Square Online Q&A: How can we help grow your online orders?

[Tom]

Are you in the food & beverage business and looking to increase online orders, to expand your marketing reach, or are you just getting started with your website? You've come to the right place.

The Square Online team wants to ensure that your business is set for success for this year's holiday shopping season. Whether you’re just starting your online ordering page or if you’ve had one up and running for a while, we want to know how we can help.

On Wednesday, October 26, we hosted a Q&A in this thread that covered the following topics:

• Menu Optimization: Set up your menu to drive the most checkout conversions.
• Email Marketing: Reach your customers with updates and promotions.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Ensure that customers can find you online.
• Social Media: Stay connected and grow your reach.
• On-Site Marketing: Raise awareness about online ordering at your restaurant.

Have a look at the thread below to see what questions sellers brought up and learn more about the solutions that Square has to offer!

[emusumano]

Hi @greenvida,

If time-based categories don’t help your situation and you need to specify item fulfillment to only be available on a certain date, we’ll relay your need to the product team as feedback. Thank you!

[genanh]

We are a cafe, food truck and coffee roaster. What is the best way to set up our website so that each business stands on its own yet is still one company?

We are trying to set up coffee subscriptions and found where to create the monthly recurring transaction but can’t figure out how to connect it to an item so that customers can order it. 

[emusumano]

Hi @genanh,

For the first part of your question, it depends on if you want these three entities (cafe, food truck, and coffee roaster) to be the same brand or their own. If the same, then you can keep one website and have promotions on your homepage that drive to landing pages for each. If different brands, you should consider separate websites for SEO purposes, and link to each website from a parent domain (like how a hospitality group will have a parent website that promotes each of its restaurant concepts, each with their own domain).

For the second part of your question, we recommend contacting our support team at 1-855-700-6000.

[Thebackdoor612]

We have online ordering currently with multiple categories with one of the categories being pizza. We would like to offer a “2 for 20” special on select pizzas  for Wednesdays and Thursdays and full price on Fridays and Saturdays. Is there something I can set up to create this scenario or do I have to go in the system and manually change the prices every time? The normal pizza prices vary between $14 and $17.

[emusumano]

Hi @Thebackdoor612,

At this time, you cannot schedule a recurring sales price change for an item by day of week. With that said, you can schedule a price change or control the future availability of an item by date. For example, let’s say that you have a surplus of a certain ingredient, and you want to set the price to go down during a shoulder time. You could do that. More on that here. The limitation is it’s not recurring by day of week. It’s one-time.  

[mrgspizzas]

How can I set up the same deal to online customers that in-store customers get?  Also, my online presenting site is our business name but some say it is too long for customers to remember. Could this be the reason my online business is slow?

[emusumano]

Hi @mrgspizzas,

Good news! You can use Square Marketing coupons to apply to both dine-in and Square Online orders, right out-of-the-box (the exception here being category-based coupons).

[JHOPPE]

How can we make customer feedback public? We get great reviews but we only see them internally. I think the positive reviews would help drive sales. Thank you!

[emusumano]

Hi @JHOPPE,

While there isn’t currently a way for you to mark for your customer’s reviews on Square to become public (this is a feature request that has been passed along to our product team!), the best way to garner public reviews currently is to ask your happy customers to review you on platforms like Google and Facebook. More on Google reviews here and Facebook here. You can actually use Square Marketing to get more Facebook reviews. Just go to Automations and select “Get more Facebook Reviews.” 

[smallcatering]

We are trying to set up our menu for online orders, but with serving pizza, there are alot of modifiers. how can we can we simplify the process? also how can we ensure that square will offer delivery to our customers locally?

[Shoplocal1234]

It took us a lot of tweaking. We originally did have square set it up for us but recently redid most of it. The main thing I think helped was hiding the item from inside the restaurant and creating a separate same item with different modifiers for online customers.  As far as delivery we still do our own in house. Square for Restaurant's seems to be moving in the right direction is just been a little slower for the pizza business owners but I think it will get there. 

[emusumano]

Hi @smallcatering,

We recommend having fewer than 10 modifiers per menu item. Beyond that, it gets overwhelming for your customer to decide. And for delivery, you should absolutely turn on On-Demand Delivery to ensure that your local customers can receive your food to their doorstep without needing your on couriers on staff! 

[Grabngrub]

I am a mobile food truck always on the go.  How can we automatically update our location and hours of operation to let customers place pick order at the particular location? 

[emusumano]

Hi @Grabngrub,

There’s not a way for you to currently schedule location updates, because the wide majority of our customers are based in a permanent location. We can add this as a feature request, but for now, the best way for you to update your location will be for you to log in to your Square dashboard and go to Online > Fulfillment > Pickup and Delivery > Edit. You can edit your address and hours in the Location Details section.  

[bhgbrandmanager]

We would love to create items for pre-order on specific calendar days, the workaround we have to use is really difficult for customers. Are you rolling this feature out any time soon? 

We also would love to be able to attach sides and add on to menu items and have them print to their correct expo station. 

We'd love improved reporting on kitchen performance. Are the plans to add graph features to show ticket time trends over a full day like you can see sales trends? 

Are the plans to upgrade the inventory functionality? We do a 'pick two' and aren't able to make the inventory update for both the pick-two item and the regular menu item. Am i missing a function? 

[emusumano]

Hi @bhgbrandmanager,

Let’s answer these questions one at a time: 

Pre-orders

We do have a Preorering product that is about to go into beta! We encourage you to join the community here. 

Attaching sides & add-ons to print to specific expo stations

At this time, you can only control which items will print to certain printers based on its category.  Modifiers (the sides and add-ons) cannot be separately routed today. More on assigning printers here.

Ticket trend graphs to be included in Reporting

We are happy to add this as a feature request for Reporting! Right now, your best way to see sales over time is to go to Online > Reports > Online Sales for Square Online or to Reports from your main dashboard and then Sales Summary from your main Square dashboard. 

Inventory updates

As far as I know, it’s not on the roadmap to handle the inventorying type that you mention, but we can log this as feedback for our team.

[branchburgsbest]

Hey Tom,

Maybe some more help with modifications for us with more customizable menus. Do you offer 1:1 services where someone can assist with modifiers by going over the menu & needs of the customer & how they differ from what the restaurant sees when receiving/inputting orders?

Thanks!

[branchburgsbest]

Also, adjusting delivery times separately from pick ups within online ordering. Online ordering times may differ depending on pick up or delivery in food industry so it would be nice to separate them

[emusumano]

Hi @branchburgsbest,

Good to hear from you again! You can log in to your Square dashboard and go to Online > Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery > Edit. From here, you can edit each fulfillment type individually. While the prep time stays the same for both fulfillment types, what you can do is edit your Delivery to accept fewer orders per every 15 minutes. This will bump out the estimated time to a customer to the next 15 minute slot once you’ve accepted a maximum volume for any 15 minute increment.  

[emusumano]

Hi @branchburgsbest,

You can call our customer success team Monday to Friday, 6am to 6pm PST at 1-855-700-6000. We’d be happy to talk you through how to best lay out your menu based on both the needs of your customer and the operations of your staff.  

[HopIceCream]

Hello! I am interested in learning more about all of the bullet points mentioned, but specifically this one...

I created my Square Online ordering page but what are some ways that I can let people know about it?

Thanks!

Greg

Owner

The Hop Ice Cream