Live Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Appointments

[katieand]

On April 11th, we hosted a Live Q&A about Square Appointments. We recently announced we changed our pricing for the product, and made it free for Individuals. We had the Square Appointments Product Manager, Devon Meyer, here to answer any of your questions about the new price change or getting the most out of Square Appointments for your business!

@Devon has been part of the Square Appointments team for almost four years. He started as an engineer, and is now the Product lead. In that time, he’s interviewed more than 100 Appointments sellers, and knows how important it is to give service providers their time back so they can focus on providing a great client experience.

A couple example questions:

• What does the pricing change mean for individuals?
• How can I use Appointments to check out my customers when their service ends?
• How can I protect myself from no-shows?

Thanks in advance! Cheers!

[PureMassaga]

I second this. Making the booking site more configurable would be great! The embeding needs to be able to resize its height to be "full height" so no scroll bars appear. 

Also, couldnt find a way to hide the business hours. Business hours are based on the calendar... so, in my instance, I dont need or even want to show business hours.... because they all show closed.

[dthebarber]

Will the plug ins for SquareSpace actually work or is Acuity the preferred booking vendor for Squarespace?

Will you be able to set a widget to create a menu of services available at the customer's location?

[Devon]

Thanks for this @dthebarber! Square Appointments is easy to embed into SquareSpace! You can see specific instructions on how to embed the Appointments Booking flow in your SquareSpace website in this thread.

You can definitely offer services to be performed at the customer’s location-- just go ahead and set that in your Appointments Business Settings page. Then, set up your services, your staff, your hours, and embed your booking flow on your website. The buyer will be required to enter their location when booking an appointment, and this location will be noted on your calendar.

[geriak]

Can I add a discount to the payment the client is about to make (I have them prepay) when I accept a client booking?

[Devon]

Hey @geriak! This is not possible today, but it’s a really good suggestion. We took the approach of saying “the price your buyer sees when they booked the appointment is the price that they are charged”. Charging them less than what they see seems like a reasonable thing to allow, especially since you need to confirm the appointment to charge it in this case anyways! We’ll take a look at this request and put it in our backlog.

To help me better understand this request, could you let me know when you would see yourself applying a discount for clients? Is it for first-time clients? If the client has a promo code? Or something else entirely?

[geriak]

Hi Devon,

Thanks for responding to my question. So I occasionally give presentations on my services. When I do, I sometimes like to offer a discount to people who book a session within a week or whatever and mention they were at my event. I did this this week. Unfortunately, because I can’t give the discount when they book on my site, I have to deal with a ton of back and forth emails and/or calls trying to set up appointments. (Which is why I use Square appointments, to avoid that! Lol.) And then I have to manually invoice them with the discount. 

I also often give close friends a discount on my services. Same thing there, if a friend wants to book, they have to call or email me to set it up and I have to invoice them. Would just be awesome for them to be able to book and allow me to put the discount in when I ‘accept’ the appointment.

Thanks so much for putting this out there as a feature I’d love!

[geriak]

Hi Devon,
Thanks for responding to my question. So I occasionally give presentations on my services. When I do, I sometimes like to offer a discount to people who book a session within a week or whatever and mention they were at my event. I did this this week. Unfortunately, because I can’t give the discount when they book on my site, I have to deal with a ton of back and forth emails and/or calls trying to set up appointments. (Which is why I use Square appointments, to avoid that! Lol.) And then I have to manually invoice them with the discount.

I also often give close friends a discount on my services. Same thing there, if a friend wants to book, they have to call or email me to set it up and I have to invoice them. Would just be awesome for them to be able to book and allow me to put the discount in when I ‘accept’ the appointment.

Thanks so much for putting this out there as a feature I’d love!

[Kellyf99]

I have two staff members in a salon setting. Will we be able to check out a client with each staff member on the same ticket?

[Devon]

Today, this is not possible @Kellyf99. Assuming this is two different services (e.g. Joe is performing a haircut and Jane is performing a color treatment), then you’d have to book two different appointments and check them out separately, in order to make sure that each staff gets ‘credit’ for the appropriate services. This is an issue we’re very aware of, and definitely plan to support, but I don’t foresee us supporting it in the next few months.

[danceprometheus]

When can we accept Bitcoin as payment? Also can you make it so booking for certain providers can be deliniated to specific areas?

[Devon]

Accepting Bitcoin payments across Square products for all sorts of Square sellers is something that has been asked in the past. You can see a thread here about the topic, @danceprometheus. If and when Bitcoin is accepted as a form of payment at Square, that will also be true for Square Appointments, so to keep track of updates, I’d suggest subscribing to that thread.

As for providers being assigned to certain areas-- this is already possible! To repeat an answer I provided to a similar question above…

If you set up multiple locations in the Locations Settings page on Square Dashboard, you can then set specific service providers to be available at these locations. So if Erin works around the East Side of the city and Wesley works around the West Side of the city, you can have them show up as available at these different locations.

Set it up so that you offer services to be performed at the customer’s location-- this is done in your Appointments Business Settings page. Then, set up your services, your staff, your hours, and embed your booking flow on your website. You’d have to create one booking button for “Appointments in the East Side of the city” and another for “Appointments in the West Side of the city”. The buyer, upon selecting one or the other area, will be required to enter their location when booking an appointment, and this location will be noted on your calendar.

[Devon · Accepted solution]

Hey everyone! Thank you for all of your incredible questions, I’ve really enjoyed hearing from all of you. What I love most about your questions is that you’re excited to use Square Appointments, but many of you just wish it could do more. This shows just how much we can help sellers like all of you by continuing to invest in improving the Appointments product. We plan to do just that.

If you’re just getting started with Square Appointments, and are having trouble getting started with the product, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with our Support team. We have a dedicated group of Appointments specialists waiting to help you out. I work closely with these folks-- they’re fantastic, and will get you the answers you need.

Second, if you’ve got requests or feedback about Square Appointments, please feel free to share it here in the Community! Posts about Appointments routinely get sent to me and my team. The more you can tell me about why you need this feature or that, or why you found a certain part of the product confusing or difficult to use, the easier it’ll be for us to use that feedback in developing the product.

If you’re on the lookout for what’s next for Square Appointments-- right now we’re hard at work on a lot of things. One of those things we’ve recently announced is the Appointments Android App. We’re starting an Early Access Program for this very soon, and are asking for folks to raise their hand to participate.

As for what else is next-- this will be a big year for Square Appointments, and I think you’ll all be very happy with what we’ve got on the roadmap. I can’t publicly share projects or dates, because things often change, move around, and get delayed-- I don’t want to promise something that I don’t feel confident I can keep. But rest assured that there is a team of about a dozen engineers and designers here at Square working hard to keep making this product better and better.

Thank you again for your questions, and thank you for using Square and Square Appointments. Signing off now-- cheers!

[toniescut]

Is there a way in appointments to create booking links for individual staff members for clients to go directly to their schedule? Just like a booking link for multiple staff but then add individual links to each individual person?