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).

[skippy9643]

I would like the option the option to have different delivery rates depending on postal address we operate on the west coast of Scotland and its hard to manage delivery costs to the islands as this is an additional cost to us   

[alexws]

Hi @skippy9643, thank you for the suggested feature. We’ve heard similar feedback from sellers who need more granular control over how much to charge for shipping and delivery at the city or postal code level and this is something we are looking into.

[steve0973]

Hello

I’m a self employed driving instructor and would like to have the option to sell lessons online (no shipping).

I've tried already and managed to create items (as a service) and checkout links, but when testing a payment with Apple Pay a shipping error message is displayed.

any thoughts?

regards

stuart

[tranguyen]

Sorry to hear you're running into this @steve0973! This is something our Customer Success team can help look into further. When you can, please contact us directly.

[KingTechnicalAp]

Can you please explain how to print a packing slip for online orders? I can create and print an "Order" (which is what I'm doing now) to include when I ship but it isn't a formatted packing slip with nice customer language - and no option for a personalised message.

Thank you.

[tranguyen]

Hey @KingTechnicalAp, I don't think the ability to print out packing slip is available in the UK right now but I'm going to loop in @ktaniguchi-sq and @alexws who can correct me!

[ktaniguchi-sq]

We (myself and a few of my teammates) are working on this right now!  

[KingTechnicalAp]

Great news! Thanks. 

[Twiggy]

Would it possible to have the delivery address as a hyperlink to a map for in house delivery 

[faheem]

This is a great feature request @Twiggy. Do you especially want to have this on either your Square Point of Sale app, your desktop Order Manager, or both?

[Twiggy]

mobile device apps mainly - all would be great so we can plan route on main mac 

[AndrewN]

I'd like to be able to turn on or off locations for pickup depending on when order deadlines pass.

The use case here is attendance at Farmers' Markets, whereby each Market is a regular occurrence (e.g. every  Friday, or the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month). I need people to give me there order by say 5.00pm Wednesday for Saturday collection, beyond which any orders then go to the following Saturday.

[faheem]

Thanks for sharing that use case, @AndrewN. We are working on features that will allow you to set an order cutoff date/time for items that need to be collected later. If you’d like, I’m happy to reach out and enrol you in our beta program once you’re ready (make sure you’re part of the Square Beta Community!)

[AndrewN]

Yes please Faheem!

Can you let me know how to enrol for the Beta Community?

Many thanks,

Andrew

[Twiggy]

@Elyn  - you'll need testflight installed on your apple mobile devices 

[BeerSeller]

It would be useful if you could make item catagories visible/hidden/unavailable like you can items, this would allow for seasonal or special event catagories to be set up but without being on display all the time.

[tranguyen]

Hey @BeerSeller, this is a great suggestion! I can definitely see how making items invisible/hidden from a category level can help streamline your process. 

While this feature isn’t available now, the bulk edit action can help! You can filter items by category and edit them all in one go. 

[BeerSeller]

I'd love the ability to message customers (to their mobile phone number) from inside Square, any replies would come back to Square app on tablet/computer/Square Terminal. Equally customers could message me direct into the Square App rather than via social media

[tonydow]

Fully agree. The messaging in Square needs to be vastly improved. The current requirement for the recipient to have made a purchase, received a digital receipt and not opted out is too restrictive. Especially when the same recipient can be messaged from the POS app without these limitations. Plus, as you say, message to a mobile no. 

[tranguyen]

Hey @BeerSeller, just jumping in here for a moment! This feature is not available in the UK currently. At the moment, the ability to send messages is limited to only customers who have made a purchase and received a digital receipt from your business. We’re working to bring more functionality to the market soon so do keep an eye out for updates!

If you haven’t already, 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.

[MyCoffeeStop]

Hello,

Will customers be able to save their favourite items, while shopping online, to make future shopping orders easier? Or can a previously ordered items page be set up automatically for them? 

We have over 700 essentials on our site that people need to order regularly from week to week, or month to month and I would like a way to make it easier and less time consuming for them.

Any ideas on how I can do that for them until a favourites facility comes along? 

Thank you.