Point of Sale: Using a scale to sell items by weight

[saumaya]

Hey everyone

I'm Saumaya, Product Manager for Point of Sale. We're looking for insights into businesses that use a Scale to sell items by weight to better understand how Square Point of Sale can service your needs.

Does this sound like your business? We want to hear from you!

Some questions to consider (Note: We are working on the ability to support decimal places, these questions assume that decimal places are supported while using a scale): 
1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

Thanks for your feedback!

[saumaya]

Does this sound like your business? We want to hear from you!

Some questions to consider (Note: We are working on the ability to support decimal places, these questions assume that decimal places are supported while using a scale): 
1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

Thanks for your feedback!

[#3]

Hello everyone!

Saumaya and team have been hard at work and I'm pleased to announce you can now link a bluetooth scale to iOS devices to sell items by weight with Square! 

For more details on which scale is currently supported, and the steps to get started check out this post: Square now supports scales. 🎉

[ryanwanner]

Hi @saumaya!

My business doesn't really need a scale linked to the PoS per se, but I know that's a HUGE thing in the community here!

But I will bet that the number one answer to your Questions 3 and 4 will be this: Square needs to be able to have decimal places in the items! Selling 1.5 pounds of something is a lot different than 1 or 2 pounds! Scales aren't going to round to the nearest whole number! 🙂

[saumaya]

Thank you for the response @ryanwanner! We are working on adding the support for decimal places for items as we recognize this is a huge pain point for sellers. 

Looks like your business uses a scale. What is your workflow like today while checking out items that you sell by weight?

[ryanwanner]

@saumaya Since I only use a scale to sell coffee in one pound and half pound increments, it's been easy to make Square work for me. I bag the coffee, people buy it, and we sell it like any other item on the system. I'm not the guy to give you insight here... 🙂

I do know that a FroYo place that's a wholesale client of mine looked into Square for their register. Simply becuase of the lack of decimal points is the reason they didn't go with Square. The fact that their current Point of Sale does integrate with the scale was just a bonus for them.

[KatJones]

The brand of scale probably doesn’t matter. Selling food we are bound by Weights and Measures laws to use “legal for trade” scales. The biggest issue is being able to use a decimal place. And enter product with the correct price and correct weight. When I sell 1.35 pounds of fish - I’m having to “manipulate” square into charging the correct amount by entering 135 sold and keeping my pricing at 1/10th of the correct weight. We should be able to add “Blackcod” $30/lb item and sell that correctly per pound. 

The only thing that would bridge the gap would being able to enter the correct weight (with desimal) so we can add items with the true pricing. 

[KatJones]

Also, we have to take our scales into have them re-certified every year... I would t want a square scale due to the wet environment and the need to print my labels off my scales. 

[randyesq]

1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

I don't use a scale. The products that I sell are returned to me by the item manufacturer with a weight on them.

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

N/A

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

Since I can't sell items by anything other than integer quantities, then I have to sell meat by the pound as meat by the 1/10th of a pound and then each unit by 1/10th of the per pound price. This is difficult for my employees at first, and terribly confusing to my customers. They were told they were buying 4 lbs of chicken @ $4 per pound, but all of the sudden they are buying 40 1/10ths of a pound of chicken for $0.40 per pound. Unless I coach the customer beforehand, they will ask why their order/invoice/receipt is all screwed up.

Also, I cannot ask customers to purchase by the pound on my website with this system. They will inevitably purchase a 4 pound chicken, but really, they are purchasing 4/10ths of a pound. I sell whole chickens, and there is no such thing as a chicken that small.

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

As others have said, make quantity a field which can handle decimal numbers. Also, it would be nice to have variable quantity inventory. For instance, if I have 3 chickens in the freezer at the store, they are all different weights. It would be nice to input all of their weights and sell them as a specific unit under the same item.

[psolberg]

You are making it Waaaaaay to complicated.   I dont need to track the product inventory. In fact, if it is being sold as a per weight in the item detail, you shouldn't / couldn't / can't track it with inventory.   Just give us an additional decimal place to allow for cost per lb.   

Example:   

Library Item:

Name: Chicken Breast

Manage Inventory: No

Cost per [Quantity|Weight]: Weight

Cost $3.99

Weight Unit: [Ton, Lb, Oz.] OR [Kg. G] Lbs

Sale Item:

Item: Chicken Breast

Weight: 1.2 (lbs)

Price: $4.79 <- Calculated

Whoala!  Done.   Do it!   Don't mess with scales.  Don't try and do everything in phase 1.   Just do that! 

[psolberg]

Based on the responses you have received, it is obvious that Square has not been listening to it's customers for last 2+ years.   We dont care about scales.   Do don't care (as much) about inventory.   We need to sell by the 10th, 100th of an item.   To support weight, we need a certified scale by weights and measures.   That scale provides the weight to the 100th of a pound.  Certain scales can print out labels with the price on them.   However some cannot.   PLEASE PLEASE... just focus on the initial request.   Disable what you must from inventory management to allow for decimal.   Once that is done, move on to inventory management or importing inventory (SKU's of items as a serial list of weights)   (Chicken legs - 1.23 lbs, Chicken legs - 2.32 lbs., Chicken legs - .35 lbs., etc).   The LAST thing you should be focused on is integration with scales.   Most all of them are closed systems anyway... BTW, I have a Hobart scale with printer however it is a closed system that requires Hobart software to integrate.   It's how Hobart maintains return customers.   

[Greatspirit]

We don't care about scales either... just decimal points. We have two businesses that sell products that require a decimal point.
One side is fabric and we must be able to sell 1.5 yards
The other is hardwood and we must be able to sell say, 2.25 board feet.

Rounding up won't work obviously and a convoluted system to divide in tenths invites mistake and the resulting voids, "returns" and unhappy customers.

[gcoughlin]

I will have to disagree on this.

A lot of Frozen Yogurt shops want the scale integration because the owners are not always in the store and not all employees can be trusted. I know hard to believe right.
Printing out a label is just an extra expenditure for a shop that already has a low profit margin.
When the item is being weighed, it is also being rung up at the same time, making a label is a waste of time for us and we would now have to buy a scanner.

Too many times I have busted employee's putting the item on the scale and then not ringing up the amount that appears on the scale.
Like weighing a cup of yogurt and the scale says $3.57 and they ring up $2.57 for that friend of theirs.
Integrating a scale into the POS and also allowing for the decimal point is something the programmer could do at the same time.
I have tried the inventory thing, but when I sell different flavors, change them out regularly, have toppings that are added and have customers mix flavors, the inventory side of the POS is garbage to me, but that does not mean it will not work for someone that has a clothing store or small gift shop.
Just because something does not work for you, does not mean it will not work for someone else.
I am pretty sure most of us that use Square is because of the flat credit card fee schedule and we are all small businesses.
I hope that Square will hear all of us and come up with something that will work across the board for everyone. Hell they are making enough money off of all of us to listen to all of us!

[crocart]

We own a frozen yogurt shop as well and we exactly have same issues as gcoughlin.

Currnetly we use Avery Berkel 6712-7 scale but I am willing to purchase any other scale if SQUARE can fix this problems.

Please add features to integrate a scale into square pos. 

[farmersol]

1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

a couple different scales: one is a small digital scale and the other is a manual scale. I don’t need my scale to connect with Square (and it’s too old to do that). Many of my entries are done in the office on invoices (I write the amounts on packing slips)

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

durabilty, humidity, weight (manual scale can take up to 50lb), legal for trade (digital scale)

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

I deal in fractional amounts on many, if not most, of my products as they are priced by the pound. (eg 8.25lbs of salad)

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

Allow for 2 decimal points for quantities. 

[b2berry]

YES! What he said. Maybe scale integration would help SOME people but overwhelmingly the forum posts related to this painpoint would be solved by this simple example.  Push scales to a future release, focus on handling decimal weights please!

[VanKalkerFarms]

1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

     6x OHAUS Aviator 7000

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

     The ability to use an accumulate button to keep adding scaled items together for a total.

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

   assuming that Decimals are added, then I don't see an issue as we can just type in the weight and Square can calculate and add the rest.

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

    Square can track the amount of an item sold for me.

[b2berry]

Like many others we don't care about scale integration with Square, we only care about the decimal point. We're a farm and sell many products but the biggest reason we've had to switch to another POS is the lack of support for weights; sorry, gaming your system with the 1/10th hack is ridiculous and a non-starter.

We use our scale to weigh our meat and print labels. At the POS we enter the weight at time of sale and the $/lb loaded in the system for the SKU is calculated by the POS we moved to, VERY standard straight forward stuff here, not rocket science.

We use square for some of our items we sell out at another farm location but would move all our business back to square if you just added support for weights.

[GlassJudy]

We don't use a scale either.  We're a stained glass retailer and sell by the square foot, but most sales aren't for whole square foot increments.  Using the work-around that almost everyone else here has adapted works for us but is very clumsy and time consuming at the register, and we have to maintain and merge two different item numbers for each type of glass (one for whole increments and a variable version for decimal quantities) in our accounting program.  Adding the ability to enter decimal quantities would be a huge help to us.

[TxFarm]

1. What type of scale(s) are you using today?

Not using any scales. Our meat comes from the processor prepackaged with the weight for resale. We need a solution to enter the weight.

2. What made you pick the specific scale?

N/A

3. What are issues you commonly face while selling items by the weight? 

When you use the work around of "tenths pounds" you lose money (and lots of it at times). You have to train your employee to look at the package of meat, find it in the items list then choose it. So for and example hamburger might be $8/lb. You have to enter the price in the item list at $/.80 and enter the quantity as 10 to get it calculate. Then the employee has to pull their entry back down and adjust the quantity to 10 or else they charge them $.80 for a pound of hamburger. They dont always do that. They "thought they did" or it was "really busy so I didn't check that" or a million reasons why. It really hurts the pocket book when they sell a steak that should be $18 for $1.80.

4. How could Square Point of Sale help you bridge the gap for these issues?

The decimal is a nice start but a long term solution would be to something that can trigger a request for weight when an item that is identified as a weight only item is selected. I know that's a bit much so just rolling out the decimal change will make things way better.

[MichiganFarmsta]

We are a farmstand.  About 50% of what we do is sold by weight. 

1. We are using 2 price computing scales.  Mettler Toledo (this model is disconituned) and Ohaus

2)These scales each have 12 preset buttons or price computing (preset tare and price).  So an items is placed on the scale and with one button push the price is displayed to the cashier and to the customer. (Quick effiecent and nearly fool proof). 

3) a) The cashier must now move to the POS, select the item and then enter the price.  This adds time. 

b) The reports only show the dollar amount sold. It would be nice to know how much of a product is sold.  (Prices fluctate due to market) 

c) In the POS, we often have different price points (prepackaged) and the varible price for the item sold by weight.  If you are normally skipping the details screen (because 90% is sold by weight) and entering the varible price, there is not an efficent way to exit the varible screen and select a prepackaged price point.

4) a) I would like to see an integrated scale that an employee could simply press another button on the scale to send the price and weight to the POS.

b) Allowing price to be entered with an attahched keyboard (number pad) would speed up entering the price in the POS, because the employees would not have to use the slow entry of the onscreen numbers, and the number pad could be setting next to the scale. 

c) rather than using a varible price, allow us to enter a weight (up to 3 decimal points)  which then computes the price in the POS. 

I included a picture of our current setup. 

There is a scale for each register and

[cabreramouzo]

Which scanners are you using? Are connected by wire to the iPads?

Thanks.

[kellyj]

@cabreramouzo

Looks like this question is mainly directed @MichiganFarmsta, Just wanted to ping them in for visibility here. 😃