Square Online Store: On-demand delivery available now!

[#1]

Hi Seller Community! Many of you have been asking for more delivery options and I'm thrilled to announce our Online Store team's latest product update: On-demand delivery.

What does this do? On-demand delivery enables you as a seller to dispatch delivery drivers from third party delivery service providers for orders placed directly on your website. Integrating on-demand delivery directly via Square Online Store offers you these key benefits:

1. Save on order commission
2. Maintain the customer relationship
3. Keep all order details in one place

How does pricing work? There is a flat dispatch fee of $1.50 for per on-demand delivery order and typically service providers charge $6-8 for deliveries under 3 miles. You can pass the delivery cost on to your customers, pay it yourself, or cover it for orders over a certain amount, e.g., free delivery for orders over $50. Other delivery apps can charge as much as 30% commission — when you apply this across hundreds of delivery orders each month, it can come out to a sizable amount of savings for your business.

For a detailed overview on how to get set up, check out this tutorial video below.

Check out this Support Center article for more information: On-demand delivery with Square Online Store.

Thank you for your patience as we worked to unlock this feature. Keep in touch and let us know as any other questions come up — we're constantly iterating based on our seller's needs during these rapidly changing times.

[porktaco]

OMG, it's actually happening! I can't believe this is real life. Finally, a fully integrated direct online ordering solution for Square. Pickup and on-demand delivery, gift cards, loyalty, marketing, payments... plus more. It's all there! Today is the best day! Love you @Tom and Square dev team for prioritizing this feature. We'll be back to Square Online Store with all locations by Aug 1.

[goldburger]

Hi @Tom, this is *very* exciting, just a few questions.

If Postmates is busy will they de-prioritize Square delivery orders? This was my experience with ChowNow/Door Dash where we would get 0% orders picked up even after making the order on weekends and evenings. 

Thanks again!

[ryanwanner]

This. Is. Awesome. Ever since we enabled deliveries on the online store, all our delivery orders seemed to hit when we didn't have the spare hands to run the order. This solves this problem and saves us a TON of money over the fees from Doordash and Grubhub! Great job all!

[pessosices]

This is absolutely incredible and a really great addition! I'm definitely going to strongly consider doing delivery now! It's a really great implementation, and really exciting, with big implications for so many sellers! Thank you Square!

[Melimelo]

Wonderful news! Thank you so much for making this possible.

Here's our next wish: enable programmed delivery for future date/time.

Kudos to the teams that worked on this project, you're amazing!

[zder]

This sounds interesting but,

• How do Postmates drivers ensure that food is delivered in its proper condition (cold items stay cold, hot items stay hot, food isn't damaged, sanitary food service practices are maintained)?
• What if there is a problem with the delivery? If a customer hired Postmates to deliver a food order before, and something went wrong with the delivery, the customer would contact Postmates. Now, if a customer orders delivery through a Square vendor, and something goes wrong with the delivery, they will contact the vendor, who will be held responsible for the error. Can a Square vendor using this new system trust that Postmates will give them the same level of support as a standard business customer who is on the Postmates platform?

[curt1]

Is it possible to split the fee with your customers? id pay half of the fee ,but the whole fee would kill me and that 6-8$ would be a deal breaker for customers of  businesses with less than 25$ per transaction.

[cohostcatering]

I second the suggestion to allow for future dates/times.  I actually won't be able to use it until then.  ☹️

[anhmazingfood]

@curt1 If you watch the video. It shows you that you can split fees by % or by $. You can also set max limit fee, free delivery on orders over $$$. etc

[curt1]

Yes learned that. Thanks! 

[QuyDang]

We love to have Delivery option on our website. However, we experience 1 case today, that we give the order to postmate delivery man and it is gone ... customers called in to ask where is their order. I don't know what to do other than replace order for them to come to pick it up. I have all Square customer service but they pass the issue to Postmates

[JoeOnline]

What will happen now that Uber has purchased Postmates. 

[ryanwanner]

Got our first delivery order with Postmates today! YAY!

However, we had a couple relatively minor issues for you to pass along, @Tom ...

-The Postmates driver was really late. She arrived at close to 9:00 when the delivery was set to be picked up at 8:30. Cold food=not so much. 😞

-When we called Postmates to figure out where the driver was, we had to give them the order id. The id was that string of characters that starts with del_ in the picture. REALLY easy to misspeak this id. (Capital O? Zero? Lowercase L? A one??) Any way to get that ID into an easily repeatable number???

[RabbitFoodGro]

Hi there!

We got our first delivery order today, success! One issue, though, is that the driver actually arrived before we ever marked the order as "Ready". The order was still in "In Progress" mode, as we were finishing packing it up for them. It was fine, the driver waited a moment for us to finish, but I was under the impression we had to mark the order as "Ready" for it to send a driver out. Is that not true? The driver was on time, which was good, but we were running behind due to a lunch rush. So are we to assume that the Postmates delivery time is what we need to pay close attention to, and bump those orders up in the queue? Thanks for any help!

[anhmazingfood]

@RabbitFoodGro If this is your first time dealing with 3rd party delivery service, that is exactly how they do it. For Doordash, if the prep time is 30min, at 15min mark, they will ping for a driver. Depending on where the driver is, they can arrive within a 1min or take the 15min. See if you can change the prep time for your online store. We made ours to 30min. I don’t know if it affects on demand delivery or not.

[RabbitFoodGro]

@anhmazingfood it is, thank you for the help! I'll go in an tweak the prep time and that should fix the issue!

[GrandmaSweet]

@Tom @ I am hoping that you will soon enable the ability to schedule deliveries without the third party courier, as we like to schedule and deliver our products personally. Thanks

[Kassi_]

Hey there, @ROKO - 

Welcome to the Community! 

I have moved your post to a thread about On-Demand Delivery to help with what you're looking for. 

Check out the main post by @Tom

[alyssaissofine]

Now that my old site has been effectively disabled (migrated to Weebly, and then I un-published it because we had already moved to the new site a while ago) I was totally excited to start taking advantage of the pickup and delivery options, specifically so we could have a free delivery radius/range. Heretofore, we've been offering free local delivery via a coupon code that would remove the shipping charge, as this would work on both online store front platforms.Unfortunately, we'd sometimes get "local" deliveries that were pretty far away.

Today, I tried to opt into delivery with Weebly. We are a very small business, so we fulfill all online orders ourselves, including local deliveries. Imagine my surprise when I encountered a fee for using "My own couriers". I contacted customer support to inquire about who would be charged that fee - me or the customer, as I've never encountered this before and it was not clearly outlined at all in the system. I explained to the rep that we do our own delivery, and wondered why in the world we would be charging ourselves an additional 50 cents to do what we already do? Rep told me it's basically an additional transaction fee.

I might be new to all this, but it seems really unfair to charge a small business to make its own delivery. Rep argued that it's a valuable feature, that we could be charged for a subscription to this service but we are generously allowed to pay a transaction fee instead, etc. I get it - it's a cool feature. But again, it seems really, really sneaky to charge me an additional fee to fulfill an order myself vs. actually using a third party to deliver.

Thoughts? Am I just overreacting? Guess it's back to the good old coupon code and hope that customers outside of our range don't take advantage of it. :'(

[GrandmaSweet]

I agree with you totally, they get a percentage of the orders and we can't even schedule the delivery on demand, so what transaction exactly is the fee for??? 

[Ale88]

I'd like to have a clarification regarding this: There is a flat dispatch fee of $1.50 for per on-demand delivery order that means the business is gonna get charged for that fee, there is no way the customer is gonna pay for it, right? So if I sell something for $10 my net income is $8.5 minus the Square processing fees, is everything correct?

[goldburger]

@Ale88 you can charge it back as a service fee if you want, but $1.50 isn't bad IMO when you consider you don't have to hire, pay wages, insurance, etc.

[porktaco]

Hey @Tom, hope all is well! I just wanted to check-in on Square's plans to incorporate additional delivery partners for the new O.D.D. feature? Unfortunately, Postmates is the laggard in my geographic area and we've found their driver network to be unreliable and inconsistent with order pickup and delivery. As a result, we had to switch our online ordering solution back to ChowNow which uses the Doordash driver network to service their O.D.D.option. In my area, both the Doordash and Ubereats driver networks have proven to be reliable and readily available to us. Thanks Tom for your help!

[Tom]

Hey @porktaco, thanks for checking back in here and sorry to hear about the driver network issues. I don't have specifics that I can offer on other services plugging into ODD on hand right now. Rest assured that I will be sharing your experience with the appropriate team members and circle back as soon as I have more info. Thank you for giving it a try and I appreciate your patience as I look for more details.

[orik]

Will it be possible to change the site design so that it is clear to users that delivery is an option?

Right now if we have both pick-up and delivery enabled, the shopping cart shows pick up and then simply says "Change" rather than "Click for Delivery" or other clear wording. Most users are unable to find the delivery option at the moment.

[AdamB]

That's a great suggestion, @orik. Do you generally do more pickup or more delivery? You can set which fulfillment type is default, so if your customers generally prefer delivery you can update your checkout so it shows delivery by default instead. To change that, go to Settings > Checkout > Advanced settings in your Square Online overview page.

[orik]

@AdamB we do far more pickup so we wouldn't want to change the default. However "change" is just not effective at conveying the information that there is delivery available and how to use it. 

[ZDeli]

I 100% agree with @orik's comments and think just a edit to the word "change" will make a huge difference.

[orik]

Also can Square please please please work with Instagram and other social networks to integrate "Square" as a food ordering option? Since Toast is on instagram's list it might just be the breaking point of moving away from Square.

[orik]

@AdamB - actually I just noticed that local delivery is already set as the default option in Checkout -> Advanced Settings but it still shows pickup as the default.

[AdamB]

Sounds like it might be broken, @orik. Have you contacted our support team yet? I would contact them so they can escalate the issue for you.

[ZDeli]

I have a question about giving customers the option to select pick-up or delivery before they start their order. I was ordering from a restaurant that allowed me to do this. I noticed that they use Weebly for their online order tool (see image attached). When I place an order through my own restaurant's website this option doesn't appear. I am wondering how I can get this pop up to appear for my customers. Not all of my options are avaialble for delivery - is this why this window won't appear or is it something I have to select in website settings?

[AdamB]

Thanks for your question, @ZDeli. Are you using the Order Online template or the Shop All template? I think that popup may only show if you have your shop page using the Order Online template.

[ZDeli]

I am using the Order Online Template.

[orik]

@AdamB I contacted support about this. It seems like in Square's relentless chase after that $0.50 "delivery" fee they have only made it possible to set delivery as the default if your shop does not support shipping (so that we smartass sellers can't encourage people to use shipping to implement delivery).

Choosing that type of shop ("restaurant features") resulted in such odd behavior (all items in all categories get displayed and need to be hidden one by one, which brings the shop editor to its knees) and such a waste of time that I can only describe it as surreal. 

It is also counterproductive to those of us who, during covid, have switched to also offering non-restaurant items which can ship. 

Now we're being further told Square will soon take away the ability to sell from a "Featured Items" section, which will make displaying our menu for the day an awkward exercise in creating a "today's menu" category and adding and removing items from it. 

Seriously...

[ShaunaD]

Hi all,

Have any of you guys received delivery orders outside of the radius that was set in the delivery settings? It's been happening to me more often than I like to have. Not sure what is making it to accept deliveries that are outside of your radius?

[AshleyK]

Hi @ShaunaD Thanks for reaching out! I haven't seen any reports of this. I would triple check your radius settings to see if there are any outliers. Otherwise, if that keeps happening I would contact Support so they can look at your account details.