Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

[Tom]

On August 19th at 11am PT / 2pm ET, our Square Hardware team hosted a virtual office hours session on this thread!

This time around, we asked you to dream big — if you could design any piece of hardware for accepting payments:

• What features would your ideal point of sale include?
• What would your ideal point of sale look like?
• What products do you wish Square made?
• Thinking about existing Square hardware, what would the most important enhancements be?
  

Our hosts were @ChristinainHW, @nika_sq, @Rowan, @hanswang, @GetGreg, and @nsnow. Altogether, they have ten years of experience working on Square products and they're excited to answer questions, learn about your business needs, and make sure your insights are included with the development process.

We responded to as many replies as we could on Thursday, August 19th. Looking ahead, we will summarize your questions and responses about your ideal hardware experience in a follow-up post. And, of course, we will incorporate all of your feedback as we continue to improve the payment experience!

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

[#2]

Update:

Thank you to everyone who asked questions! We're grateful for the wide variety of real world insights and feedback.

I'm checking in at the end of the hour to let you know that the time to post new questions has closed, and our Hardware team members will continue to follow up on as many questions as they can over the next few days.

We also noticed a lot of questions related to software—which makes sense—there's a lot of overlap between hardware and software. Rest assured that we'll review everything you shared and surface your experiences with the appropriate teams.

Thank you for your patience and keep watch for updates.

[dasap1234]

Is This a live event that is voice and vid? or just in the forum? 

[Tom]

Hey @dasap1234, thanks for checking in. This event will only take place in this forum—there's no video. If you have any questions or feedback that you'd like our Hardware team to see, please do drop them in here. They'll address questions in this post tomorrow. 

[BillyPtown]

As we see more and more people using apple watches, iphones and android phones to pay contactless, we have noticed that these payment methods show "unknown name" and as such don't add into the customers' histories.  This detracts enormously from the power of tracking a customer history that has always been a key feature of Square that other POS providers cannot provide. This improvement is necessary to keep the competitive advantage on other POS systems that are not integrated payment platforms. 

Thanks, 

Billy

[VanKalkerFarms]

Unfortunately, that is the way ApplePay is designed so that each transaction uses a unique card number and doesn't share user info.

[Rowan]

Thanks for the feedback. We absolutely agree that Customer Directory is a powerful tool for our sellers and the ability to automatically import information on dip transactions is very convenient.

For now you are correct that customer information needs to be manually added for contactless payments. I’ll pass along the info to our team that you’d like similar functionality to the dip payment experience.

[BillyPtown]

The improvements being made continuously to the inventory management and vendor management are greatly appreciated.   It is nice that from the item library you can select to order more of a specific item and it starts generating a draft PO.  It is nice that you can generate a draft PO based on minimum quantities specified.  However, it would be great if you could go through a vendor and and all of that vendors products and order various quantities of various different products.  If for instance you could see the vendor item list with inventory numbers and an option to order a quantity that you could enter for each line item and then have that generate a PO. You could order products that are not under the minimum stock levels without having to manually generate a PO.  This would be incredibly beneficial as we have vendors that have dozens of products with dozens of variations. 

Many thanks, 

Billy

[kasmiller]

We’d like the ability to place online orders in store. Our cakes require a 3 day lead time, but sometimes people come in store to order. Would be great if we could place the order from the register. This would also allow those who want to pay cash to order. 

[kasmiller]

Another item: the ability to use separate bank accounts to pay payroll through by location. We can run reports of payroll by location, why can’t we have payroll come out of different accounts by location??

[jewelcam]

The passcode can easily be seen by other people at the reg. this needs to be fixed. Solutions would be Fingerprint ID or scan an ID card or facial recognition.  The scan ID cards could be used for Managers(this is the one i do not want other people while entering in the screen) the current 4 number pin could be used by regular cashier. 

The Customer Display on Square Reg should have the feature to rotate the Customer displayed images. 

The cable for the customer display needs to be extendable. 6.5feet is not long enough for our island checkout counters. We need a cord long enough to run it down in the counter along the floor then up to the top of the checkout counter. 

[316dyestudio]

If we had the ability to split payments up into installments and be able to charge for the future installments automatically that would be fantastic!

[tootym]

I would like to see a currency counter when opening and closing cash drawers. This will make currency counting much faster and more accurate. I have another business and we use Lightspeed as the POS provider and it has this feature. Please add this feature. Thanks.

[baycountygun21]

I talked to Support about this but have not heard anything further. Could you please write a report that prints off the printer when closing the cash drawer that details the items sold, quantity and total dollars. I am looking for a report similar to the "Z-Report" from a Casio register that we previously had. It is a perfect Summary of the days results for our Managers!

Thanks.

[rtfulk]

I don’t know if you are talking about this feature or not, but if you go to reports, hit the print icon.  Then turn off show all transactions, then hit print.   This will only show you the category items, the total sold and the amount collected in each category.   It will  print a short ticket, not one a mile long showing every item you sold.  

[zder]

• The new UI for the Square iOS app has grown on me, but it feels sluggish compared to the old one. Any plans to optimize the app for Apple’s latest iPads with the M1 chip?
• When it was introduced, Square Register was presented as the best hardware for running Square POS. Now, after a few years, the Square Register hardware hasn’t been updated, and seems a bit neglected. It would be useful for Square sellers to get some insight into the Square hardware team’s roadmap for the future.

[PerroneTech]

I second, third, and fourth this. I want to pounce on some new Square software, but it just seems so limited.

I think a fantastic solution to this problem would be the ability to make the customer facing display an add on option to any device. I use a Lenovo M10 tablet as my point of sales and I'm about to swap out for a Galaxy Tab S7+, so being able to add the customer display would be freaking awesome!

[allwhowander]

Thanks for taking our questions & requests!

[1] Wireless (Qi) charging pad for the iPad stand and Square Terminal! We move it around the bar a lot and have to constantly unplug and plug it back in. Would be cool to just grab and go. Maybe an adjustable proximity alarm just in case a customer decides to walk out the door with it. 

[2] Integrate the chip reader into the back arm of the stand so that customers can simply dip right there. We had to drill additional holes in our bar top to mount and run the charging wire for the chip reader so it stays powered on. Problem is when we bring the iPad stand down the bar to check someone out, we have to also pop the chip reader from the dock and have another thing to worry about and plug back in. It should just power right off of the stand.*

[3] Big wishful thinking here - how cool would it be to have a wi-fi order buzzer fully integrated to Square POS simply by tapping on the terminal during a sale? Customer orders at register, employee grabs a fresh buzzer and taps it on the Square Stand, it links up automagically to that sale, and buzzes when the customer's order is marked as ready 🤯

*We do use a Square Terminal to supplement being mobile around the bar, but at this time there are some necessary software features not available.

[Rowan]

These are some great suggestions @allwhowander!

It seems as though the common theme is better interoperability between all the hardware Square offers. As we've built up our portfolio over time this has definitely been on our mind. I can't make any promises for exactly what that interaction will look like, but creating these seamless experiences is a major focus for us and I think you'll continue to see improvements that unlock some of the functionality you're looking for.

[dasap1234]

We would Love a ID scanner/verifier built into the register This will be great if a card transaction is disputed also for age restricted products. also would be great if this integrated with cust loyalty  

[mtm100]

Kinda a hardware and software question but we would love to see a self serve kiosk developed by square. They are the future and we are seeing them everywhere around us. Hiring has been very difficult and this would allow us to move some front of house staff to the back to help make food. 

Any plans at this time to develop a Kiosk solution?

[PerroneTech]

Doesn't Square allow you to make QR codes for self serve?

https://squareup.com/us/en/online-store/restaurants/self-serve-ordering

If it forwards to KDS, I'm not sure.

[mtm100]

Hi PerronTech, they do have a QR code but it's not the same as having a kiosk that the customer can just walk up to and place their order.