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.

[jbeedlow]

Custom shipping per item would make my life WAY easier. I have some products that are drop-shipped from the manufacturer and my flat rate shipping rules shouldn't be applied, but a per-product shipping should. 

I would also love to sell weights and measurements set in Square POS on the website (1.5 yards of fabric for example). 

[Justin_N]

Hello, @jbeedlow! Welcome to the discussion!

Shipping rules at the item level have been a popular request that the team has heard loud and clear. I can assure you that this need is on our radar! So too is this request for fractional quantities that keeps coming up in this post!

I'd like to hear more about what your current experience drop-shipping with Square Online is like, and what your ideal experience would be.

Thank you for this great feedback and for your participation today!

[TinyTotscc]

So far, I love the Square apps and website as use for business purposes. However, I could use a "drafting" and "void" option in the Contracts section. That's all from me 😁

[Justin_N]

Thanks for being with us @TinyTotscc! We appreciate your feedback about using Contracts -- we’ll be sure that the team hears your feedback!

In addition to Contracts I see that you’re using Online Booking -- do you have any feedback about how your experience has been using these products with Square Online? Thank you!

[IndianaSoapCo]

I would like to run reports that show what clients buy but I'd like to exclude certain clients from that report. For example: I'd like to see what individuals buy as opposed to my wholesale clients.

[Justin_N]

Hey @IndianaSoapCo  -- thanks for joining us today and for your feedback around Reports!

This is such an important area of our product when it comes to you operating your business, and making Reports as effective as possible for your business is certainly one of our goals. Are there other needs you have with reporting that are not adequately addressed today?

You mentioned wholesale -- I’m curious about how you currently manage online orders for wholesale customers (as opposed to retail). Thanks in advance for the context, it’s all very helpful!

[BundledBaybee]

We are a children's boutique store that sells items from many brands and there is no "brand" field. Having to use the category field is quite frustrating since brands sell multiple items that could fall into a few categories. Adding the brands field would give us the flexibility we need and it would clean our website up tremendously!! Even a custom named field where we could be flexible would be a great start.

Some form of payment brand such as Stripe or Afterpay. We constantly get asked about this an loose revenue monthly because of Square not offering this. This would allow our customers who want our more premium products not found in big box stores the flexibility they get direct from the manufacture but want to support our small business.

Another pain point we have is the way the items page differs from online to the register. Things such as adding pictures is completely different and a lot easier on the online with the drag and drop feature.

The biggest thing that is too cumbersome for us is to have the online and the POS sides sync 100%. It feels like when I get an order shipped and I input the order, I have to do things twice which is just silly and not user friendly. 

Consistency would go a long way with this application.

[AdamB]

Hi there, @BundledBaybee ! 👋 When you mention syncing 100%, are you making changes in Square Online or your Square Dashboard and those are not syncing? What kind of changes are you seeing that with?

[Justin_N]

Thanks for being here, @BundledBaybee!

We hear you clearly 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. Also, the feedback about needing additional categorization within your items (e.g. brand) 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’m really interested to hear more about the specific tasks which you have to do twice (once on POS, once online). This is definitely not the experience we want to be providing (I mean...part of the goal is literally to save you time with our products, and doing the opposite is not very palatable).

Thanks again!

[shoneycutt]

I own a brick and mortar quilt shop and I really need two features:

1. Fractional quantities in a pre-defined drop-down list for web site sales.

That's my #1 pain point with Square/Weebly. I have been using a completely separate site to sell online, and inventory management is a nightmare. I've had to give several refunds because of inaccurate inventory and those customers will likely never come back to me.

2. The ability to build kits/bundles of existing items, and deduct inventory of existing items if I add inventory to the kit/bundle.

[CactusQuilter]

I am also a quilt shop and I agree with both of your points.  I actually had begun to look at other options for POS/Online due to these two issues.

[Justin_N]

@CactusQuilter -- Thank you for sharing your thoughts here! Please feel free to add anything else that comes to mind!

[Justin_N]

Thanks for joining us, @shoneycutt!

I can understand how being unable to sell in fractional quantities on Square Online makes it a no-go for your business. I’m very sorry that you’re having to manage inventory between two interfaces because that is an extremely difficult exercise. It's clear to me from the responses in this board today that fractional quantities is a very important missing feature in Square Online, and my message to the team will be that we ought to prioritize this work.

Your point about kits/bundles is a great one. This is something that I know we can do a better job of in Square Online. Could you tell me more about how your business would use a kit/bundling feature?

I appreciate your time here, and look forward to sharing your feedback on these issues!

[shoneycutt]

Thanks for the reply, Justin. 

When people shop at a quilt store, they often want to buy a kit to make a quilt that we have on display. We create kits that have all of the fabric and other items needed to make the quilt as shown. Right now I have to manually reduce the inventory of each individual fabric or other item used in the kit. I also have to keep a record outside of the POS of all the fabrics used in the kit. An added bonus would be an informational box that would tell me how many kits I could make with what I have on hand, and what's missing if I can't make a complete kit.

Also, this is another issue I thought about this morning: Can you look at improving all item screen layouts, in Square Online and Square POS so there's less scrolling? I've used a few other POS systems, and the page layouts in Square are by far the least optimized. Scrolling takes time, and all those little bits of time add up. Not to mention the repetitive motion required for scrolling or swiping. As someone who has worked on a computer for most of my adult life, this is a huge concern!

It's especially frustrating when I'm ringing someone up and I have to swipe down to enter a quantity. A lot of my inventory is the same type of item (fabric, thread, needles, etc.) that have several variations. I prefer to make one item with variations, but that means I often have to scroll or swipe down constantly to enter a quantity. Moving the quantity field to the top or side would solve that.

Oh, and I much prefer the Square POS app (white icon) vs. the Square for Retail app (greenish icon).  The Favorites screen is MUCH better and super convenient. I think the green app may have the quantity field in a better spot, but it's been a while since I used it.

Thanks so much for a chance to voice our needs/wants/concerns!!

Sheila

[thedonutgrove]

We wished that Square provide a spreadsheet of our customers and their orders (item types of items across the top and customer).

[Tom]

Hi @thedonutgrove, thanks for bringing this up. Depending on the kind of information you're looking for, it sounds like the Customer Directory may be useful. For more context on customer information, have a look at Caty's reply in this thread.

If the Customer Directory doesn't have what you're looking for, please reply back with a bit more information on why a spreadsheet would be useful for your business. I'll make sure to surface your experience with the appropriate team members. 💯

[stinnett_sticks]

Hello, Tom!

Thank you for this thread! As someone who is wanting to sell art in our Square online store, I've seen two things that I would really like to see changed:

1. There is a "Quantity" button that I need to be able to disable/ take off of my products. Most of my art are one-of-a-kind items, so giving the option for people to buy more than one of them worries me.

2. The photos of my products keep getting cropped off. The set sizes don't allow for the diversity of sizes and shapes of my pieces of art to be displayed correctly. If we could have the option to have our photos displayed in our store in its original size/shape, that would be very helpful. Also, just being able to edit our photos on the site without it affecting all of the products in the store would also be helpful.

Ultimately, having more options for formatting and editing the look and behavior of each individual photo/product, would be so helpful. As it is, I have not been able to advertise our square store, due to these issues.

Thank you!

Heather

[SammyGrace2414]

@stinnett_sticks do you have inventory tracking enabled? If my items are sold out, it does not let someone purchase that item from my online store. 

[stinnett_sticks]

Thank you, Sammy! This really helps! And I do see that there has been some reformatting in the editor since last I looked. 😅 I still wish that the my photos could be a free size rather than their set sizes. But being able to set the stock to 1, solves my other dilemma. Thanks again! 😊

[GWTS]

THE QUANTITY BUTTON BRINGS TO MIND THAT I HATE SCROLLING AROUND LOOKING FOR QUANTITY ON THE SQUARE FOR IPAD RINGING AS A CASHIER.  I WOULD LOVE TO SEE IT FIRST WHEN GOING BACK INTO AN ITEM

[Justin_N]

Hello, @stinnett_sticks!  Thank you for being here!

It looks like you’ve got the concern with the “Quantity” button worked out. I’m curious about your thoughts on whether you’re OK with the way it is, or whether you’d really prefer to see the button disappear altogether for these one-of-a-kind items?

This is great feedback about needing more flexibility when it comes to the ratios at which your item images are displayed. This feedback is especially common for artists such as yourself, who very often need at least the ability to display images (well) in either portrait or landscape. I’ll be happy to take this one back to the team! As an artist, are there any other significant points of friction which you have with Square Online?

Thanks again!