klaviyo forever. The integration can't conjure contact info that Square never collected.
So before you touch Klaviyo, make sure every sale is capturing an email address. Square gives you a few ways to do that, and which one you use depends on your hardware.
Square POS app (iPad, Stand): Tap More → Add-ons, open Email Marketing, and toggle on the sign-up screen during checkout. This adds a prompt after the receipt screen inviting the customer onto your list.
Square Register: Square updated this recently. You can now collect emails and phone numbers directly on the buyer-facing screen, and if the customer already exists in your directory it pre-fills the information. Worth noting for consent purposes: when a customer enters their email on the buyer-facing Register screen, they're automatically opted into email marketing. For alcohol that's riskier from a compliance standpoint, even though it's technically allowed.
Manual add during checkout: In the Square app, tap More → Settings → Checkout → Customer management to enable adding customers during or after a sale. Slower, but it works on any hardware and it's the fallback when the add-on screen isn't available on your device.
Hosted sign-up page: In Square Dashboard, go to Customers → Customer directory → Settings → Email Collection, and under Hosted Sign-up Page click Customize Page. You get a URL you can turn into a QR code. Print it, put it in an acrylic stand next to the register or on the tasting bar. This is a great fallback option, and it works better when you pair it with a real reason to sign up.
One honest note: email collection tooling is not identical across every Square product. Square POS and Square for Retail POS support the email marketing add-on; Square Register handles it through the buyer-facing screen instead. If a menu path doesn't exist on your device, the hosted sign-up page and manual customer add are your universal options.
Train your staff on the ask. "Want me to email your receipt?" gets you an address. "Want to hear about barrel picks and release days before they sell out?" gets you a subscriber. Different question, very different downstream value.
Step 2: Connect Square to Klaviyo
Once collection is on, the connection itself is easy.
- In Klaviyo, click Integrations in the left-hand navigation.
- Click Explore apps, search for Square, and click the card. Then click Install.
- Enter your store URL in the box and click Connect to Square.
- You'll be sent to Square to log in, if you aren't already.
- Review the permissions and click Allow. That sends you back to Klaviyo.
- Double-check the store URL setting to confirm you picked the right Square account.
- Leave Automatically add Klaviyo onsite JavaScript checked if you want Klaviyo's on-site tracking and sign-up forms. It's checked by default.
- Click Complete setup.
You should land on a confirmation that your Square account is now connected. Your historical Square data starts syncing immediately.
To change anything later: Integrations → Square → make your edits → Save.
Step 3: Verify the Data Is Flowing
Don't assume. Go look and test it out.
Head to Integrations → Square → Data. You'll see recently synced data plus a progress bar for the historical import. If the sync is stalling mid-import, there's a button on that page to restart it — labeled Re-import or Restart Import depending on your account.
Two timing details to set your expectations:
- Square Online events sync in real time.
- Square POS events sync every 30 minutes.
That half-hour lag is fine for almost everything a distillery does. It's only a problem if you were dreaming of a "thanks for visiting" email hitting someone's phone before they get to the parking lot. Plan around that timing.
Step 4: Separate Tasting Room From Web
Every event Klaviyo receives from Square carries a property called source name that tells you whether it came from the POS or from online. Use it to start your segmentations.
Tasting room buyers and web buyers are different types of customers. Someone who drove out, took the tour, and bought a bottle at the bar has different intent than someone who clicked an ad and shipped a bottle to themselves. If you dump them into the same flows and campaigns, your messaging gets mushy and your unsubscribe rate tells you about it.
Build segments on source name so you can do things like:
- Invite tasting room visitors to events, cocktail classes, and barrel picks.
- Push shipping-eligible releases and bundles to web buyers in states you can actually ship to.
- Spot the crossover crowd (visited and ordered online) and treat them like the VIPs they are.
- Win back the people who came in once eight months ago and never returned.
Klaviyo provides pre-built Square flow templates — go to Flows → Browse Ideas (or Create, if you already have flows) and filter by Square in the dropdown next to the search bar. You'll find Customer Thank You, Customer Winback, Repeat Purchase Nurture, Post-Purchase Bounce Back, and others. They're a fine starting point, but a template out of the box reads like a generic ecommerce store, not a distillery. This is the piece we handle for clients: BFX Commerce designs and deploys the flow templates for you. These are branded to your distillery, with copy written for tasting room visitors and release-day buyers rather than generic shoppers.
A Few Things That Might Trip You Up
One Square account per Klaviyo account. If you're running separate Square accounts (e.g. a distillery and a separate bar or a second location on its own account) you can only connect one to a given Klaviyo account. Multiple Square accounts means multiple Klaviyo accounts.
Your existing flows will start firing on POS customers. This is the mistake I see most. If you already have a welcome series or a first-purchase flow built for your webstore, connecting Square means tasting room customers start dropping into those flows. Audit your existing flow triggers before you connect, not after someone gets an "abandoned cart" email about a bottle they physically carried out of your building.
Historical import can surface some old ghosts. The integration pulls historical data, which means profiles for people who bought from you two years ago and haven't thought about you since. Great for a winback campaign, rough for your deliverability if you blast the whole file on day one. Warm up gradually, lean on engaged segments first, and know when to purge the cold ones.
Email receipts are not marketing consent. More on this next.
⚠️ Compliance Callout for Beverage Alcohol
Two things distilleries in particular need to keep straight.
A receipt email is not a marketing opt-in. Someone who agreed to get their receipt by email did not thereby agree to your newsletter. Square's own data handling distinguishes between contact info a customer shared directly with you and info they shared with another Square seller, and different rules apply. Keep your explicit marketing opt-ins separate from your receipt-only contacts and only market to people who actually said yes.
Age gating and state rules still apply. Your Klaviyo list is a list of people you're sending alcohol marketing to. That means age affirmation at sign-up, and it means your shippable-product campaigns need to respect the states you're licensed to ship into. The Square-to-Klaviyo pipe doesn't know or care about any of that — it's your job to segment for it, inside the same advertising and marketing rules that govern the rest of your channels. If you're not sure where you stand, get your compliance counsel involved before your first send, not after.
After 90 Days, This Is What You Should Have Done
If this is set up properly, here's what you should have:
- Email capture running at the register with staff who actually ask
- Square POS orders creating Klaviyo profiles automatically
- Segments that distinguish tasting room visitors from web buyers
- A thank-you flow for first-time visitors that invites them to your next event
- A winback flow for visitors who haven't returned
- Age-gated sign-up and state-aware sending on anything shippable
None of that requires custom development. It requires about an hour of setup and the discipline to ask for an email address at the register.
Need Help Wiring This Up?
Most of the value here isn't in the connection — it's in the segmentation and flow strategy that comes after. That's where distilleries either build a real repeat-purchase engine or end up with a bigger list and the same revenue.
If you want a second set of eyes on your Square and Klaviyo setup, or you'd rather hand the whole build to someone who does this in the beverage alcohol space every day, let's talk. We'll look at what you've got and tell you straight whether it needs work.
