Ask a Payments Product Manager Anything

[Tom]

Hello Sellers! On July 8th at 11am PT / 2pm ET, we hosted a virtual office hours opportunity where sellers posted questions to this thread and heard back from our Payments team!

@Sean is a product manager on the Payment Products team at Square, and he took the lead in this session. Having worked on the Seller Community team as a community manager previously and with more than 7 years of experience at Square, he's always excited to hear from sellers and ensure that their experiences are taken into account with product decisions.

Click here to learn more about Square Payments.

A few example questions:

• How can I offer a seamless payment experience to my customers?
• How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact Square payment products and services?
• How does Square's referral program work and how do I track my free processing balance?

Note on account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific payments, deposits, or account status details in our public forums. If you need assistance on one of those related topics, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive into your account.

[Portland1to1]

Is there a way to share individual staff members availability with a link to book just with them? 

also I’ve seen I can pay a lower rate/ fees if I have a business that does more than $250,000 annually or if each transaction is over 15$ 

my average transaction is over 60$ is there a way to lower my rates/ fees on each transaction? 

[Sean]

Hi @Portland1to1. To tackle your first question, while I’m not a Square Appointments expert, it sounds like you could create a widget to link directly to a staff member/service.

As for your second question, there are a number of factors that go into whether or not we can extend a custom rate to a seller. It’s normally best to reach out directly so we can connect you with our Sales/Account Management Team. Generally you’ve got the right idea, to quality, you need to be processing at least $250K per year. Hope this helps!

[Portland1to1]

Thanks so much! Widgets are freaking the way!!! 

Looking into lowering rates 😇

[MJD]

Are there any plans to allow customers to purchase multiple products on online checkout links?

[Sean]

Hey @MJD! Just had to test this out myself, but if you added multiple items to a sale in the Point of Sale app, when you use the “Send Payment Link” option during check out, the seller will be able to pay for any items added. Let me know if I misunderstood the question - happy to follow up!

[MJD]

Wow I hadn’t noticed this, that’s really useful!

[SammyGrace2414]

I hadn't noticed this either, very useful!! Thank you! 

[allwhowander]

Thanks for bringing this session to us 🙏 One of the largest pain points in our business is the inability to swipe a card and pre-auth an open ticket at our craft beer bar. It is a *huge* productivity and security issue for us and our customers. I’ve been watching community threads / feature requests for this for 5+ years now. Any hope seeing this happen this year? 🍻

[CrowbarCindy]

YES!!!  We must have pre-authorization and soon for our bar.  

[Sean]

Hey @allwhowander and @CrowbarCindy! While I can't commit to a particular timeframe for this feature, as much as I would like to, this is definitely a feature that is top of mind for us. I know it’s super common for many POS providers, so I hear you! Oftentimes a feature seems simple at face value, but the implications of how to productize it within the constraints of our technical stack/infrastructure are often multi year projects. You can subscribe to this thread for future updates!

[Adamscottsmith]

 

 

Can we have an the ability to create custom payment options? Either have custom option appear under the cash option, or under other payment types, have it be a drop down of the custom payment types. This would be set up in the back end like discounts, and would show on sales reporting that x dollars was x payment type like it shows cash and credit on the daily sales print out. 

the picture are from my app on my iPhone however we use the square register in store. 

[Sean]

Thanks again for the question, @Adamscottsmith! Would you mind explaining the use case here a little bit more? We don’t currently let a discount amount exceed what is added to the cart. You could always add an Gift/eGift Card for the extra amount so the buyer could still receive any additional discount amount.

[Adamscottsmith]

@Sean well it may not matter much longer as we may do away with the lottery. But we have customers that will bring in winning lottery tickets to redeem and we have no way have giving them the winnings out of the register via cash only if course, unless we do a payout. and tracking and reconciling the reports at the end of month is difficult when the payouts don’t really have a standard payout option like a drop down list or report that groups them together. Hope this helps. 

[Adamscottsmith]

I know that Venmo is the name we shall not speak, but, we offer our customers as many options as possible to pay, including cashapp, which we would love to come to square register, the linq app through stripe, and Venmo. 

it would be amazing if we could select either cash app or venmo and our QR code for payment could pop up on the customer display, then once the customer pays, the register gets the update that the payment was successful and completes the transaction. But at minimum, have the QR code pop up and then we could manually confirm the payment and complete the transaction. 

[Sean]

Hi again @Adamscottsmith. Totally understand the request to accept all the forms of payments your customers want to use, I’ll definitely pass along the feedback for acceptance of Paypal. Were there any other peer to peer or digital wallets you’d like to see supported? Do you see a lot of requests for paying this way and do you accept payment outside the Square POS app now? Would love to understand the key benefit to you in bringing support for new methods into the app.

[Adamscottsmith]

@Sean yes we do accept payment outside of square. We currently accept Venmo, Cashapp (which isn’t connected to the square register even though I’m in the beta tests), LinqApp (processed through Stripe), zelle, and of course cash. 

there are many benefits for us to use all of these methods, for example, our processing fee is less than 60% of our rate with square. But the most important thing is giving our customers as many different ways to pay as possible. We want them to have the option to pay how they want. I have had people ask about affirm or QuadPay type things, but we are a liquor store so I wouldn’t use that but others might. 

[Adamscottsmith]

@Sean @But honestly the most important thing is tracking them on the reports. So if there was a way for me to create an option that says “Venmo” “CashApp” “Zelle” etc and then it would show on the daily report and the sales reports in the back office that X amount of dollars was paid by “Venmo” etc just like it shows how much cash was paid, and how much in credit cards. 

[Adamscottsmith]

We need a way to provide a negative price item or discount that allows us to give the customer a cash back payment. Is this something that could be a possibility? 

[Sean]

Hey @Adamscottsmith. Love the suggestion, while you can definitely configure the preset check out options in Settings > Checkout in the Point of Sale app, we don’t let you create new ones. As a follow up, what type of other tender options do you use? Would love to understand the underlying use case!

[barbergrl]

Will the option to require deposits for services be available or will it be considered in the near future? I really need this option for no show clients that have appointments (square appointments) . I really love using square and this is the ONLY thing that square does not do that the other appointment apps can. Right now I can only put a card on file to bill them later or have them prepay for the services which most clients don't want to do. 

Thank you in advance