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.

[calebsavage]

We use our Square Online site mostly as "brochureware" to provide general info about our business and haven't taken advantage of many of the online shop features.

We'd like to see more options to customize the look and feel of the site, more and better templates, and a more intuitive interface for editing the website. It feels like the Square Online page editor is neutered compared to Weebly (which powers the sites) on its own.

[Justin_N]

Hey there, @calebsavage! Thank you for being here today!

I want to first acknowledge the obvious and fundamental differences between the older Weebly.com site editor and the newer editor which powers Square Online. Much of the difference (e.g. using Sections & Layouts rather than a drag and drop builder) was purposeful with very particular goals around helping businesses create online stores that convert traffic into sales. Then, there’s also the reality that the newer editor simply hasn’t been around for long enough to have time to build all the bells and whistles that the old editor has (e.g. header slideshows).

This “feature parity gap” has been diminishing over time, with new features being added to the new builder every month. In that vein, I’m very interested to hear more specifics about the types of customizations you wish you could make in the new builder, as well as any other thoughts around missing must-have features that you’d like to see us prioritize.

I'm also very curious about your thoughts on the ideal experience when it comes to templates in Square Online.

Thank you for your time!

[cheyogallc]

Hi.  Here's what I'd like to see.

• Decrease site website and mobile loading time - it is faaaar too slow and this costs us in Google rankings now
• Condense image sizes & auto-adjust images rather than making us select the ratio of product photos
• Accept the formatting of custom code - I have custom code for a quiz on my website and Square would not accept the formatting so it doesn't look good at all
• Improve the API for Google Listings
• Allow for more creativity in the design of the online store
• Allow live chat windows
• Allow header images and text on the Shop All and Category pages
• Allow Google Reviews to show on the website
• Allow for more custom menu options

[Justin_N]

Welcome, @cheyogallc! Thank you for the great list!

Website performance is fundamentally important, as is your ability to connect your online store with buyer touch points across the internet. We completely agree, appreciate your feedback about these topics and promise to continue to work hard to improve in these areas!

When it comes to customizing your Shop All and Category pages, are there other changes you’d make beyond wanting to add header images?

I’m also curious about how your business would utilize “more custom menu options”. Would you mind describing your idea in more detail?

Thank you again for the great feedback and for your time today!

[Sugarandgeek]

Hi! Will Square add another payment option for customers like Sezzle or Afterpay? I find myself using this option a lot when I shop and customers are asking me if I will offer this on my website too. It would be a great option to add. 

[Justin_N]

Thanks for being with us today, @Sugarandgeek!
We hear you loud and clear on the importance of “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) to enable buyers to purchase items when, without it, they’d be more-likely to abandon the cart. My question here is, of the available BNPL providers (you mentioned Sezzle and Afterpay), do you have a preference? If yes, why?

[lovenlight68]

Change things back the way they were.  You just keep going in circles trying to find things!!!!!!!!!!!

[AdamB]

Hi, @lovenlight68 . Thanks for your feedback! Is there something in specific that was updated recently that you preferred to stay the same?

[MissLyndi]

I love Square, but I am finding myself looking at other options-
I would love an option to create "tags" or something of products, it's easiest explained with our board game section -

It would be great if I could add tags like "45min" "4 players" "company/manufacturer" "under $20" and when people are browsing the 1000+ board games, they could narrow it down. (Subcategories do not cut it and are WAY too tedious to maintain.)

Customer accounts would be great online - could see past purchases, have a store credit option if there was a return or something, and then the BIG issue/improvement needed: purchasing limit & Pre-Orders. We have very limited product that we limit purchases of it 1 per family, and because there is a big online market to compete with, we have to offer pre-sales of the product before the release date.
Though I know it would be alot more work, because it would need options to prevent people from just making a new account to buy more product. 
PLUS I've gotten screwed twice by online scammers because of SQUARES lack of online security - the fact that people can put in JUST a billing zip code and no other address component shouldn't be allowed. I know I could've caught it too, but when I'm processing 100's of orders, of course I'm not going to catch it. 

Thats all I can think of at this time.

[Justin_N]

Thank you for the great feedback here, @MissLyndi!

The point about needing additional categorization abilities within your items (e.g. minutes, players, manufacturer) is really valuable! In 2020 the team added some new data fields to items (e.g. Nutritional Information) and I know there are plans to continue to iterate in this area. I’ll be happy to make sure that your feedback is seen by the team who owns this!

And, we agree. Getting Square’s Customers integrated with Square Online is going to be great to see, and it’s absolutely a priority. I personally can even imagine a world where some of the potential issues around ordering rules (such as one per person) could perhaps be solved utilizing an integration with Customers. We don’t know exactly what all these integrations will look like (yet), but we do know we want to get these jobs done right in the most impactful way possible for your business. Feedback like yours absolutely helps us get there, so thank you!

My question for you is, how would you describe your "ideal experience" when considering customer accounts within Square Online. Thanks again!

[Lenniemullaney]

I just purchased a new iPadOS14.9 with 5G.  Hooked it up with a cell line to my Verizon cellular provider.  I have used square for years to sell artwork in my art studio in a building that does NOT have wi-if..  I bought a new square reader with the charging pod.  It paired with my new iPhone Promax 12.  But it will NOT pair. With my new iPad.  I watched all the videos, deleted the old square app and downloaded the newest square app from the App Store.  Nothing has worked.  I can open square and type in credit card numbers, but the square reader, that I just spent $79 for does not connect to my iPad.  I am very frustrated as the square was advertised as wireless and Bluetooth compatible.  Why can’t I pair my new iPad with my new square reader?  Otherwise, I can’t use the iPad to sell or the square reader.  

[SammyGrace2414]

@Lenniemullaney the reader is definitely compatible. Do you have it connected to your iPhone while you are trying to connect it to your iPad? If so go to your iPhone's bluetooth settings and remove the reader. Once removed, then start the process of adding to iPad. 

[stjeromeschool]

We have an online bookstore. I have to do almost all of my shipping outside of this program. It would be SOOO helpful to have USPS Media Mail accessible for the shipping! 

Also, PLEASE make an unlimited amount of items able to be sorted in the way that the owner wants! My customers see the most recent items I added first. I have over 1000 items and it is critical that the customers see the first books of the curriculum first and not just the most recent.

[Justin_N]

Hello @stjeromeschool -- thank you for your comments today!

This is great insight into some of the limitations of the shipping product. Would you mind sharing a bit more about how you go about doing your shipping today?

And, thank you for the feedback on needing to be able to customize the order of items on the Shop All page. Are there other changes you'd make to the Shop All page to make it better suit your business? Given that you cannot do this today, the best option for you may be to use a 'blank page' and add a number of the 'featured item' sections to the page, and organize your items by curriculum in that way.

Thanks again!

[stjeromeschool]

Thank you for your answer! We do most of our shipping through ShipStation separately which offers USPS Media Mail. Then we just copy and paste the tracking number into Square under "mark as shipped". It would be so much easier if we could just make USPS Media Mail shipping labels in bulk (and it would also save a ton of paper!)

I'm not sure that your suggestion would help us much. I guess I will have to think about that. It seems like a lot of work when everything is already set up so beautifully except for the fact that I cannot get the pages to default to "featured". Here is what I mean: This page is for Grade 1. My customers would have to click "featured" in the drop down menu for it to come up correctly, but none of my customers know how to do that. It's not intuitive. https://www.stjeromelibrary.org/shop/grade-1/29?page=1&limit=60&sort_by=category_order&sort_order=as...

We also do have this page set up with the "menu" layout which although not ideal, is definitely better than anything else to display which books are necessary for the curriculum choices. https://www.stjeromelibrary.org/st-jerome-school I certainly do wish that the picture display for this page had an option to have a rectangular shape though! As you can see, many of the books are cut off because they are shaped as squares and have no option to change that.

Also, my customers are frequently saying that their credit cards are denied or that the website won't let them pay for one reason or another (daily, we seem to receive complaints like these). Customer service is no help, so I frequently have to send them invoices for their purchases which wastes a lot of my time! And then the invoices have no options to click to send the customer a tracking number for their packages. No options to make labels from the invoices either. 

As to the Shop All page, I really, really wish the default wasn't set to "newest". "Popularity" would be a better default. But it doesn't even work. I have lots of people buying from us, but can Square not figure out what is most popular from those purchases? It just shows the same selections as "newest" when you choose it.

Thanks!

[quiltingntx]

Hello Tom,

I have two request:

#1.  We print our recurring invoice from our desktop pc. Is there anyway to get the paid receipt that is emailed to us, to fit on one page? I can reduce it in my printer settings but it still fits on two pages. 

#2. I dread entering products on Square. Grrrr... 

Entering product. We need a duplicate option, then we can change what is different about the item in the title or SKU. It would take less time to enter items. My website and Quickbooks have options to allow us to duplicate items and make changes.

Thanks for listening.

Have a great day!

[SammyGrace2414]

Hi @quiltingntx there is a duplicate option! 🙂

In the Item Library, just click the 3 dots for more info at the end of the item and you can duplicate. 

It is much faster, I find, to use the import inventory feature using a spreadsheet though. You can read about that here. 

[diannebaercouns]

When working with appointments through the calendar, it is a problem that when a standing repeat customer decides to stop coming, when I stop their scheduled appointments, it erases ALL of their previous appointments also. I am a mental health counselor and need to have a record of past appts. that I can easily access. I often have repeat weekly/biweekly, etc. clients. So I find myself just having to cancel them as I go!

Dr. Dianne Baer

[Tom]

Hey @diannebaercouns, thanks for flagging this and I'm sorry to hear about the issues you've encountered with the Appointments section of the online Square Dashboard. I went to check this out and it sounds like there could be a couple of things going on here:

1. For repeated appointments, you should get a pop-up that asks if you want to delete the single appointment or the whole series. Does selecting the single appointment option solve what you've been running into?
2. There also is a feature request for the ability to cancel all future appointments in the series, but keep the ones in the past for your records. The good news is that our Appointments team is working on implementing this option, though we can't share out a specific timeline for when it will be available.

Hope that helps clear things up for now, though if it's still happening — I'd suggest getting in touch with our Customer Success team directly. If you can share with them a screenshot or the specific appointment series where this occurred, they'll be able to take a deeper dive into your account.

[zder]

@Justin_N , @AdamB , @Tom , Square Online Folks,

My recommendations to make Square Online work better for our business, a bakery,

1. For Pickup & delivery Order timing settings,

• Add seller-control over future date maximum to a specific date or date time-period (MM/DD/YYYY, 1 week, 2 weeks, 30 days). Current default of 90 days only is not realistic for food-service businesses due to menu changes and difficulty of managing inventory that far into the future, and for all retail businesses due to ongoing supply-chain issues (we were recently informed by our paper product supplier that there are major issues with availability of to-go boxes).
• Build item level fulfillment options for new Custom Pickup & Delivery Timing (pre-orders). So, for example, a seller could create a special Holiday Item category which would be fulfilled as pre-orders for a specific date, while remaining items/categories would use existing automatically assigned pickup times.

2. Unify support for Square POS and Square Online. One of the main reasons Square acquired Weebly, and our business chose Square Online, was its integration with Square POS. In the last year, many brick and mortar businesses have moved a large percentage of their business online. There are often issues with Square Online which are directly related to its integration with Square POS (e.g. inventory). A seller contacting Square support about issues like this should have a one-stop-shop for resolutions - no back and forth between departments. This is a huge time-waster.

3. The Image Gallery needs work. It is currently unusable for our business. Uploaded seller images are poorly resampled, resulting in low website image quality. Gallery image quality should be at least as good as Site Item Media image quality.

4. Stability, stability, stability. Uptime!

That's it for now. Square Online has really evolved during the last year. Keep up the good work. We are looking forward to continued improvements. 

Thank You

[Justin_N]

Hello @zder and thank you for your thorough reply! We really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on these topics!

With regards to stability and uptime, we agree. This is table-stakes and has always been viewed with priority. Our infrastructure team has been hard at work scaling the backend of our operations to stay ahead of the explosive growth of Square Online. The team will never stop working hard to increase stability and ensure uptime!

This is great feedback with regards to the need to have more-granular control of the order scheduling options available to buyers. The needs you have here are understandable and this will be very helpful as we consider the next iterations of order scheduling. Additionally, the concept of pre-ordering is something we've heard a ton of feedback about. I'm curious if there is anything else you have in mind when it comes to the ideal pre-ordering experience for your business.

I'll follow up with the team about the image gallery. I don't presume we expect it to be unusable for anyone's business. Also, I want to say that I appreciate your note with regards to the support for our products, and we'll make sure to share the feedback!

Thanks again for participating today!