50 cent Delivery fee?

[Wavemaker]

Can someone explain to me the 50 cent delivery fee that square chargers per order when delivery is selected? Starting July 1st?

Why does this exist? Delivery costs ME money. What's it to square if someone picks up their order or I deliver it for free?

[#2]

I wanted to take a minute to continue the conversation around this topic, answer some of the questions that have come up, and address some of your concerns.

Why are you charging a fee for deliveries?

Instead of charging a high fixed monthly fee or a large commission, we chose a business model where we are only successful when you are. Having a sustainable business model also enables us to continue to deeply invest in building out a competitive delivery and online ordering platform with all of the functionality that you need to be successful. 

What about scheduled deliveries? (or other needed features)

This is a new platform, and we hear your feedback that there is some missing functionality that you need. We have been working very quickly on releasing updates to the product (you can see the release notes for April and May). We are currently building scheduled delivery functionality and plan to launch it soon, and are eager to hear your feedback on what other features would be critical to help you operate more effectively. 

How can I afford these fees on top of others?

Anyone who has had to make the shift online over the last few months can attest that online selling is a different experience with its own unique challenges. Online orders typically come with a different set of fees, including different processing rates (read more about why here), and it is important to adjust to ensure that your margins remain sustainable. In addition to custom delivery fee settings, we also offer an optional service fee setting, which you can learn how to configure in our local delivery support article.

We appreciate your feedback and the opportunity to engage and discuss here. We are dedicated to building out a fully featured delivery and online ordering platform, and to be your partners in helping you build a direct channel to engage with your customers. We want to add value to your business by streamlining your operations, saving you and your employees’ time, and improving the delivery experience for your customers.

Please let us know what features you need, and what we could do to improve the platform -- we are very quickly releasing new functionality and are prioritizing what we build based on your feedback!

[Joe · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @Wavemaker - thanks for taking the time to reach out to us here on the Seller Community. We can help provide some clarity, here.

Due to Seller hardship resulting from COVID-19 related restrictions, we announced a fee waiver for 3 months (April, May, June). 

As of this week, we have begun contacting Sellers again to inform them that fees will resume. Sellers will be charged 50¢ per order for all local delivery orders occurring on and after July 1st. This fee will be subtracted along with current processing fees and will be visible in the seller Dashboard.

It's important to note that this fee is associated for Seller-powered deliveries only. Pickup orders have no charge and courier-powered delivery will have separate fees associated.

You can learn more about Square processing fees and pricing here. 

Let me know if you have any clarifying questions! We are here to help.

[gknight · Accepted solution]

I wanted to take a minute to continue the conversation around this topic, answer some of the questions that have come up, and address some of your concerns.

Why are you charging a fee for deliveries?

Instead of charging a high fixed monthly fee or a large commission, we chose a business model where we are only successful when you are. Having a sustainable business model also enables us to continue to deeply invest in building out a competitive delivery and online ordering platform with all of the functionality that you need to be successful. 

What about scheduled deliveries? (or other needed features)

This is a new platform, and we hear your feedback that there is some missing functionality that you need. We have been working very quickly on releasing updates to the product (you can see the release notes for April and May). We are currently building scheduled delivery functionality and plan to launch it soon, and are eager to hear your feedback on what other features would be critical to help you operate more effectively. 

How can I afford these fees on top of others?

Anyone who has had to make the shift online over the last few months can attest that online selling is a different experience with its own unique challenges. Online orders typically come with a different set of fees, including different processing rates (read more about why here), and it is important to adjust to ensure that your margins remain sustainable. In addition to custom delivery fee settings, we also offer an optional service fee setting, which you can learn how to configure in our local delivery support article.

We appreciate your feedback and the opportunity to engage and discuss here. We are dedicated to building out a fully featured delivery and online ordering platform, and to be your partners in helping you build a direct channel to engage with your customers. We want to add value to your business by streamlining your operations, saving you and your employees’ time, and improving the delivery experience for your customers.

Please let us know what features you need, and what we could do to improve the platform -- we are very quickly releasing new functionality and are prioritizing what we build based on your feedback!

[orik]

This is just an acknowledgement that you're charging this fee because:

1. You can.

2. You want to.

And that you plan to continue taking your sweet time developing an actual feature for scheduled pickup and delivery.

The way to ensure our margins remain sustainable is for you to reduce, rather than increase, your fees, not for us to make our products less affordable so that square can fill its coffers.

[rich4747]

It's just strange that you're charging a fee for something you acknowledge is still being worked on.  Maybe you should wait until you have completed the delivery "system" before you ask your customers to pay you for an incomplete system.  Some things that I would expect to have been included are:

-- Ability to automatically text/email customers when I delivery is complete

-- Ability to mark an order as "delivered"

-- Ability to restrict deliveries to certain times or days

-- Ability to create delivery routes for multiple destinations

As far as I can tell, none of these is part of the delivery system now, so it's strange that you would want to charge me an additional 50 cents per transaction (on top of subscription fees and credit card processing fees).  I have just started with Square and based my pricing on your existing fees, so I don't plan to pass along your new fee to my customers (just as you should have told me you were going to add a fee when I signed up for your service).

[FlightKitchen]

The sentence that sticks in my mind from the reply is this: "Having a sustainable business model also enables us to continue to deeply invest in building out a competitive delivery and online ordering platform with all of the functionality that you need to be successful."

We're paying a monthly fee to you, and your infrastructure, staff, development and all other overhead should be calculated based on that. The products we sell have to take all of that into account: raw materials, staff, marketing, insurance, everything—and many of these costs are increasing rapidly, especially for food-based services. But we price our product to cover all of those and leave us with a small profit, and then price our delivery fee to cover our staff time, gas, vehicle insurance, and everything else associated with that.

It not acceptable to come along and say "oh, because we're only successful when you are—and we see that your business has found a way to survive in uncertain times—here's an additional fee to provide delivery." Sorry, at this point, including that as part of your online store service is just table stakes. Having this keeps Square/Weebly in the game. If you didn't have delivery, and if you didn't build out these features, you'd be left behind.

Your business model where you are "only successful when [we, your subscribing businesses] are" and tagging on extra fees is fundamentally flawed. We're paying a monthly fee to subscribe to your service. If you can't build additional features into the service at that price because you're not charging enough to cover your costs, then rethink your pricing tiers. A per-delivery service fee is utterly unacceptable and breaks customer trust. I mean, if the rationale is you need that fee to build out more features, what's to stop you from launching an additional image fee because you need to cover the cost of more storage? Or an additional product fee because adding more information to the database is complex?

Please rethink this fee.

[rich4747]

@FlightKitchen -- well said!  

[TheGOoDSweets]

The fee shouldn't be charged until we're receiving a feature complete product worth paying for. Another option needed is to separate out pickup from delivery rather than lumping them together.  There are some things we can't list on our site because we can only offer pickup for them but because we offer both pickup and delivery we're unable to specify which ones people can't get delivered.

[luxcrafter]

What nonsense.  Your answer does not address the question : HOW CAN SQUARE JUSTIFY THE FEE.  Yammering on about business models and investing shows only that this was a canned response prepared by a committee not wanting to address the question.

So because a buyer lives near me and I am able to deliver my item myself instead of using the postal system, Square believes it is entitled to another 50 cents from my order?  Again the question .... for doing what exactly?

[bearandbird]

This is exactly my problem too. I would like to offer free local delivery to my neighbors, where I personally deliver purchases to them - but with this new insane 50¢ per order fee I will not be able to do that.

I get to PAY 50 cents extra to physically drive product to a buyers home? That makes NO SENSE and is honestly leaning towards evil. There is no way to spin this to have it make sense. I already pay $65 a month for Square Retail, plus the processing fees... 

In essence you are charging ME to try my best to make "shopping small" and "shopping local" more appealing so that SQUARE makes money off my purchases and charges.

Very unhappy about this. Really adding on to the pile of things that are making me want to move away from Square as my main provider. 

[luxcrafter]

 it is important to adjust to ensure that your margins remain sustainable.

Sadly, regrettably, horribly, the Etsy "because we can so deal with it" mindset is creeping into Square.

[Thunderkiss]

This 50 cent delivery charge needs stopped. I'd rather pay the reasonable monthly fees at Shopify then pay you hundreds of dollars every month for this charge. Square was a good deal before, but now it's not a good deal for sellers offering local delivery compared to Shopify or other services.

[Copperpot]

When I first signed up with Weebly/Square, I had to use the shipping option instead of delivery. Deliveries and in store pickups were tied together at the time, and I didn't offer in store pickups. I was in reality not shipping, but delivering in my own vehicle. I switched to using delivery on the website when that became an option. It doesn't do everything I need it to, but it's close. So, now I'm wondering if I should switch back to using shipping like I did originally. There is not much functional difference on my end, except that then I won't be charged that 50¢ delivery fee. Therein lies my confusion as to why deliveries are singled out to have a fee added. 

[crustydelight]

Just like the credit charges fee depends on the amount of the order, delivery fee should as well. A fixed 50 cent fee is quite high for small orders, this on top of the credit card fees.

[manousheh403]

Unfortunately this business model does not make sense to your customers.  It makes sense for startups, but once you pass 200 or so orders your platform becomes more expensive.  Not only that, but it keeps increasing, while other platforms charge a flat fee!

50 cents per order is not an acceptable business model in the long run, and if a restaurant is not selling around 200 orders they are probably not making money to begin with so how is that "only successful when" we are, as you said?  The right model, to make the case you made, would be to not charge a fee at all unless we are selling more than 200 orders.  We already have switched all our orders to online due to the pandemic, and the majority these days are delivery.  We are paying more to use your platform than if we use a third party.  No joke, Square becomes more expensive than ChowNow at the 197 order mark if you pay the max of $150/month.

Moreover, what you are doing right now is bypassing the law.  The law in most states has made it illegal to charge more than 5% for marketing and 15% for deliveries.  This means that third parties cannot charge more than 20% total to market and deliver for a restaurant.  You have found a way to charge us a fee to use your platform, which bypasses that mandate, during a pandemic (and profit from it).  We can barely feed ourselves, and you are charging us 50 cents per order as if the pandemic is over.  Why did you offer 3 free months in the beginning?  What has changed?

[Phillybaker]

I think it's a great service (since I can select which zip codes that the system will accept delivery order from) and definitely worth the extra fee and we run 20+ deliveries a day, usually $15-60 size orders.  After pricing out alternatives, Square is still highly competitive.  However, for the fee I think they should offer a routing system add-on that is integrated so the system can put together an efficient route without me having to download the delivery data, process the data, and upload into the routing app.  I have to pay another $60/month (Circuit for Teams) for a routing app which is another expense.  I charge customers a flat $4 delivery fee so that hedges against small-ish orders and covers the costs of delivery.   Overall, much better cost than using a delivery service.

[luxcrafter]

Surely to {deity} the absurdity of Square charging its clients a fee for not providing any service or value-added whatsoever for that fee can only be seen as a rip-off, and not be completely lost on you?

[Phillybaker]

I'm sensible enough to look at the whole situation (ie the cost of everything) versus one fee.  But sure, maybe I need to re-access the situation.  

[manousheh403]

@Phillybaker 20+ orders a day?  I don't want to tell you how to run your business and I don't know how you priced out the alternatives but you do realize at 20 orders per day you are paying $300/month, when you could be getting a much better service from GoParrot for around $200/month or Chownow for $150/month.  Square Online does not have the robustness of GoParrot or Chownow, even Square will tell you that. GoParrot integrates with Square Loyalty, Chownow does not.  I only use Square Online at my location because we are doing less than 5 orders a day right now, otherwise I would have jumped ship long ago.  I would love to see how you priced out the alternatives, you're lucky you're getting that many orders a day and have the luxury to throw away money for no good reason at a platform like this.  For goodness sake, they didn't even have holiday hour capability until a few days ago! 

Also all systems I've used allow you to select by zipcode, other ones even let you draw out a delivery zone which is better in my opinion.

[Phillybaker]

Thanks.  I'll check them out.  My customers are having lots of problems with ordering through square online so I'm open to changing.  

[Ejmg]

I would get this fee if it actually provided a service, like making me a delivery map out of the addresses collected.  Our online store is to add additional items to our customers pre-existing standing orders (a food subscription basically), so I don't need their addresses collected or anything.  I have that info and they have already paid their delivery fee for the pre-existing order.  Yep, turned delivery off and just told them they are gonna get a pick-up message at checkout and they should ignore it.

[WST90]

Hello, 

I have exhausted every option regarding this bug I found with the new delivery fees and syncing to the Square quickbooks app.

I have reached out to both square and quickbooks and no one has been able to help as this is apparently an engineer thing??

Here is the issue and I have proof to back up this claim if anyone from Square is willing to help!

In Quickbooks, most of my square transactions are not matching up to my square deposits into my bank account. It’s always off by a couple of cents and this started in JUNE. Hence, I have a whole bunch of Square transactions not finding a match in my Quickbooks

I started to look through each of my transactions to see if there is any different between the transactions that are finding a match and the ones that do not find a match…. and I found this!

All the ones that did NOT find a match had a  “service fee” charged for that day, which is the delivery fees being charge on my online shop.

All the transactions that DID find match, did not have this “service fee”.

Then I made the connection that the “service fee” (which is the delivery fee for my online shop) started charging per delivery in June!! And this is when the issue started.

Therefore, I believe there is some sort of rounding issue that is happening which is stemming from the service fee. I have taken down my delivery service on my online shop to prove this point and this issue in Quicksbook has stopped. I have proof to back this issue up and would love someone from Square who can help me fix this problem to please contact me. I would love to add delivery back on my shop without having a problem with my quickbooks app.

Please help!

[Boris]

Hi @WST90, thanks for writing in about this issue. Am I right in thinking that the problem is that you cannot reconcile transactions through QuickBooks as it is not taking into account the service fee? I'd suggest contacting QuickBooks to discuss if there are settings that can be configured to account for the delivery fee for the online shop. Let us know how you go.