Meet the Device Experience team: How can we help you better manage your devices?

[Tom]

Happy New Year, Sellers!

On Tuesday, January 18th, our Device Experience team hosted a Q&A focused on sellers' needs with device monitoring. Topics covered related to: Square Card Readers, Square Stand, Square Register, Square Terminal, printers, scales, scanners, and cash drawers.

We've got exciting plans this year that will help you monitor device connectivity, battery status, and logins from a single hub within the online Square Dashboard. We can't share out specific details on our product roadmaps, though we will certainly make sure all of the feedback that came through on this thread is incorporated into the decision making process.

[MNormansell]

Samsung galaxy s20 doesn't even have an input for the portable card swiper, so I can't even take any orders any more now that I've upgraded my phone.

[Donnie-M]

@MNormansell Hey, You can always pick up the square contactless chip reader as it connects via bluetooth.  It will allow you to dip/tap and it is the only method that provides protection from chargebacks for in person transactions.  I haven't tried using the swipe headphone adapter with the usb dongle, I am not sure it works, I know they have an apple card swiper that might work with a lightning to usb adapter...<goes and digs through drawer of cords and stuff to look for adapters to do testing>...I'll try to report back!

[GourmetOnWheels]

Use the Square chip/tap reader, this also protects you more against chargebacks.

René

[aroger317]

Will square offer direct digital downloads? I work with a lot of digital files and would like for customer to have them automatically download or emailed once purchase is made. I’m currently using 2 systems but would love to have this option in one. I love the easy design feature with square but I would love to have my customers come to one website. 

[GContinuum]

I would also like something similar,  we deal with product keys and if we can just print the product key on the receipt and/or send it in an email to the customer that would be nice.

[nazluzzi]

Good to know. We will look into it. 

[nazluzzi]

Hi @aroger317 ,

Is this unique per customer? Is the ideal experience to add the download link to receipt?

[PartyManiaMD]

I am currently using Square for retail on a Square Register.

Is there any intent to streamline receiving/adding product on a square register?

Currently adding new product on Square Register leaves a lot to be desired.

Can't add vendors, vendor item #'s, or see current cost of product.

When on Square Register you can't search by vendor and to check current quantity you have to go into each item.

More functionality from the square register would be great.

I also noticed that the default functionality of square register seems diminished when using square for retail. A lot of the functionality like grids, adding discounts, etc seems to go away when you upgrade to square for retail on a square register. What's up with that? It seems like we should be getting more functionality not less.

Overall I am still enjoying using square register especially since your team helped me upload my inventory. I just hope eventually functionality and ease of checking inventory will be improved.

[nazluzzi]

Hi @PartyManiaMD,

Thanks for reaching out.

We support bulk stock receive and purchase orders from the Inventory tab in Square for Retail Plus.

RE: For adding new products, Square for Retail sellers can scan UPC codes for items and have the data auto populate in the app during item creation.

On Square register you can access Stock overview from Inventory by tapping the Checklist icon. Instructions here. This allows you to filter by item category and location. Sort A-Z, low to high stock or high to low stock.

I passed on the other feedback to our Retail team, who will investigate further.

[aroger317]

Will square allow options for Sezzle or Afterpay to be used as payment options? 

[GContinuum]

That would be nice, Another way I know you can do something similar is to use square reoccurring payments invoice system.  But maybe Square can add something like Sezzle to Cashapp where it pays the vendor the full amount but charges the customer over time making them pay the processing fees also.

Better for the vendor in my opinion because they get all the money upfront and pay no processing fees.  The win for the customer is being to pay square back in installments over a period of time.  And the win for Square would be to tap a new source of revenue by collecting interest & a one time processing fee from the customer. 

[nazluzzi]

Hi @aroger317,

We don’t have immediate plans, but we are looking into the feasibility of integrating Afterpay as a payment option.

[TICE]

An overnight update last month sometime made it so that the customer display on the square register never turns off. It used to work fine, e.g. both screens sleep at the same time, but this update messed it up, now the main screen only sleeps, the customer screen remains on 24/7. We're afraid it's going to burn-in the screen, so we now resort to turning off the registers at night. When will this be fixed?

[nazluzzi]

Hi @TICE,

We are aware of this issue and are fixing it. Tentative rollout date is early-mid March. Sorry for the trouble.

[drill]

We would love to have more options in terms of wireless capabilities. We currently have a square stand as our main POS checkout, but use Square on our Macs for shipping fulfillment and invoicing. It seems to be extremely limited to find a cost effective compatible receipt printer that is wireless (either bluetooth or wifi) to be able to print out receipts (pick tickets) for packing of orders. We've also been trying to find an all in one solution for inventory management without having to tote around our iPad and bluetooth scanner. Would love to be able to us a single device for scanning in inventory in the warehouse and adjusting items all from the same device. Would also love to have a customer facing screen without having to convert to the Square Register which seems to be limited as well. Seems to be a lot of great individual items, but not an all in one seamless solution for a complete system to handle customers, inventory, and back office tasks.

[nazluzzi]

Hi @drill,

Thanks for reaching out. We support a number of BLE and Wifi printers on Square Stand in the USD 250- 350 range, like Star TSP143IIIW, Star TSP143IIIBi and TSP654IIBi. We recently launched AirPrint support on iOS which means we support all the receipt and kitchen printers listed here - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201311.

I will pass along the other feedback to our Inventory team.

[Ginkhao]

We use Square Register

1.  The ability to have the customer insert a chip card face up or face down.

2.  The ability to invert the customer facing display screen. We had to create a special stand because this inverts the display automatically when disconnected from the register, thereby causing the problem in the first point. All customers have to insert the card facedown for it to read. 

3.  The ability to check the connection to the credit card authorization server from the admin screen. Every once in a while we get into an area where the internet is not the best.  The only way we can check the internet is going to a support website through the register and see if it downloads a page. Just because our hotspot says it has internet does not mean the register is communicating. 

[nazluzzi]

HI @Ginkhao,

Thanks for reaching out. 

We have a feature in beta which will allow you to invert the customer facing screen on Bran. If you are interested in participating in the beta, let us know.

We will investigate the feasibility of #1 and have passed it along to the Hardware team.

Regarding #3, this is the sort of thing we want to solve with device monitoring on the Square dashboard. Thanks for the feedback.

[PartyManiaMD]

Oh. One more common sense functionality request: Can we please get the ability to turn off the warning when ringing up something that is negative quantity? For example bag taxes and items that are made to order I have to set to a quantity that doesnt exist.

Just a thought but if I'm scanning an item I already know I have the inventory, there should be a toggle for that warning.

[Rbbraids]

When will you guys have it to where the card is automatically saved when a client books an appointment online? I wouldn’t mind paying a subscription fee for that because I really need that back. 

[GContinuum]

I know a dog groomer that would kill for this feature to be added into the Square Register product.  She has to use a different app on her tablet to keep appointments, but if the register could handle it would help.