Q&A: Ask Us Anything About the Square Online Website Builder!

[AdamB]

Update: Due to volume and complexity of the questions, this event was moved to Thursday October 14th so our product team had more time to research and answer your questions. Thanks for your understanding!

Hello everyone! 👋

On October 3rd at 10:30 AM PT/1:30PM ET October 14th at 10:30 AM PT/1:30PM ET, we hosted a Square Online website builder Q&A with @xuanhua, @KSA100, and @BradS-PM  of the Square Online Product team! This was a great opportunity to ask questions specifically about the website editor used by Square Online.

[#2]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks again for taking the time to share your questions and feedback!

We ended up covering quite a lot more than just the website builder, but that’s okay! Everything you’ve shared with us will help us incorporate what you need into future updates to Square Online. If you didn’t get a reply, don’t worry - while there wasn’t time to respond individually to all comments, our product managers did read them and will consider that feedback for future updates.

As we wrap up this event, we wanted to recap a few different themes that came up frequently:

Digital item fulfillment: Though not currently available, this is something we are working on for 2022!

Category and item page customization: You’d like to have more options to add content to category and item pages. Giving you more options to make your item and category pages look how you’d like is important, and something we're working on. Stay tuned for updates in the near future.

Video on item pages: Videos on item pages would add another dynamic way to show off your products. While we don’t yet have this as an option, you might want to consider adding 360º images to provide some more dynamic views of your products.

If you haven’t yet set up an online store through Square Online - it’s super easy! Click on the Online link in your Square Dashboard, then click on Get Started. Square Online will walk you through setting up your online store in minutes.

Square Online will be adding a lot of new features in the coming months, both to the website editor and to many other areas of Square Online. Thank you so much for your participation!

[xuanhua]

Hey there! Could you clarify what you mean by 5 and 65? Are those Google page speed scores?

[MagpieIdaho]

I believe so, yes.  My page speed today is a 4 - dismal!

[xuanhua]

We are still actively working on page performances. The challenge with improving page performance on a customizable website builder is every site is different. We cannot predict what goes on a page because it is possible to add any sections to it. This makes optimizing the site performance challenging. But we have dedicated a lot time in these few months investigating something new to improve the performance.

[MagpieIdaho]

Thank you!  I can only imagine it's a tough job. 🙂

[xuanhua]

🙏

[Jchamberlin]

I have a question that has been frustrating me for months... (And No One apparently knows the answer)

   When trying to seamlessly connect to Google Merchant account or to Facebook Store using Fb Pixel, I have over 200 hundred items that do not qualify or are in some way ineligible to be posted on google merch...  All "Fix issue" links simply point to their policy webpages , many many pages of policy.  Google simply says to delete the objects and try again... This obviously doesn't work.

   Can't Square create a Closed-Loop system that checks all of my data to confirm its eligible for posting and if not SHOW ME, what is wrong rather than send me down a rabbit hole of infinite possible problems???

[greenpantry]

Hi Looking forward to this. My question :

I would like to set up a square online shop (we have others)  but am very confused about how to do it? Last year, I spent some time trying to figure it out but in the end I gave up. This is because I have 'shop' set up so that I can take payments and raise invoices but then I tried to set up a separate shop when your offer of new shops came through. However, it was not easy to design as I thought. What do you suggest I do? 

Lara

[AdamB]

Thanks for your post, @greenpantry. Was there something in particular with your Square Online store that you were having trouble setting up?

[dannyschmidt]

Hi Gang.  Thanks for meeting with us to answer our questions.

My question/feature request is about Automatic Fulfillment of Digital Products . . .

Weebly USED to include instant fulfillment of digital sales . . . but the feature was removed when Square bought Weebly.  I was told at the time the plan was to add it back, but it's been more than two years now (maybe three?), and the last time I talked to a product manager they said there was no plan for it on the roadmap.

So my question is:  WHEN are y'all gonna add this feature back?

I'm a musician and I use Square Online for my website store where I sell a combination of physical and digital products (ie CDs and Album Downloads) . . . and this feature has become a make-or-break feature for me, since more and more sales are digital.

If this feature isn't on the roadmap, I need to look for other store solutions.  So I just need transparency from y'all.

Thanks --

Danny

For more context, in case you need it . . .

Currently when a sale comes in for a digital product (an MP3 download, for instance), once I receive the notification of that sale, I have to manually fulfill that order by emailing the customer back with a download link or code to a third-party service (like Dropbox or Bandcamp).  This is problematic for a number of reasons:

1. If my fulfillment email ends up in spam, my customer never receives the product they ordered.

2. If I can't fulfill the order almost instantaneously, customers assume there was a technical glitch with the transaction process, because there's an expectation for instantaneous fulfillment, and so they write to me confused or angry.

3. It makes the whole store transaction process seem clunky and hacky and unprofessional, and that reflects poorly on my business.

4. It's totally unscalable.

What I'd love to see in this feature is this:

- When I set up a digital product on the store, I would upload the item (and MP3 or PDF) which would be stored on the Square server.

- After a sale is transacted, the customer would be taken a success page that included a link to the product they had just ordered, which they can then download immediately from the Square server.

- It's important that the download process be handled in the browser rather than rely on email delivery.  Email is not 100% reliable anymore.  An email receipt that also includes the download link as a backup would be acceptable, but not as the sole means of delivery.
- Ideally, the download link presented to the customer would be a one-time generated URL so that the link itself couldn't be copied and shared around the web . . . and the linked file (MP3 or PDF) would have a limited number of download associated with it via that URL.  I understand that's more complicated, and I don't consider it necessary, just desirable and ideal.

- Another ideal-but-not-necessary feature would be some sort of confirmation in my Online Store log that showed that the customer had downloaded the product they purchased.  I'm my own customer service agent, and having the ability to help trouble-shoot for a customer that's having difficulty would be great.

Thank y'all so much for considering my thoughts and concerns.

[byakki]

Yessss! And having to checkout separately for digital files vs physical files is also very tedious and affects sales, as you've mentioned.

[KSA100]

Hi @dannyschmidt, we plan to add support for automatic fulfillment of digital downloads in 2022. Stay tuned!

[dannyschmidt]

This makes me very very happy!  Thanks, @KSA100.

Besides keeping an eye on product announcement emails, is there a way I can track the release of this feature somewhere on the Square site or in the Square community somewhere?  

[Tania75]

Hi. Currently in my store I run cookie pre-sales with one (1) or two (2) pick up date options. The only way to set these options for the customer to select their preferred pick up date is to create modifiers against each product being offered.  This is frustrating for my customers.  Is it possible to allow an option when placing an order to select from the dates and times being offered??  I know there's a pick up option but it doesn't allow to select one off date's and times, well not that I've been able to work out at least.  I know a lot of other people in the same field as me have the same issue.

[faheem]

Hi @Tania75  thanks for sharing the feedback. This definitely sounds like a frustrating customer experience and we’re looking at how to support this use case better. We do support the option to change a location’s settings so that you can show a custom message to customers instead of the fulfillment time we auto-calculate and assign to orders. I’ve seen some sellers set up a new location to handle their preorders, and then use the custom message feature to communicate the pickup date.

Here’s how to set it up:

1) Click Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery

2) Click Edit next to your location > Navigate to Order timing settings

3) Next to 'Calculate & assign pickup times automatically', press 'No'

4) Add a Short Message to let your customers know when they can expect to get these orders 

[Tania75]

Thanks so much for looking into this and providing a suggestion around it in the meantime. I’ll look into that and see  what it’s like to see if it will work for me. 

[SaltyBae]

Afterpay Pay pal 4 zip pay!!! 

[BradS-PM]

@SaltyBae  - We are actively working on and testing Buy Now Pay Later payment solutions.

[keicollective]

Thank you all for your time! 

My asks are all around categories. We have over 5K individual SKUs in Square right now, and we've been delaying putting them all online because of the lack of clean navigation for our customers. The current shop is limited to categories and sort by options, but is missing custom filter options. This would be a GAME CHANGER for us and allow us to move a lot more volume through our Square Online shop. We frequently get DMs from customers who know what item they are looking for, but can't filter the shop down enough to find it. Square Online should allow us to add filter options to the main shop page!

More detail: We've used nested categories to accomplish both 'Shop by Item' and 'Shop by Artist' (we sell on behalf of over 80 independent artists) sections of our website. But there's no way for a customer to combine those to say, shop for all Tops from Artist A, or to shop for all Pins from Artist B. (can see our shop page to see what I'm mentioning: https://www.keicollective.com/shop/shop-by-artist/37?page=1&limit=60&sort_by=created_date&sort_order... ) 

Ideally, the shop categories would be used for item type and then customers could filter by the artist(s) they want to browse. It would also be a huge help to be able to add other filters like color, size, style, etc as they apply to our shop, not just the pre-set price range and item options ones that came out a little while ago (and we don't have control over showing those that I know of?). 

If items could be tagged with applicable attributes, it would allow customers to filter by combinations of those attributes in the shop page and it could also be used to help better auto-generate the featured collections used on other pages. In the website editor, Add Section > Featured Items could allow us to add all items that match the attributes of 'tops' and 'black' to generate a section without having to manually search for all of our black tops. 

Is anything like this on the product road map? 

[pomellaoakland]

When will you add the ability to restrict pickup dates by menu item or by category?  Restaurants desperately need this functionality for special menus!!!! 

For example, we pre-sell Holiday menus very frequently. Thanksgiving is coming up, and we want to be able to restrict pickup dates for Thanksgiving items to only the week of Thanksgiving.  There are a few workarounds, but none of them are ideal.  We really REALLY need this functionality!!  It is a major flaw and creates unbelievable headaches for our team because customers constantly select the wrong dates (no matter HOW much instruction we include) which screws up our reporting and fulfillment.

The only "solution" is creating a 2nd "location" and restricting pickup dates that way, but this is NOT ideal, as it's hard for our regular customers to navigate and understand. 

PLEASE HELP US

[faheem]

Hi @pomellaoakland -like you said, the main options right now are to create a pre-order specific ‘location’, and use restricted dates or turn off auto-assignment of pickup times and show a custom message to your buyers But that definitely is a frustrating buyer experience. We definitely hear your feedback and we are actively looking at how to make this experience better and more intuitive for your buyers

[Forginthecraft]

How can I apply specific fonts to specific text,? For example, I use a script type of font for my titles on non product pages, but the editor has automatically applied the same font to my product titles in the online shop. This doesn't really there. So is it possible to fully customise the fonts?