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.

[Jdscoffeeshop]

I Completely Agree!

[Justin_N]

You’re welcome, @jjsmeatshak1  Thank YOU for participating!

1. There has been a lot of work going on with regards to improving the interface between Square’s hardware and Square Online, and there's still quite a bit of room for improvement. In addition to being able to ‘pause Square Online orders from the Restaurant POS’, what other Square Online settings would you like to control from the Restaurant POS?
2. Are you saying that, for orders which have already been placed, you’d like to be able to postpone the pickup time for all orders en-masse?
3. We’ve heard a significant amount of feedback from businesses who need a more-seamless 86’ing feature across all Square touchpoints. The experience you’ve laid out here @jjsmeatshak1  is really rough. I agree with @DSander that when changing the Item Visibility (Available, Unavailable, Hidden) it is expected that the change is made any place that item surfaces. As I mentioned in point 1, I do know that there is quite a bit of discussion between teams at Square on how to make these experiences much much better for you.

[jjsmeatshak1]

1. When I say Pause I guess Im saying to stop accepting orders for that present time or to postpone order for an additional 30 mins or 1hr. in addition to the prep time we already have set. So say we get flooded with in person tickets, and we start to have a ton of online orders come in... I can go into the Restaurant POS (preferably on the Square Register NOT IOS Version) and toggle an additional prep time or time until complete. That way, any additional tickets via online that come in will be postponed for whatever time was set.   YEs this can already be done at an individual ticket level as they come in... however... we are so short staffed like many others and cant dedicate 1 person to stand at the POS and just change online order pick up times individually. 

3. 86ing is a huge feature that is needed to be streamlined better! It takes forever to go into 3-4 different places and half the time having to actually log into the Dashboard and navigate to online store settings to get 86 1 item for online. 

[user12039123]

Hi,

I have a few things!

1.The ability to hide the "services" tab when online booking. Right now, you can get rid of the "staff" tab, but not the "services" tab. We are a larger salon, and it makes much more sense to pick their provider first and then the service that they want. It is too confusing.

2. Making website pages non-clickable on the menu part. For example, I want to list all of our stylist's on different tabs, but I don't want a main landing page for all of the stylists.

3. A product recommendation quiz integration to the website like other website hosts do. 

4. The ability to add a link during online booking for people to fill out forms ahead of time (this might be more on the appointment side than the online, but I thought that I should mention it). 

Thanks very much!

[Justin_N]

Thanks for joining us today, @user12039123!

This is very interesting feedback about being unable to hide the Services tab within Online Booking! When combined with the need to integrate forms into the process of booking a service, what I hear is that we could be doing a better job of addressing your business needs more holistically here. Question for you -- are there other challenges you’re facing due to the software operating in a way that doesn’t quite fit your business needs

Thank you for the feedback about Non-Clickable Navigation Items and a Product Recommendation Quiz! I’m curious to know what your ideal “quiz experience” would look like! Thanks for your time!

[Ranger52]

Hello Square Team,

There are two things that stand out as needs in our use of the online store.  We use our online store to sell tickets for events at our store and restaurant.

1  When working to add events we have never had a quick and smooth process for updating the Inventory.  Using the stock updates quickly is critical to adding more tickets or getting marketing out on time for events.  We get an error most times that we try and create or update Events.  And if we try to bypass this and fix the inventory in the Square Item library it does not get reflected in the online store item library.  Maybe there is a way to separate event type items like "service items" in the square library.

2  The Second feature is the sorting of the events in the square online store and on the customers interface.  The events come up in alphabetical order and do not sort based on the date of the event.  It may be that events need to be more separated from items and sorted by themselves.

Overall we have been having a harder time managing this online store than we ever had before Weebly became the online platform.  If it doesn't get more streamlined we will need to move to a different platform for our online ticket sales.

I am sure the online system works well for actually physical item sales and digital sales but so far the event tickets have been buggy.

Thanks for all you do and for all the rest of the great products.

[AdamB]

Hi, @Ranger52. 👋   Regarding your first comment, it sounds like you’re having some sync issues between Square Online and your Square Item Library. Any issues like that are not intended - regardless of item type, changes should be syncing correctly. I would contact our support team and let them know which items you see that with and what kind of changes you are making, that way they can escalate the issue for our engineers to investigate.  I will let Justin speak towards your suggestion about sorting events by date. 😊

[Justin_N]

Thanks for being here today @Ranger52  and thanks for the handoff, @AdamB!

I am happy to have gotten your feedback today about your experience with Square Events + Square Online. I can see how the need to sort items by Event item attributes on the automated “Shop All” pages is a need that we simply don’t address today. Both of these sections are very-much focused on retail (Shop All) and food & drink (Order Online)

For Events, what we have for you is an “Event” section which can be used on a standard page. Events in this section will be ordered by date and there are all sorts of customizations you can make to the section. Hopefully this helps you out!

I’m curious to hear more about the inefficiencies which your business has experienced when using Square Events + Square Online. As event-type businesses like yours are an important part of Square as a whole, I have no doubts that we’ll see the entire experience of Events + Square Online improve in remarkable ways over the coming years. Much of that improvement will be informed by you and businesses like yours, and I again wanted to thank you for the time spent delivering us that feedback!

[Jask99]

I'd like to be able to add more to the ITEM Description Online.. I've turned off the item description sync so i can add hyperlinks and do different fonts. but I would like to build content to sell the item on the item page. such as embed how-to-use videos, example pictures, instructions. currently my option is to build a Story page and link to the item but I'd rather it all be one page

[Justin_N]

Great feedback, @Jask99! It sounds like if we were to add the ability to add sections to these Item pages, that’d be exactly what you’re looking for?

[ccoast]

YES Please!  This would be extremely helpful.  

[WhittierFarms]

We'd love to see a sell by weight feature for things like produce and meat. It would essentially take a deposit from the customer and once we entered the final weight of the product, charge the card. Also, pull subscriptions away from "invoice transactions" to make them more integrated online so we could make online items easily ordered on a recurring weekly/monthly basis from the same item screen. Thank you!

[Justin_N]

Thank you for leaving a reply, @WhittierFarms!

We appreciate you sharing your grocery use-case for making edits to orders after they’ve been placed (specifically, adjusting item weights and having that adjustment be reflected in the subtotal). Orders placed today are largely static and unchangeable and there are a number of good reasons (including yours!) to need to edit orders after they’re placed. Are there other aspects of an Order which you'd like to be able to adjust after it has been placed?

Regarding bringing subscriptions / recurring payments into Square Online, I’m totally with you. Would you mind describing an “ideal scenario” for your business when it comes to subscriptions / recurring payments?

Thank you!!

[user12039123]

Hello!

I have some online suggestions for my hair salon, 

1) Having commission available for team members for clients online purchases. It’s hard for me to get my staff to promote our online store if they can’t benefit from it. 

2) SEO help on website items. I have used  Wix in the past and they have a little guidance and it helped a lot. 

3) add a client portal to the online booking profile so stylist can add notes about products they used and links to purchase then from our website. Then the clients can go back to that anytime they need to reorder. Again- to help promote online sales 

4)when a client is booking an appt, close in days together their name will then another color (hilites) and this will help stylist prevent getting last minute cancellation do to multiple booking.  

thank you!

[AdamB]

Hey, @user12039123 . Regarding your SEO question, have you seen the Ultimate SEO Guide? That’s a really great resource to start with if you want to focus on SEO strategies.

[Justin_N]

Hello again, @user12039123  … if that is your real name ...

Thank you for the additional context on your business needs here. The idea of attributing online sales to your employees is really interesting! Are there other times when the Square Team + Square Online experience leaves you hanging?

We really like the idea of further integrating Customers with Square Online. Beyond the re-ordering and “client notes” needs, could you go into more detail on what the ideal experience would be here both for your business and for your customers?

Thank you for your time today!!

[Baking1]

There is a thread that's been going for over a year that has not been addressed AT ALL.  Its the ability to force customers to choose pick up date/time on their orders  vs defaulting to soonest available.  Too many customers don't see on the last part of check out that they can select from a drop down the pick up date.  This selection needs to happen much sooner in the ordering process.   It might be as "simple" as allowing the business owner to shut off soonest available so that the order cannot be completed with the selection of a pickup date/time.

[GWTS]

I AGREE THAT IT IS EASILY OVERLOOKED BUT I DON'T WANT IT TURNED OFF 

[Justin_N]

@GWTS Consider it noted that you wouldn't want ASAP disable altogether. Thanks!

[Justin_N]

Well hello there, @Baking1!

I am thrilled to address this topic today. 🙂 This is feedback we’ve heard loud and clear for quite some time. Over the past year or so we’ve released a few iterations of the Order Online experience, and ultimately those releases have so far not satisfied your specific concern here. However, as I said, I’m thrilled to be able to tell you that this is being actively addressed and you should expect to hear more (and specific) detail from us about this topic within the next handful of weeks!

[renees]

Basic website features that non-Square weebly users have access to:

ability to use Iframes;  and banner rotators.