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. 🙏🏻

[jewelcam]

I would like to add some info to this,  When I go to reports I need to be able to do a report on a certain item/Sku and then have Square pull up each time that item was sold for a period of time. When it pulls it up I need to be able to click on the item so it takes me to the details of the transaction so I can see which customers bought, and can view any NOTES that need to be viewed for that Transaction/Receipt or any other details about that item when it sold that would be on the receipt. 

It's kind of like how we can look up all a customer's buying history. I would need to do the same thing for an item/Sku.

See the history of who bought it and BE ABLE to click that transaction to view the receipt. 

Hope that makes sense. 

[homeprogreen]

That would be a very useful thing to be able to do in case of a product recall 

[Trish_Yarn]

I'm able to do that now by running an Item Sales report for the time period I need and then filtering by Item. You can then export the Details, which includes a link to the receipt. It's definitely more work than what you're proposing (your suggestion would be really handy) but a usable workaround.

[Trish_Yarn]

This wasn't my question, but I have this issue too. We often offer pre-orders of items that we haven't yet received. We usually need to limit the quantity of pre-order we take, so we mark a certain amount as "received" even though the actual product has not yet been received in my shop. 

---

@LeahfromProduct wrote:

Regarding receiving inventory, I can confirm it's not possible to back-date a Purchase Order or a Receive. Would love to better understand when you’d want to use this feature, do you typically need to receive inventory in the Square system after you’ve already made it available for sale to customers?

[tonik]

@themoose Thank you for your questions - see relevant answers to your order management questions below. 

Managing custom orders: with Square for Retail, you have the ability to create custom orders with fulfillment (for pickup or shipment at a later date) directly from your app. Just navigate to Checkout, add items to cart and tap on “Create Order” to follow the prompts for fulfillment. After you complete an order, you can manage it by tapping the three horizontal lines to bring up the main menu, and tap Orders. You’ll now see a list of your orders, along with bucketing based on fulfillment type and status of the order. Tap an order to bring up the Order Detail screen, and see what items need to be fulfilled. You can also manage completed orders by navigating to the Orders tab of your online Square Dashboard.

Taking orders without a payment upfront : the ability to take unpaid, or partially paid, orders from Square for Retail is not available currently but we hope to add this availability in the future.

[themoose]

Hi there, thanks for the response.  A couple comments:

- Not being able to take a unpaid or partially paid order is a show stopper for us.  We would need a way to take an order quickly and easily and not expect payment from the customer right away.  If that order could then be transferred to an invoice when it was ready that would be ideal.

- For managing custom orders, is the method you mentioned available on Square Register?  That is what we use in the store and needing to have another device is a pain.

Thanks!

[homeprogreen]

Could you do it as an estimate? I know that it’s possible in Square to do an estimate then accept a partial payment on the estimate then at completion turn the estimate into an invoice to collect balance of payment 

[themoose]

Finally getting back to this!  Thanks for the suggestion, I'm going to look into that.  First thought is that I currently have staff that is watching for orders to fulfill.  If I create an estimate they won't see it.  Also seems like estimates aren't available across all apps/platforms, such as the Square Register.  But will check it out!

[homeprogreen]

I have been running Square for Retail since it was released and overall I like it. Have to run it to get the advanced inventory features and the P.O. ability. Couple of things that are needed is a way to print out the P.O. from within the dashboard instead of saving as a PDF, jumping out of dashboard and then opening up preview to print. 

[LeahfromProduct]

Thank you for the feedback. We will consider this in the future.

[homeprogreen]

Any plans to add the ability to enter a discount to a purchase order? Right now we can add taxes, fees, to a P.O. then receive the items and the fee is automatically broken out across all the items in the order so you get a true cost of goods. But sometimes vendors are having a sale so they give say a 25% discount on the order. Right now it means that I have to manually change the per item cost for each item instead of just entering the negative number as a fee so it’s automatically broken out across all the items on that P.O.  not good when I am dealing with a lot of items and variations on a single P.O.

[LeahfromProduct]

Thank you for the feedback, making Purchase Orders simpler to use is a priority for our team. We’ll work to make this a reality in the future. Can definitely see how this would slow your workflow down.

[homeprogreen]

Ok 1 last question. I tried to break them out separately so it would be easier for the individual team members to answer depending on their area of expertise. I upgraded to the Square Register running Square for Retail a couple of days ago. Today I was adding an item variation and tried to scan the SKU into the spot it goes like I normally do on the IOS version and discovered that it won’t scan in. I ended up having to type in the sku and then save. Once it was saved then the scanner reads the barcode just fine for checkout. Is this a bug or a known limitation in Retail running on register? 

[LeahfromProduct]

Great question, in the Retail you’ll notice that we have two barcode attributes: SKU and UPC (also known as GTIN). Since we have both fields, you first need to clarify the barcode that you are scanning by focusing on the field (just tap it) and then scan. Let me know if this doesn’t work for you and we can look into it further. 

[homeprogreen]

Yeah I did tap the correct field so it would scan into the right location. Even tried the other location just to see if it was an issue with the way the barcode was printed. Didn’t matter what I did it won’t let me scan the barcode in while creating a variation. I know the scanner is fine because once I manually typed the SKU into the system and saved it I am able to use scanner during checkout 

[StuffInBalloons]

We had the same issue - except mine didn't scan after I entered it. I can create a new item if I scan the bar code, but I can no longer add it to a previously created item. I've reset both the scanner and the register, but it is not working in Retail so I'm guessing it is a new bug.

[homeprogreen]

Ok I lied, one more question. Is there a setting or a way to make it so the customers check in with their phone number at the beginning of the checkout process on the front display when running Square for Retail on the Square Register? I know that that’s the way it can be set up on the regular Square POS running on Register. As it is now in Square for Retail if the customer is paying cash I have to type in there information myself, check to see if they belong to any group like veterans or first responders that I give discounts to, check if they have a reward available and apply any available myself. This is definitely slowing down the process and it must be do-able since it’s available in the regular Square POS on Register. Since we pay a monthly fee for Retail it should have all of the features that the free app has plus the advanced features 

[KatieKarma]

Hi there,

We'd like to move on online store from BigCommerce to Square Online.

We're hoping  someone can point us to information on the process for moving our existing domain and if we can build /complete the Square Online store in a development environment and then turn it (switch from old to new) on when we move the domain - if that makes sense 🙂 

Thank you for any guidance you can provide, we really appreciate it!

Kind regards,

Andy

[keicollective]

Square Online lets you build everything and preview it without publishing. We did that when moving our website over, and continue to use the preview to build new things before they go live (like updates to our homepage when new items are released - we build everything beforehand and then publish it on the release date). 

Switching your domain over will depend on who hosts it currently. If you use a 3rd party to host, like GoDaddy, or if BigCommerce also hosts your domain the steps may be different. Square's support page already has pretty good documents for how to get setup if you use a 3rd party to host your domain. I'd go check those out. 

[Addieleeskitche]

Addielees i see some activities from Square forvthe amount $150.00 c as n that be explained  

[Addieleeskitche]

Explain the transfer. amont of $150.00 ftom square