Q&A: Ask our Square for Retail Product Managers Anything

[Tom]

Hello Sellers! Our Square for Retail team hosted a virtual office hours session on August 11th, 2021.

Product managers @NKRfromProduct, @LeahfromProduct, @KCfromProduct, @MLBfromProduct, and @TonifromProduct lead this session.

Learn more about their areas of expertise below:

@MLBfromProduct: I’ve been a product manager at Square since 2019, based in the NYC office. My area of focus has been helping Retail expand into new countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK as well as integrate parts of the Square Ecosystem into the Retail POS that are useful to Retailers (such as messaging). I’m really excited to hear about anything you wish was in the Retail App, such as being able to manage your team, as well as any pain points you have with managing your relationships with your customers that we currently don’t serve well.

@KCfromProduct: I recently joined Square in July 2021. As the Product Manager of the Retail Machine Learning team, it’s my job to think about all the ways we can use AI/ML to help you save time and grow your business. As such, I’d love to learn more about which tasks you’d like to see automated and what types of insights would help you run your business more efficiently.

@LeahfromProduct: I started at Square in 2018, where I worked from Square’s Atlanta office as a Product Manager on the Catalog team. I have since relocated back to NYC and am now the Product Manager working on catalog building and advanced inventory features on the Square for Retail team. I’m excited to hear about the things that slow you down so we can help give you time back to grow your business.

@NKRfromProduct: I started at Square in March 2021 and am based in San Francisco. As the Product Manager for the Growth team, I’m looking for ways to help sellers better understand how Square for Retail can be valuable to them and expand our reach around the globe. I’m particularly interested in what you could use more help with learning how to do in the product or what type of information or tutorials you might have found helpful when you were first getting set up.

@TonifromProduct: I’ve been at Square since 2016, focusing on our hardware integrations for the last few years. I joined the Square for Retail team earlier this year and am focusing on order management, fulfilment s and complex transaction needs. Looking forward to hearing from you about any omnichannel needs you have, and how we can help serve you better.

Having worked on a variety of features on Square for Retail and more than 9 years of combined experience at Square, they answered questions and made sure your feedback went to the right decision makers. Learn more about Square for Retail.

A few example questions:

• How can I make sure I'm getting the most out of Square for Retail?
• What are the best strategies for fulfilling customer orders with Square for Retail?
• What’s the difference between a GTIN and a UPC?
• How can I make sure I’m getting the most out of my Inventory reports?

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.

[#2]

Hello and thank you to everyone who contributed questions this week. We appreciate you sharing your experience! I'm checking in at the end of the hour to let you know that the opportunity to post new questions is closed. Our Retail team members is working on some followups and will respond to more questions over the next couple of days.

Thanks for your patience and keep watch for updates. 🙏🏻

[juanjesussalina]

Hi,

Can you please help me to obtain my costumer code?

[ZestoIceCream]

I found discrepancies in the amount that was deposited in my account on 2 days. The square report shows one amount and my bank statement shows a different amount. I checked and there weren't any refunds on those days. Please advise.

Susan Goodwin

[ZestoIceCream]

I found that the discrepancy is in the fees taken out. Not sure why. Please help.

[dmcericola]

I've never used my Square Reader. Now I want to start selling. How can I try it out so I don't mess up with a real customer?

[TylerKing080105]

As sad as it sounds, I’ve been paying for Square for Retail, $60/month, for almost 9 years, while not knowing there’s a difference between Square and Square for Retail!  We’ve been using the free version all along.  Now, we’re trying to learn about Square for Retail.  It’s quite a bit more complicated that the free version.  Wondering what the best videos/training there is to get this figured out.  Are there consultants one can hire to help?

[XtinaDam]

Hi TylerKing[redacted], thank you for being such a longtime customer of Square! To help clear up some of the confusion, Square for Retail was introduced as an additional point of sale offering in February 2017, to provide more advanced inventory features and functionality, and a more purpose-built app experience for retail merchants. When you subscribed to Square for Retail, you gained access to new features in your online dashboard, as well as the “Retail Point of Sale” app on iOS. 

Here is an article that helps explain the differences between these offerings. 

Here are a few videos that may help you get set-up:

• Manage your inventory with Square for Retail
• How to easily build your inventory using Square for Retail (with barcode scanning)
• Taking inventory counts with Square for Retail
• Check out customers from Square for Retail POS app

Let us know if you have any additional questions or what other kinds of resources would be helpful. Thank you for the question!

[Grassroots1]

We have been using square for retail for about a year and I wish we were able to use the advanced inventory features to it's full capabilities.  Right now the most useful thing would be to sell bundles of different items while still maintaining our inventory.    I am currently trying to test the stock conversion - sell by feature, but we really need to be able to sell bundles of different things.   

For example we sell muffin & coffee has a combo, its discounted if you purchase both.  I currently have a combo item set up, so my muffin & coffee inventory are always off by whatever muffins I sold in the combo.  It would be great if  could sell the combo but it adjusted the actual inventory of each item.

We also use DoorDash, why can't square for retail customers get the same integration has Square for restaurants?  This would also very helpful to us in maintaining accurate inventories.  I currently need to manually adjust inventory for every item sold on DoorDash.  It would be very helpful if I could have all items sold on DoorDash integrate into our square for retail system.  It would save me a ton of time!   Thanks!!

[keicollective]

We currently do bundles by checking out the individual items in the bundle and having an automatic discount apply at checkout that reflects the bundle discount (you can do a % or a set dollar amount off). Example: we sell $3 stickers that can be purchased as 2 for $5, so an automatic discount is setup to take $1 off when 2 of the stickers are bought; there's about 50 different designs that can be included in this discount and they all keep the correct stock counts this way. 

Hope that helped! 

[cocosnap]

I have a version of this problem too. I thought I would be able to solve it with the new stock conversion feature, but alas, no. I sell chocolate bars, both retail and wholesale. They are two different prices, but pull from exactly the same stock. So, much like you, every time I fill a wholesale order, my inventory counts are off and I have to do a manual edit of the retail version. Any information would be appreciated. 

[homeprogreen]

From inside the item in your Square for Retail dashboard on computer you can set pricing tiers for items. That way for your candy bars you can set a price for your wholesale customers and a different price for your retail customers and have it pull from the same inventory item

[LeahfromProduct]

Thank you for the feedback about our sell by feature, bundling and compositions are a high priority for the inventory team at Square and it’s on our roadmap!

[regionwine]

Is it possible to have the customer entry fields on the Customer facing display to be customizable? Right now that setting is specific to the Square Register and doesn't reflect on the customer-facing display. Lots of other companies and ours need this feature desperately.

[tonik]

Unfortunately it is not possible to update any of the Customer input fields on Square Register, or our customer display at this point. Would love to understand: which fields specifically would you most like to customize?

[tasting_house]

Why doesn't square for retail recognize French accents when putting words int he search box? Gruyère and Valençay for example. Thanks!!

[specs]

No sure if this is for the Retail team or not, but the API between Square and Facebook/Instagram/Google shops is really bad. Many of the items don't merge onto those platforms. We luckily don't rely on shops on those for sales much, but its frustrating when we cannot tag products. Shopify seems to have this integration worked out well. 

I had asked for detailed variations since we started with Square Retail, about 4 years ago, and to this date, we still have to create workarounds, export inventory reports, and parse it out ourselves if we want more detailed inventory reports. I'm mainly interested in reports for each vendor, style, material, color, etc. The COGS report is mainly what we use to export and parse out ourselves. 

It would be nice to bundle orders as others are asking for as well. We sell prescription eyewear and sell many multiple pairs; it would be nice to see invoices broken down clearly for patients:

Order 1 - Opticals

Frame + Lens material + Coatings

Order 2 - Sunglasses

Frame + Lens material + Coating

and the ability to factor in discounts for each. 

[brianstanish]

Hi @specs, I'm Brian, a Product Manager from our Channels team. Thanks for sharing your experience with a few of our channel integrations. Can you tell us more about the problems you’re having with Google and Facebook/Instagram? If you’re seeing errors, then our support team should be able to help. If the integrations aren’t behaving how you’d expect, then we’d love to hear more about how we could improve them.

[TCSlaguna]

Hi Brian, 

With Facebook, a product post's image will crop to a height of only 530 pixels. That means we have to resize the images to look good in the given amount of space. Right now I create a 1000x800px picture with the images in the middle 530px. 

[brianstanish]

Thanks . I'm making note of this as a way we can improve the photo sync for the Facebook integration. Appreciate you sharing!

[specs]

Thanks Brian.

I have an number of items that don't merge over or get rejected for some odd reason or another, not allowing me to tag them on our social media posts. There's a complete breakdown with Google shops and I have not had the bandwidth to dive into rectifying the problem. I believe our Google Shops is non-existent. Facebook/Instagram are lucky if we may tag items or have items show up.

The way these social media "Shops" are set up is also not a very UI friendly situation, and not engaging/shoppable, but I suppose that's more feedback for those platforms. We don't do much sales on these channels so it doesn't affect me a ton.

However, it would be nice to link to our products page when we post on our social media channels. The current integration, or lack thereof, does not allow us to link very many products, which is the crux of my issue here. I have gone through hours of trying to figure our pixels and disconnecting and reconnecting. There has got to be a better process, and I see friends on Shopify having none of these issues. 

[brianstanish]

Thanks . Generally when a product is rejected it's based on the policies of the channel so I'd encourage you to follow up with either Google or Facebook depending on where you are seeing the rejections.

Google Shopping is a bit different from Facebook and Instagram in that you don't have your own Shop, but your items will appear in searches within the Google Shopping tab. They still apply their algorithms to determine relevancy so there is no guarantee that your items show up there, but you can increase your odds by filling in all of the attributes you see in the Listings Manager (Items -> Channel Listings -> Click into item -> Edit listing details).

Sorry to hear you are also having trouble with the Facebook pixel installation. I understand how frustrating that can be. We are looking at ways we can improve that process to ensure that it's both simple and robust. In the meantime, please take a look at this post in the Seller Community in case you find it helpful.

[apridefulplace]

We NEED a customer online profile section!!! Customers are begging for a chance to be able to create an online login to manage their orders and have an online account! Why is this not a feature yet?!?!?! I have customers constantly asking for this and I am practically losing money by not being able to offer our patrons a better user experience. I would go and use a different ecommerce site but Square has such a hard time with being friendly when it comes to inventory syncing with 3rd parties.