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. 🙏🏻

[Dayhill]

we need a quicker way to get out of a rejected card read. When either card declined or network down there needs to be a way to get out of the sale quicker. As of now when declined you have to wait to long to get back to select new payment Also Bottle deposit function would be good

[TCSlaguna]

Hi Everyone! 

Under: Inventory -> Vendors -> (Select Vendor) -> Item Library   we would love to see "Quantity on Hand"

We order products from different vendors. Many times, we order the same product (i.e. incense) from different vendors. Who we order from this month can depend on many factors.

Unfortunately Item Library -> Export -> Filter by Default Vendor does not solve this for the following reasons: 

1) Having to run a report, export to Excel and filter, to order from a vendor takes quite a bit of time

2) Default Vendor means the other three vendors we order incense from will not show in the report. To reorder, we have to match items from vendor library to item library and write the quantities down. This process takes a long time if a vendor has 50 products.

3) Sometimes a vendor will stop by and ask if we need anything. We will not have time to go through the process of matching items from vendor library to item library and writing the quantities down in the time the vendor is there.

@LeahfromProduct  we would love your insight on how we could pull up the data faster. 

Thanks in advanced for considering it. Keep up the great work!

[specs]

I agree. Inventory reporting is a bit clunky and I had been asking since 4 years ago for a better way to break down reports (ie. pull reports per vendor, style, color, material, etc). Making a more user friendly reporting system and real customizable reports would add so much value. 

[LeahfromProduct]

 if you were to prioritize the most helpful ways to breakdown a report for your business, what would be the top priorities? Would it be vendor, style, color and material?

[specs]

Yes, that would be great. Even better would be the ability to customize variation categories and I'm sure it is different for everyone's business. But on the high level, vendor, style, color, material are general ones which should be beneficial to most. 

[LeahfromProduct]

We’ll definitely take this feedback to our design team to make adding many variations to a purchase order easier, we’re very interested in where “bulk flows” like the checkboxes would be most useful so this feedback is very specific and helpful.

In the meantime, do you have access to Square Stand or iPhone in-store? With the new Create Purchase Order from an iOS device feature that's currently rolling out as part of the 5.70 release, you can scan variation barcodes to add them to a purchase order quickly (you can scan using a Socket Mobile bluetooth scanner, a USB scanner plugged into Square Stand, or with the built-in camera scanner). This will allow you to add items to the purchase much faster than search in Dashboard. We’re also working on the ability to import a Purchase Order via a CSV file into Square if you like spreadsheets.

[TCSlaguna]

How about viewing quantity on hand of all products from a vendor? 

[Trish_Yarn]

1. Streamlining the creation of Purchase Orders is much needed. In my retail shop, I often have dozens of variations per item. It would be great to be able to add items to a PO by a checkbox in the Item page itself in my dashboard, instead of one-by-one in the PO system. I'm aware of the feature to create POs automatically for items predicted to run out soon, but that feature does not address my issue.
   
   
2. When a customer uses multiple forms of payment for one purchase, they are prompted after each form to get a receipt, rather than one receipt covering the whole transaction. This is tedious and unnecessary.
   
   
3. Is there a way to download the history of an Item (i.e., showing restocks, receiving Items, etc.)? I've resorted to copying and pasting which is clunky and not convenient.
   
   
4. Orders made through Weebly often create duplicate Customer records which I then have to manually merge with their already existing record. What can we tell the customers to do to avoid this? 
   
   
5. Is there a way to auto-save a cart in the iPad app? Often times we begin ringing up a purchase, then need to access a website to answer a question for the customer, and then when we go back to the SfR app, the cart has been reset.
   
   
6. Occasionally we accidentally mark an item in a PO as received, only to discover once the PO has been saved that the item was left out of our order. It would be helpful to be able to un-receive an item.
   
   
7. It would also be helpful to be able to add shipping costs when creating the PO, rather than waiting to add them after items have been received.
   
   
8. As far as I can tell, there is no way to bundle multiple Items, or multiple variations, to make a kit. Instead, we have to create a new Item for the kit, then manually adjust inventory of the individual components, add inventory for the kit, and then reverse the process once the kit is no longer available for sale. 
   
   
9. Putting items on sale requires separate processes for in-store purchases via the SfR app and online purchases via Weebly. This duplication of work can create significant delays and also introduces the possibility for error (especially when the sale price is a percentage of the original price; Weebly requires that the sale price be manually entered). I know there's the option to use a coupon, but sometimes we prefer not to use that.
   
   Similarly, after the sale is over, it is time consuming to remove the sale price from the various Items in Weebly, while it's much easier in Square.

[tonik]

@Trish_Yarn  Thank you for all these great questions! See answers broken out to some of your questions in the thread below.

2. Printing multiple receipts: we understand that any slowdown in the customer checkout process can be frustrating.
However, we are required to give Buyers the option to have a proof of each payment, and when there are multiple forms of payment associated with one cart - each of those is a separate transaction that is eligible for its own artifact. We give the option to consumers to print (or elect not to) each of those receipts in order to give them flexibility in how they maintain their records based on the various forms of payment. We try to make the opt-in / opt-out process as quick as possible in each of these steps, to save your customers’ time. Thank you for understanding and let us know how else we can help!

5. Saved carts: Yes - saving carts with Square for Retail is available and easy. Just add items to your cart, and if you need to switch workflows - tap on “Save Cart” at the bottom of the of the cart building view. You may name the cart and add notes to it, then tap on “Save”.

Reopening a cart is just as easy, and you can reopen a cart at any of your points of sale at a location:
1) Navigate to “Checkout” applet at the bottom right on your screen
2) Tap on 'Saved Carts' at the top left of your screen \
3) Select the cart you are looking for and it will reopen in the cart screen
4) Add or edit items in the cart and checkout

[keicollective]

RE: 2. Printing multiple receipts: Would it be possible to give them the option to have one receipt per checkout with the payments broken down at the bottom? I've seen restaurants do this with split payments. 

Ideally the default would be that they get one receipt with the multiple payments on it, and there be an option for split receipts that they have to select if they need that granularity for their records.  

[Trish_Yarn]

@tonik Seconding this suggestion. 

[tonik]

4. Duplicate customer records with Weebly vs. POS: Thank you for highlighting this issue. I have shared your feedback with your engineering team and we are investigating further, and may reach out to you directly to troubleshoot.

[Trish_Yarn]

@tonik Thanks for your response. Regarding Saved carts, you didn't address the issue I raised. We save carts regularly, but I'm looking for an auto-save feature, or an explanation why navigating away from the app briefly empties the cart. Remembering to save the cart before navigating to the browser or another app can be tricky when you're multitasking. It would be great at least if the existing cart remained available even when the Retail app is running in the background.

[LeahfromProduct]

We’ll definitely take this feedback to our design team to make adding many variations to a purchase order easier, we’re very interested in where “bulk flows” like the checkboxes would be most useful so this feedback is very specific and helpful.

In the meantime, do you have access to Square Stand or iPhone in-store? With the new Create Purchase Order from an iOS device feature that's currently rolling out as part of the 5.70 release, you can scan variation barcodes to add them to a purchase order quickly (you can scan using a Socket Mobile bluetooth scanner, a USB scanner plugged into Square Stand, or with the built-in camera scanner). This will allow you to add items to the purchase much faster than search in Dashboard. We’re also working on the ability to import a Purchase Order via a CSV file into Square if you like spreadsheets.

[Trish_Yarn]

Uploading a PO by spreadsheet would be fantastic! We use Square Stand and have the Retail app on a phone, so that option would definitely be of interest. But the spreadsheet option would help immensely!

[Trish_Yarn]

Even being able to add all Item variations and then delete the ones I'm not ordering would be helpful.

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@LeahfromProduct wrote:

We’ll definitely take this feedback to our design team to make adding many variations to a purchase order easier, we’re very interested in where “bulk flows” like the checkboxes would be most useful so this feedback is very specific and helpful.

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[themoose]

- Receiving inventory - is there a way to back-date when receiving inventory?  It appears this defaults to the current date always with no options for changing.

- Receiving inventory - would love an option where I can put in a total cost for the inventory received along with qty, then have Square figure out the unit cost.  Stopping to calculate unit cost when receiving inventory takes a lot of time for us!  We buy a quantity of items at a total cost and the invoice we get from the vendor does not show a unit cost.

- Need more granular options for determining COGS each month.Need to be able to filter the COGS report by specific items.

- Order management - need a better way to manage customer orders.  We take orders that may or may not be inventoried items.  And usually for a date sometime in the future.  Also, we don't always take full payment when the order is placed.  Sometimes no payment.  Need a report/screen to show a list of custom order with the status of each and the required completion date.

Thanks for doing this!

[LeahfromProduct]

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? Is there a way we can make receiving inventory more efficient when it physically arrives?

Regarding unit cost calculations, good to know that this is something that is slowing you down, would the ideal format be to add the total for each line item and split the cost evenly across each variation or do you typically only order one type of item per purchase order?

Can you tell me more about why you want to filter the COGS report down to view only specific variations?

[specs]

I'm not sure about others, but sometimes our customers order product we don't currently have on hand, we order it from our vendors, and deliver to the customer. To complete something like this, we typically add a "custom amount" and make notes of the item that needs to be ordered, and we don't check it into inventory when it arrives since it was technically never taken out of inventory. 

Is there a better way to streamline this? or would a back-date of a purchase order/inventory item be a good solution here?

[themoose]

Hi Leah, thanks for the reply.  See my comments:

For receiving inventory, the most common scenario for back-dating is we receive inventory, our staff graciously unpacks it and either puts it out on shelves or into back-stock, but then forgets to actually receive it in Square.  Or there have been times when its so busy we're selling items before getting them into inventory.  I typically review these invoices days later and there are times I need to update.  If I could backdate, it would help with my own auditing to make sure a package that arrived on a certain date was also received on a certain date.  We are a small shop!

For unit cost calculation, we are a candy store and order a variety of items with each order.  We don't use PO's specifically.  But when an order arrives, there might be 10 different boxes of candy in there.  Each with a random number of the actual candy inside the box.  So if I get a box of 24 candy bars, I only see the total price of that box.  But when I receive the item, I need the unit cost, not the cost of the box.  So if I could enter the total price and the qty and automatically evenly split the cost of the box, that would be ideal.

For the COGS, in my accounting system I split COGS by certain vendors and in another case by item category.  Right now I export the COGS report from Square and then do my filtering in Excel.  If I were able to have more filters within Square it would be nice.

Thanks again!