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Advice: Order Management for T-Shirt Printing Orders

Hello Square Artists and Makers Community!

We are a Retail Clothing Store that offers custom prints on select garments.
We primarily focus on Heat-Transfer printing (Direct to Garment, Direct to Film, Vinyl, etc.)

We were looking to get some advice from anyone in a similar field (silkscreen printers, embroiders, etc.) or anyone who manages custom orders.

What system (or integrations) works best for your business when it comes to managing incoming orders, and using Square for payments and inventory?


We currently handle orders in person, and mostly write details down by hand.
We typically ask for a certain amount of days to complete an order (example= 2 days to finish an order of 1-4 garments)

We work fast, but we ask for the added time since we have to work on pending orders, and take in new orders.
It also gives us a chance to combine orders with similar printing methods so we can prep garments and materials in bigger batches rather than for each individual order.

Our current bottleneck is the order management.
It is very time consuming getting all the details down for an order, to the point where production needs to stop in order to finalize a new order.
The graphic design aspect is also a hurdle since most customers don't have designs ready. We would love to somehow integrate an effective way for customers to create designs on their own, and have them sent over to us ready for printing.

We're looking into using Form Builders (like Google Forms, Jot Form, etc) to take orders online, as well as looking at Print Order Software (like Inksoft, Ordant, Printavo, etc.) to help organize the orders and designs we receive.
The goal would be for the new potential system to use our existing Square inventory and pricing for placing orders. It would also be great if this could be embedded to a future Square website.

If anyone has a system they would like to share, any experience with some of things mentioned, or any suggestions, feel free to reply!
Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time!

Family operated retail clothing store.
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Admin

@cscstore thank you for your question! Tagging a few members here to weigh in if they have insights! @rtfulk@CROOKADILEUS, and @Skeestees 

Max Pete
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
Square Community
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@RobertAinsworth@jgrgetich, and @JK_Fiber_Art might have some ideas too!

Max Pete
Community Engagement Program Manager, Square
Square Community
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Appreciate the reply @maxpete !
Hoping for any feedback or input 🤞

Family operated retail clothing store.
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We are a bit different, but, we print on demand.  We also do custom work utilizing a GTX Pro DTG machine.  I havent a good answer for you honestly. Square is a terrible platform for businesses like us.  Printavo integrates but the cost of square and printavo is ridiculous.  Most other 3rd part design tools want your customer to pay through them.

From my investigations, you'll have to shopify and third party it. Or fulfillment like t-springs.  I think they use INKSOFT.
However, we own two brick and mortar stores, and we utilize square for mainly inventory and walk in sales.  I do have a category and named it custom prints since we have three methods of fulfilling orders.  We DTG, DTF, and Heat Transfer. We don't have the facilities to screen print or I would.

Invoices are the worst thing about square.  Takes two hours to get a 500 item invoice or estimate together.  Would be better if they had an import from excel like they do purchase orders.  If I had 500 line items in an invoice, Say 10 different colors of a hoodie, and all those colors had 7 variations (Sizes) thats 70 line items.  Lets add tshirts and long sleeves and maybe a few crew necks.  Crew necks get discounts and hoodies get a different discount, I have to manually into each line item and select the correct discount.  So time consuming. Anyways, I got off the topic and started to vent.

There are great third party integrations out there like printavo, but if I am using sqaure as an base for inventory control and they are accepting the payment, there is no way to deplete.
Also, lets say I want to fulfil an artist or designers art on a shirt. He comes to us and asks if we can print and fulfil.  We can, here is what we do. I overlay the art on a png (Say Crew neck) like a mock up.  Customer gives me t shirts hoodies and crew necks to place his art on.  I make a separate item and use options. Colors, style, size. and then create the item.  Problem is that's about 150 variations.  I give him the link, he shares it, his customers click it which re directs to our online squares store, they pay, and then we deliver.

Would be nice for square to give us an option to for a customer to choose a design and drag it over another picture(Design on a crewneck) and /or give us a design tool for customers to use. That would make life so much easier.

 

The way it is now, it is too time consuming.  300 a month for Printavo, but then you have to manually keep track of your inventory. Or use sanmar's integration and just give a 7-10 day lead time.

If you come up with a solution, I would lave to hear it as well.

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Appreciate the info!
We have the same DTG machine you have haha.

We are also a Brick & Mortar, and we initially started out only as a retail location using Square to process payments and inventory. Overtime we ventured into the custom printing side of our business, so we've done our best to integrate Square into our workflow to help manage our inventory.
Our retail inventory is shared with our printing business, so it's very important for us to have something that works with Square.
It's unfortunate to learn that there aren't many solutions for businesses like us.

Our workflow is mostly in person, so customers talk to us directly about what they would want to print. It just takes too long to finalize details.
We're currently planning on diving into the online space, and we would like for the solution to be able to streamline both in-person and online orders.

We previously posted about having Customer Generated Invoices in Square. It's currently not a feature, but other users showed interest.

Original Post:
https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-for-Retail/Customer-Calculated-Estimates-Quotes/m-p/718325...
Ideate Board Post to support if interested:
https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Square-Invoices/Customer-Generated-Estimate-Quote-in-Real-time/id...
We agree that generating invoices through Square takes too long, and it was the main reason we made these posts.

As far as other solutions, Online Forms are kind of a solution since some integrate with Square Inventory (like Jot Form). Issue with that there is a limit to how many form submissions we can receive before paying a premium.
We're jokingly thinking of using the Square Developer Platform to create a custom solution. Just need to set time aside to learn how to code, on top of running a business haha

We'll keep in touch with any updates.
Thank you for your time!

Family operated retail clothing store.
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Your web site is broken by the way...

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Appreciate the heads up!
Our site is still under construction. It's been a pain getting all the technical details figured out.
Still a long road ahead of us in regards to our site.

Family operated retail clothing store.
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Square Champion

Idunno if this is on the right track or an answer but everything we make is bespoke and we use square. I agree with the people below about bespoke and inventory. When someone requests a what you see is what you get we have a lead time of 2 working days, we need to import the flowers to the UK For more in depth orders it has to be done by phone or in person so we use Invoices in the BROWSER not the app. There is 10x more functionality when you use invoices in the browser - you can create one off items - and add one off items that won’t be listed on your site etc. see image. WE use invoices for weddings mainly as we can add up to 10 attachments and a contract so the client can see a drawing or a proof or an AI image of how the room set up will look or a drawing of the design. You can also give estimates or options as you can duplicate the invoice and amend or add things so they clcik on th estimate that makes them sign a contract and then takes hem straight to the payment page - it then adds the invoice once paid to the order manager. I hope this might help you and sorry I am a little bit late to the party. We have invoices +

IMG_1020.jpeg

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Appreciate the info!
We have yet to use invoices as in-depth as your example, but it would be convenient to use for mockups and for contracts about confirming details and timelines for orders.

Any suggestions are appreciated, so we appreciate you taking the time to provide your experiences! 🙂

Family operated retail clothing store.
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