Meet Our Square Online Team: How can we improve Square Online?

[Tom]

Hello Seller Community! On July 22nd from 10:00 – 11:00am PT, we hosted a Q&A within this thread where Square Online sellers had the opportunity to post about improvements they'd like to see with regard to features and services.

@Justin_N is a product specialist with the Square Online team and @AdamB is a community manager with extensive Square Online product experience. Together, they lead the session focused on how we can improve Square Online features. Learn more about Square Online.

We would love to know more about sellers' experiences with:

• Tasks related to Square Online which take you way too much time to complete.
• Tasks related to your online business which you simply cannot complete today with Square Online.

We will summarize your questions and responses about your “tasks” in a follow-up post soon!

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.

[zder]

@Justin_N ,

This was a great opportunity to check-in with the Square Online team. I appreciated the seller feedback and the Square team responses. I will have more feedback on our ideal pre-ordering setup later, but I wanted to get this out first,

In our old WordPress site, updating the future date maximum value would be a fix I would do myself - change "90 days" to "30 days" or "7 days" - a relatively quick change that makes a big difference. 

As an example, the recent Square update to Online Order order ticket formatting - Customer Name in ticket header replacing Order # was a little update that made our lives easier. Some feature enhancements are part of big-picture evolution and some are small fixes that add up to real improvements. It would be useful for sellers to have some insight into the Square development roadmap and priorities.

My wish is that the team at Square would do a quick fix for the future date maximum value. That would result in Square Online's feature-set better modeling seller real-world conditions, and would improve our business online ordering process, today.

Thank You

[TheGoodHop]

Hi there

We would really like to see the Online Store and the physical POS sync in real time. 

We are selling an item out of the store in real time, but that item isn't coming out of the Online store inventory for 24 hours up to 3 days or sometimes never. It is causing huge problems on our online store and customers are getting frustrated because they keep buying things on line but that item was purchased in the store and never synced out of inventory. 

Please please make the Online Store and the Physical POS store inventory sync in real time.

[AdamB]

Hi, @TheGoodHop! 👋 Syncing between your online store and POS should be instant. If you haven’t done so already, can you contact our support team? It’s really unusual that you’re seeing sync delays like that.

[MJ_BMA]

The  ability to set prices in the service library or the items library and it automatically update on your website immediately.

[AdamB]

Thanks for your comment, @MJ_BMA . Item prices should sync back and forth between your online store and your Square Item Library. Are you not seeing that?

[The_Road]

Hello - I want the ability to again arrange my dashboard as I choose OR at least move the Top Items by Sales and Top Items by Categories to the top of the dashboard.  These are far more important than community chat and capital offers. Thank you

[Tom]

Hey @The_Road, thanks for raising your experience with this. I went to check and I don't have more context on the change that I could access and share out right now. That being said, if there are any other reasons why this is important for your business that you'd like our dashboard team members to know—please reply here and I'll make sure they see your feedback.

[The_Road]

Hi

It's efficiency & relevancy.

It's should not be necessary to scroll beyond "promo" space on dashboard to get to what's important.  I'm curious how a community chat has more relevance than my/our business data.  

Business data should be the first thing I see.

We could arrange the dashboard as we preferred & then that functionality disappeared with an "update".

[paintresse]

it said free square reader -not frre shipping

[paintresse]

i'm considering switching from Shopify to Square. Either that or wix. But, Square up advertised free reader. Nope. Not there. Can anyone comment on customer service? 

[Cjonesfly]

It is very difficult to get hold of square customer service. Instead, we get routed to various help FAQ pages until we are blue in the face and give up.  I found a telephone number once which was buried in some place which I COULD NEVER FIND AGAIN.  The person on the other end when I used the phone number Wass very helpful and I'd love talk to her again.

[Tom]

Hey @Cjonesfly and @paintresse, thanks for bringing this up and sorry to hear about the trouble. For more details on getting a free reader, have a look at this article: Get a Free Square Magstripe Reader. If that doesn't get you where you need to be, you can get in touch with our Customer Success team directly by following these steps: Customer Code & Phone Number - Where is it?

They'll be able to take a closer look into your account and make sure everything gets sorted out.

[Quaint]

Tom,

We use our square register a lot to enter new products. I have several things that slow us down. Here are7 a few suggestions.

When entering a new item or variation it would be quicker to enter it into the spot I want it rather than it being on the bottom of the list and having to relocate every entry. We have most items in a alphabetical or numerical order. It takes lot of extra time to move every entry.

2. When entering new items we have to hit done and save and go back to items every 2 or 3 entries or the system suddenly defaults to the log in code and checkout side of things and if you haven't saved that entry you have to start over. Huge waste of time. 

3. Often we will sell several variations of one item. It would save time when checking out if you could select all of the variations of that item at once so you didn't have to go back and forth for every variation. Ie.. customer buys two variations  of candles, I would like to select both variations at the same time and have them added to the checkout screen at the same time.

Thank you

Jodi

Quaint & Quirky

[Justin_N]

Welcome, @Quaint! Thanks for participating today!

It sounds as though points 1 and 2 are geared more-specifically towards your Square Register, and I can’t speak much to that other than to say that we always appreciate feedback and we’ll make sure that the right team at Square sees those comments!

As far as point 3, it sounds like this could be a time-saver within both Register (for employees ringing up buyers) and Online (where buyers could more-quickly ring themselves up). It’s a really interesting piece of feedback and I appreciate you leaving it for us!

[Tom]

Hey @Quaint, thanks for bringing this up and sorry for the issues you're encountering with inventory. We'll make sure your experience goes to the right team members. In the meantime, I wanted to see if have you have tried our bulk upload tool? Learn more about it here and let me know if that helps:

• Import Items Online
• Bulk Edit Square Online Items, Categories, and Coupons

[olisny]

1) Auto-sending/auto-download of digital products! Having to email them out is a HUGE pain. If it's digital, people expect it instantly, not when I get around to emailing them. (Being able to set some items to "free" without the customer having to actually go through a checkout process would be helpful as well. I have several digital items I offer at no cost, and currently they're re-directed to another site to download.)

2) Optional app alerts when a specific item sells or when any item sells. I often sell OOAK items at mobile fairs, and it's a concern if an item sells online and I'm simultaneously selling it in-person. This results at me constantly checking email/pickup orders while at events to avoid this situation. Being able to have the Square app ping me with "X Item Sold!" would be such a time saver.

Thank you for your consideration!

[Justin_N]

Hello there, @olisny!  Thank you for the feedback!

It sounds like you’d benefit both from the ability to simply upload a file to your site (to then be downloaded by a visitor) and the ability to automatically fulfill digital orders. The pain around having to manually deliver digital goods is something that we’ve heard a lot about and we’re looking forward to making that experience much better. I’m curious to hear your take on the ideal experience of purchasing a digital product from you via Square Online.

Thank you for the great context here around the benefit that you’d get from more-granular order notification options. Are there other “filters” for order notifications that you’d benefit from, similar to “when x item”?

Let me add that you shouldn’t have to worry about overselling. Fundamentally, the system is designed to behave in a way where, if a buyer has ITEM X in their Online Store cart and you sell the last available ITEM X in person, the Online Store buyer will be unable to complete checkout. If you experience over-selling, I strongly encourage you to reach out to our support teams so that we can assess whether there is a bug in the system.

[Cjonesfly]

Okay.  two related questions:  one, When I add new inventory via iPad and scanner using Square Retail, it seems that I must go some where to choose for it to be "Visible."  This is not necessary, it seem to me.  It adds a step that I expect the act of adding an item should automatically make the item visible.   Then if I don't get to that other place to choose for it to be visible, then it remains invisible so my customers do not know it exists. 

    The second question to the one before is that when I run out of stock on a particular item, your e-commerce software (Square Online) puts a big, bold "OUT OF STOCK" across my item one the website.  That makes my website look junkie, unkempt, and like I'm going out of business for something not so good.  Why not have the e-commerce sight simply make the item invisible so that customers simply do not see out as available?

      A third question I have is related to functionality of the e-commerce website.  Can I create a page for a blog?  And it is, I do not see any templates that allow the e-commerce site to look like an actual website, complete with a blog, a photo gallery, and possible other pages that I can customize more to my liking.  If these pages can not be created, like blog page, should I instead have a website from another company like Squarespace with a link on that website to the e-commerce site?  That, however, would require me to have two domains, I think, and therefore require me too pay two sets of prices, which I can not afford as a small business.  Perhaps I should go to Squarespace and create my website and use their e-commerce capabilities.

[GWTS]

I AGREE WITH  Cjonesfly'S    "when I run out of stock on a particular item, your e-commerce software (Square Online) puts a big, bold "OUT OF STOCK" across my item one the website.  That makes my website look junkie, unkempt, and like I'm going out of business for something not so good.  Why not have the e-commerce sight simply make the item invisible so that customers simply do not see out as available?"

PLEASE JUST MAKE IT INVISIBLE ON THE WEBSITE BUT FOR IPAD REGISTER SAY OUT OF STOCK INSTEAD OF JUST GREYING OUT THE ABILITY TO ADD TO ORDER.

[AdamB]

Thanks for your thoughts, @Cjonesfly! 

1. It sounds like you want items added through your POS to be visible rather than unavailable when they import. In your Square Online overview page, go to Settings > Item Sync and toggle off the “Mark newly imported items as unavailable” option.
2. For out of stock items, go to Settings > Item Preferences in your Square Online overview page and toggle off the “display out of stock items on site” option.
3. With Square Online, you’ll want to use Stories for blog-like pages. Visit the support article I just linked and it will show you how to add that to your online store.

[Cjonesfly]

Thanks!  I'll look in to this solutions.  It would be Great if it worked.

Chuck