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. 🙏🏻

[keicollective]

We also really need customer profiles for Square Online. Frequent customers should be able to check their order history and order status.

We also really think there should be a wish list feature so that customers can save items to their wish list and then share the wish list with others! (we have a LOT of younger customers who send lists to parents of what they want) It would make sense to tie the wish list to a customer profile, but at the very least if someone could share their list and then the person who receives the list could quickly checkout we would have an easier time converting those lists to sales!! 

[tonik]

Thank you for sharing this feedback regarding the consumer-facing order manager need. We will share this feedback with our larger product team to explore potential solutions in this area in the future. Would love to reach out with more details! 

[repopgifts]

We'd love to see a couple features added to square for retail:

-being able to add the vendor to listings at the point of sale rather than only from the dashboard on a computer would help our reporting immensely.

-being able to undo a received purchase order, we accidentally checked in the wrong multi item order and mayhem ensued, we've also had items missing from an order and accidentally received. 

-it would be great to see thumbnail photos from the dashboard view of item listings, as we are trying to make sure all of our items are ready for e-commerce this would be helpful.

questions: 

1. Is there a way to bulk edit vendors or add items in bulk to a vendor? As we integrated to square for retail from regular square it seems like we have A LOT of work to do to get the full benefits from the reports. 

2. Is there a limit to the number of unique items listed that square register can support? We currently have thousands and continue to add inventory, the system seems to be getting glitchy lately, so we're wondering if this is related.

[keicollective]

We have the same issue as your question #1, so hoping a bulk edit option comes out soon! 

[jewelcam]

Hi I am aware the New Square Invoice Plus is soon to come out. My question is a much asked for request for over 4 years by many others on here which is will the New Invoice Plus adjust the qty of items that have a deposit on them? Like putting them on reserve or on hold so they can not be oversold online?  Thank you

[Bow_Lady]

I'm a small business that started off selling handmade bows at local market shows. I've now have expanded to a sub leased store front. how can i keep two separate counts on inventory thats in store & at market?

[keicollective]

we use locations to separate our store inventory from our event inventory. it's also useful to have locations setup for different local cities that we do events in so that the correct sales tax automatically applies when we are at the event. 

[cocosnap]

Thank you for hosting today. 

I am curious how many of you are high frequency shippers? I would find order creation (from the POS or Dashboard) with shipping integration (like the online store) to be extremely helpful. We do MANY special orders over the phone, items that are in our POS but not available online. We attach a customer to the order, but with things in its current state, we have to charge $0.00 for an item called "Shipping Address"  and input the address into the note section so that it will show up on the receipt. We then use that receipt as an order ticket. ...this leaves us typing in addresses and calculating shipping, and retyping the address later when we make a label. As a chocolate shop who does a TON of phone orders at Christmas, integration into Shippo from my POS, or even Dashboard would be amazing. Thoughts?

[cruisingcandle]

Hello Tom, 

We are new to the retail world. I have a candle business in Florida. Although, in the future I want to be able to ship around the USA although I know there are sales tax and big shipment costs when it comes to  FL to shipping to California. I have the upgraded square package and my retail store will be live soon but just dedicated to FL customers only at this moment until we can get shipping squared away. I worry about the sales tax between state to state. How does all that work? 

Thanks 

Cruising Candle Company 

[thoctagon]

Currently you can only apply discounts to specific times, quantities, items or categories.  I do sales by the Vendor. So in order to create a discount I have to search for and select each individual item for the Vendor I am discounting.   It would be so easy to just say - everything by VENDOR is 15% off - and select the Vendor and be done. 

[keicollective]

We also need this! 

[homeprogreen]

Have you tried setting each vendor as a separate category then including all of their items under that category? That way you could just set the discount to that category, set your end date and time, and hit apply 

[thoctagon]

Thanks but Vendors are vendors and categories are categories.  Our categories are things like Pottery, Jewelry, Fiber etc.  We have over 175 vendors. I think we should be able to do discounts for individual vendors.

[thoctagon]

We really need to be able to text or email gift receipts as well. We do not have a receipt printer.

I find this very frustrating and hope Square provides this soon.  Customers do not want printed receipts.  Maybe this has been fixed and I have missed it.

[TheAppleTree]

Hi ya everyone!  Thanks for an awesome product and continued progress to make it better.  We love the new inventory receive/count features (game changer) and many other things about Square for Retail are improving. 

We have some questions and suggestions.  We know every business and situation is different. 

1)  ETA on customer loyalty check in process for Square Register for Square for Retail?  It is what is holding us back from getting

the loyalty program.

2)  For us, the Discounts seem to be one of the biggest things we have to workaround. We have probably close to 10,000 skus and different skus on sale at different percentages.

2a)  We would also like a better option to sync discounts or sale prices automatically from POS to Square Online. All attributes included (item & category, quantity, customer group.)

2b)  Easier accessibility to scan a product to be put on sale. Right now the only way to add item specific discounts would be from desktop or laptop.  When a business has many items in a item specific discount, a person would have to scroll to very bottom of the page to actually scan the sku you want to put on sale.  Maybe a quick fix would be to move the "Add eligible items or categories" button to stay on the top instead of the bottom.  

2c)  Ability to scan discount directly from the ipad on the go.  All attributes included (item & category, quantity, customer group.)

2d)  No biggie, but would be nice on Square Register.  On customer view screen, when discount is applied to show sale price for customer to see per item based.  Right now, discounts are applied and shown at bottom of customer screen.  On our POS screen, it does show us the discounted price which is nice.  

3) Purchase Orders - When receiving a purchase order from ipad. It would be nice to have the option to scan the items and change pricing of items. When a company has large purchase orders, the select items to be received takes too long and is too hard to match up and modify if there are a lot of out of stocks or price changes on purchase order. There does seem to be some workarounds on this. We can just cancel the purchase order, then use stock overview, then receive stock from ipad. Another way is using the edit purchase order from ipad, which definitely works, but is not the easiest to train associates on. No big complaints from us, because there are definitely workarounds and we absolutely love the stock overview.

4) Advanced feature request inventory management - would be awesome to have an ABC analysis report. This way businesses can have a better idea what they to need closeout or buy more of. Even better would be to have an option to have that grade be visible when scanning a product from ipad to create purchase orders. If that is not possible, maybe an option of previous order qtys. history to be visible. We are super excited about the stock forecast feature and look forward to utilizing that more once the kinks get worked out!

Thanks for you time & Enjoy Life!

[KCfromProduct]

Hi TheAppleTree,

Thanks for your feedback and questions. We’re following up with our colleagues to get answers on the first two topics, but wanted to follow up with you on the latter two in the meantime!

3. This is great feedback. We can look into making the unit cost editable when receiving purchase orders on iPad/Square Register. Glad to hear you love the stock overview, there’s a new update coming where you’ll be able to sort stock counts highest to lowest or lowest to highest. Check it out, should be live around August 12, 2021.

4. We’re currently working on new reporting functionality, including an ABC report, and would love to follow up with you on that. Would you be open to chatting with us further? With regard to the stock forecast feature, could you provide us with more context on what you’d like to see improved? We’re also actively trying to improve this feature, so any details you can share would be extremely helpful.

[keicollective]

 Would it be possible to automate sending reports to vendors? 

Our 'vendors' are actually small artists who we sell their products on their behalf. So every month we send them a sales report so that they know which items are selling well in our store. It would be a HUGE help to be able to setup a custom report for a vendor that we can set the frequency and an email address to send to. 

[TCSlaguna]

Inventory Receive/Counting Feature:
1. It would be great to have a cloud backup of each person's scanning progress. We had one employee who lost two hours of progress because the app crashed. We immediately told everyone to click submit every fifteen minutes.
2. When you scan an item, the text input pointer is on the previous item. (Picture attached). You have click on the item you just scanned and then input quantity. This adds one more step.
3. If you manually input the SKU of a product you have already scanned, it does not add a quantity of one to the current count.

[Tom]

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. 🙏🏻

[jellresearchche]

We are new to the retail world. I have a candle business in Florida. Although, in the future I want to be able to ship around the USA although I 

https://globalsaleoil.com/category/uncategorized/

https://globalsaleoil.com/

https://globalsaleoil.com/product/crude-sunflower-oil/

[LeahfromProduct · Accepted solution]

Hello Everyone,

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

We hope your questions were answered—the experiences you've shared will help us as we continue to iterate based on your feedback.

As we close out this event, we wanted to do a recap on three themes that came up frequently:

• Better ways to receive inventory: making the process of receiving inventory easier is a top of mind for our team and there was great feedback about how we can improve the experience. 
• There are many ways to receive inventory in Square today so if you’re looking to explore our current offering, check out these articles: Manage Purchase Orders With Square for Retail and Manage Inventory with Retail POS App.
• More granular reporting tools: helping you understand your business so you can make well informed choices is a priority; you want more reports and more control over existing reports. 
• For an overview of some of the ways you can get a deeper understanding of your business today, checkout these articles: Square for Retail Reporting, Creating Custom Reports in Online Dashboard, Stock Forecast Square for Retail, and View Stock Adjustment History 
• Easier order management: with selling online and across many channels becoming increasingly important, you need easy and simple ways to fulfill orders. 
• For information about our order management tools, checkout these articles: Manage Online Orders with Square for Retail and Print Order Tickets with Square for Retail

Again, thanks for your participation. For the latest updates on Square for Retail, keep watch here: https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/retail.

For a review of other products we featured last month within the Seller Community, take a look at this post: Events in Seller Community, July Edition.