Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Online Fulfilment

[tranguyen]

Hello Seller Community!

On Wednesday, August 18th at 5PM BST, we hosted a Square Online Fulfilment Q&A with :

• Kevin Taniguchi, an engineer on the Shipping & Store Setup Team 
• Alex Smith, the Product Manager for the Shipping & Store Setup Team. 
• Faheem Zaman, the Product Manager for Pickup & Delivery
• Lisa Fong, the Product Manager for Self-Serve Ordering

Together, they have answered all your questions about Square Online Fulfilment settings, from shipping to pickup, delivery and self-serve ordering.

You can learn more about Square Online here. 

 

Ask us about Square Online Fulfilment

A few example questions:

• How can I restrict my shipping destinations?
• What’s the best fulfilment setup for a retail business/restaurants, etc.?

We’d also love to hear what new shipping & fulfilment features would you like to see! 

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.

[tranguyen · Accepted solution]

Thank you everyone who participated in our Q&A yesterday and special thanks to @alexws @faheem @ktaniguchi-sq and @lfong for joining us. You’ve given us great suggestions on how we can improve Square Online site and our Square offerings as well, and we’ll be sure to share this with the wider team.

To wrap up, here’s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

Integration with Royal Mail
We completely understand that fulfilling shipping orders without an integration with Royal Mail is very tedious and laborious. We don’t have a firm date that we can share at the moment, but it is a feature we are actively scoping. We’d love to include you in our beta of this integration once it is ready to get your early feedback.

Order email and customer communication
While Square Messaging is not available in the UK at the moment, you can add a personal touch to your customer communications by editing your store emails.

Automatic discounts & more coupon types
We are actively working on allowing for group discounts, automatic discounts (similar to how discounts work on Point of Sale app) and specific coupon types for fulfilment methods. We do not have a firm timeline for when these will be available, but I would encourage you to check out our Beta Community to join and potentially get access to new features first when we test them out.

More granular fulfilment settings
Features like setting fulfilment at an item level, charging by postal code, pre-order or setting cut-off time have been requested by a number of sellers. We’re actively working on rolling out a number of these, so please keep an eye for future Product Updates (and don’t forget to join our Beta Community to test our new feature as well).

[Parisfinery1]

Not at this current point, no.

[MJD]

Square are supposedly working on the acquisition of afterpay. 

[alexws]

Hi @Bethmcdonald, we’re unable to comment on Clearpay at this time, but Square did announce its intention to acquire Afterpay (Clearpay’s name outside of the UK) so please stay tuned!

[Savannah0127]

Hey,

Was this question ever answered? As i would also like to know this, i want to add clearpay to my website if possible.

[nella]

What is the best configuration of Square Online when some variations of an item that are being sold are in stock and others are not?

We need to allow the customer to order both in-stock and out-of-stock items at all times regardless of the current stock availability, the latter is on a pre-order/backorder basis and the former is for immediate fulfilment from stock; also to show the various lead times for each variation depending on stock availability.

Thank you

[tranguyen]

Hey @nella, I'm just gonna jump in here for a moment! Thank you for sharing this.I don’t think there is a neat way to do this at the moment as items need to be in-stock for customers to place an order online.

Pre-ordering is not a feature at the moment but we do get a lot of requests for this so it’s something we will work on bringing in the future.

[jeweller35]

Will there be in time something that allows a customer to set up an account with an Square online site

[lfong]

Hi @jeweller35, yes we are currently working on that now! We’d love for you to join our Beta when it is available.

[jeweller35]

That would be great, thank you

[OldHenAntiques]

Hello,

I get very confused over shipping settings.

Is it possible to sell only to UK (as I currently do), but be able to offer international sales on a query basis?

I sell individual, unique items and the setting up of prices for each region had me pulling my hair out! Hence a UK seller only.

Thanks 👍🏼

[alexws]

Hi @OldHenAntiques, you can go to Square Online in Fulfilment > Shipping > Destination Regions & Rates to define how much you would like to charge for shipping in specific countries or for the “Rest of World”. Soon we will also be launching the ability to define a shipping rate and region for specific items. Alternatively, to offer international sales on a query basis you might consider adding a contact form to your site to collect your international customers’ information and then send them an invoice using Square Invoices.

[OldHenAntiques]

Thank you Alex,

I'll look into the invoices option 👍🏼

[alexws]

Hi @OldHenAntiques, just following up to let you know that we're rolling out the feature that allows you to define how much to charge for shipping for specific items, and I've enabled your account for the feature. To try it out, go to Square Online and click on Fulfillment > Shipping > Add shipping profile, and then choose "Custom profile". If you have any feedback please let us know!

[OldHenAntiques]

HI Alex, 

I've had a look at the Custom Profile. 

I'm struggling with the fact that each of my items are unique, so therefore, to set a price for shipping outside UK, I would have to individually price each item for each country. At the moment I ship within UK only (free).

To be honest, I would really need someone to talk me through it, unless I'm missing something obvious!

My business is relatively new, and part-time, between study.

I would love to be able to ship outside UK, If anyone can help.

thanks.

Rowena

[elliestreasures]

Hi, there's been some excellent questions already - I have two of my own:

(1) I've had some customers get in touch because they've been confused at checkout and couldn't proceed - usually based on entering their UK address.  I've tried to replicate the possible issue and wonder if it's to do with the UK postcode.  I've noticed you have to also enter the postcode that is registered to the card number that's been entered at checkout, which wasn't immediately clear to me when I started my investigations (I don't think this is general practise for UK online sales).  Please could you clarify if address postcode and credit card postcode need to match in order to successfully checkout and also whether UK postcodes can be entered with a space (as is normal for UK postcodes) or need to be without a space.  Ideally, both should be allowed so customers aren't confused (or guidance at checkout so they are aware).

(2) Someone else has mentioned about email sales confirmations.  It would be really handy if I can add a personal note to the dispatch notification email - the personal touch is often appreciated over a standard thank you message I find.

Many thanks for your help, Elaine.

[tonydow]

Hi Ellie. On your second point, you can edit the shipped email to add your own text. 
Dashboard / Online / Communications / Email & text alerts 

Scroll down to Item shipped, click the three dots on the right and then Edit.

Fully agree on your first point. The postcode field needs to accept spaces in the middle or end. Else have a notification that it’s needs to be in a set format

[elliestreasures]

Oh, thanks for that Tony, will have a look, that's very helpful.

[KingTechnicalAp]

The postcode issue during payment has been a problem for me as well. I have lost a few sales from it as customers get too frustrated to proceed. I called Support when it happened and they couldn't replicate the problem either leaving the customer with no resolution.  I agree that it doesn't seem to be general practise in the UK to require the postcode to be entered with the credit card info for online sales.

It's important for this to be resolved.

[tranguyen]

Thanks for helping out with this question @tonydow!

With regards to the postal code issue as well - the postal code should match the code the bank has on file for the customer. At the moment, customers should enter the postal code without any space.

[tonydow]

Hi Tra. It should be possible to remove any spaces programmatically. Failing that there needs to be some indication given to the customer regarding the required format.

[elliestreasures]

OK, so this needs to be highlighted at checkout for our customers, as this isn't general practise for UK postcodes.