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.

[LocalFoodFarms]

That's still two charges?  Isn't there a functionality within square that lets you hold the card until the weight could be entered by the seller and the ticket updated and then the Seller Presses process (think something like how hotels/motels work). You have to enter the card to hold the order, but until the weight for the meat is entered, the order cannot be processed.

[Sean]

Awe - I understand your scenario now! We actually had a few other comments about a pre-authorization feature. This is definitely a feature that is top of mind for us, but isn't a functionality we currently have. You can subscribe to this thread for future updates!

[beverlyd]

I own a small local food specialty store.  I am currently entering inventory to go online with Square.  I'm unsure how to enter chicken, beef, pork etc.--items that are variable pricing because they are sold by the pound.  How do I list, for instance, whole chickens that vary in weight (pounds and ounces)  and final cost?

[Sean]

Hi @beverlyd! I think that we should be able to help with this using our decimal quantities feature. You get to choose a unit when you create an item, so different items can have different units of measurement. This article goes into detail. There’s a fun video that goes along with it too. 🙂

[gtownbutcher]

Hey Sean - Is there a way to sell fractional units on the online store? E.g. Can we use pounds as the unit and allow the web users to input 1.5 as the quantity?

[Sean]

Hi @gtownbutcher! Thanks for the question! Right now, while you can list an item online that is configured with decimal quantities, we only support selling them as whole numbers online. You could create modifiers for an item in the most popular configurations. Hope this helps a bit! I'll be sure to share your feature request, and feel free to reply with more details about your use case! 

[RockPaperSciss]

Hello – Q about Vendor Sales Reports. We output a report to pay our vendors – there are various areas of concern on the report. 1. Many "Item Names" do not reflect current input but older naming conventions. 2. Many items don't have correct information e.g. vendor, item name... 3. All our items have individual SKU but the report groups multiple quantities of similar items under the same SKU. These deficiencies lead me to wonder about the overall integrity of the Vendor Reports and what can we do to fix this issues?

[Sean]

Hi @RockPaperSciss! Thanks so much for the question. Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with Square Retail and this particular report. Let me see if I can get someone from the Retail Team to reply here with more detail, otherwise we can always connect you directly with the Customer Success Team. 🙏

[Sean]

@RockPaperSciss I wanted to circle back again here before the weekend, since I was able to quickly touch base with the Retail Team. They shared that they plan on investing resources in improving their reports in the next year. Also a few follow on's they shared: 

- The report will reflect the item name at the time of sale.

- It sounds like your issue may be due to the fact that sales reports are under item name, and the Team would like to invest in supporting reporting on the variation token for higher accuracy.

Hope this helps a bit! If you're ever willing to chat with the Retail Team, I'm sure they'd be interested in interviewing you for more feedback. It sounds like you've got a strong understanding! Thanks for the questions again! 

[Donnie-M]

@Sean Welcome back to the community and thank you for taking time and risk to answer anything we can come up with.  With order tickets and taking customer names, it is very cool to be able to "scrape" the name for a ticket off the card to speed up the checkout process, but with the push for contactless nfc payments, sometimes the name doesn't come through.  Is there anything in the works to maybe delay the nfc capture until after the name is put in through a setting maybe?  Sometimes when the customer goes to tap, if you don't enter the name fast enough the capture will fail.  Usually for me this is when I turn to grab their cup and I don't notice they are going to tap.

[Sean]

Hi @Donnie-M and thanks for the welcome! 🙂 This is an excellent question, and I had to do some digging to get a good response for you. Unlike swiped or dipped transactions, contactless transactions create a one-time code for each individual transaction to accompany payment information. This code is transmitted with an account number when someone “taps” to pay. A customer name, billing address and card verification code aren’t transmitted to Square, so we don't actually have this information on file. Since there was a belief that someone could possibly read your card when it is in your pocket, card issuers decided not to populate theses extra details to protect customer privacy. While not as effortless, you can always quickly "Add a customer" to the sale before check or after they check out on the receipt screen.  

[Tom]

Thank you to everyone who contributed questions and to @Sean for your time today! I'm checking in with a quick note to let folks know that this session has now closed, though we will address followup questions and reply with a summary post by the end of the week. Appreciate your patience, and thanks again for sharing your questions and experiences. 🙏🏻💯

[Tom · Accepted solution]

Thanks again everyone and @Sean for taking the time to share yesterday!

We heard from a wide variety of sellers who surfaced with a lot of great questions and feedback.

I hope your questions were answered—you've given a ton of great suggestions about how we can improve the payment experience for both buyers and sellers.

To wrap up, the themes we saw focused on more flexibility with Square Online payment acceptance, additional improvements related to inventory & reporting, further control settings within Square Appointments, and acceptance of new types of payments. We will continue to iterate based on the insights you shared as we work through our roadmap.

For the latest updates on payment products, keep an eye on this page: squareup.com/us/en/payments.

Finally, for a look ahead on upcoming events focused on more products within Square's ecosystem, take a look at this post: Upcoming Events in Seller Community, July Edition.

[Sean]

Thanks for having me, @Tom, and a big thanks to all the folks that asked questions. I always love chatting about how our tools might serve ya’ll better. Feel free to post any follow up comments on any of the outstanding questions, otherwise, I’ll see y’all in the community! 

[SammyGrace2414]

Hi @Sean. I have seen many requests about being able to backdate a transaction. Square's response is that there is no plans to implement this feature due to scam concerns. While I don't agree with there being a scam issue, especially while other payment processing companies allow it, might I suggest the ability to back date a transaction that is for record purposes only? If there is no charging of a card, there would be no risk of scam on square's end. It would be better than nothing and help with my business reporting.

[beverlyd1]

Has anyone combined QuickBooks and Square Retail with POS?  I have just completed inventory on Square (preparing for an online store) and purchase orders @ QuickBooks because the ease of Square far outweighs QB.  Is there a more compatible bookkeeping system (to Square) than QB? 

As I see now, I will be hand-entering inventory from QB to Square.  This is such a mess--help needed.  I have used QB desktop for 30 years, trying to convert to QB Online (since 1-1-21). 

Beverlyd 

[homeprogreen]

If you’re trying to export your inventory from QB to Square then you can open the inventory in QB, select export to csv file then open square dashboard in Retail and import from csv file. Square had a template available so it’s in the proper format. I believe it’s going to overwrite your existing square inventory list though when you do it. QB is the best accounting software for square that I have been able to find. I don’t like the QB/Square sync though. I use Commerce Sync from the Square App Store to input the sales data information from each days sales into QB automatically 

[Qualitylighting]

How can I charge a refundable deposit without paying the fee for an amount that will be refunded at the end?

[homeprogreen]

Only possible way to avoid paying the fee in this situation would be to take a check or cash for the deposit. Check would be easiest since you could just staple the check to the invoice then hand them the check back