Shipping Label - Integrate with Royal Mail Click and Drop

[Jools]

Royal Mail supports integration with various online stores and marketplaces

Integration with Square would be great so that shipping labels could be automatically created, and postage paid

https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/click-how-to-guide.pdf

https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11716/~/click-%26-drop---connect-your-ch...

Regards

Jools

[#2]

Hello everyone, this is Alex from the Square Online product team. We know how frustrating it is to have been told that a Royal Mail Click & Drop integration is on the roadmap for two years, and we're sorry that we haven't yet been able to launch this for you. Behind the scenes, we're in the process of making some fundamental changes to our shipping product, so we decided to build all shipping carrier integrations (not just Royal Mail) in a way that aligns with our long term strategy. This will take us time to fully execute. We also understand that you have to make decisions about how to operate your business, and that an expectation of a Royal Mail integration has been a key factor in choosing to continue using Square. Unfortunately, we don't have a concrete update that we can share with you on our plans or timeline for this today, but we'll be sure to post in this thread when our beta is ready for you. 

[doc_choc]

We have tried this but it has its challenges and this day and age it about being slick and integrating systems to minimise errors and maximise customer satisfaction. When you are doing 100's of orders a day, you don't want to be downloading spreadsheets, mapping, cutting and pasting tracking back in to Square online, particularly in peek season. Takes a lot of time and open to errors.

[doc_choc]

We cut and paste orders from Square online to Click and Drop, it is 'very' time consuming and prone to errors also (from experience, costing us money and making us look dad in front of customers). We are on the NOTHS platform, the data (order number, contact details and delivery address) just flows straight from NOTHS orders to the Click and Drop automatically upon accepting the order on NOTHS. Once we assign a weight and service to the order, in the click and drop we print the dispatch label which sets the status to dispatch in C&D and automatically fires the tracking number back to NOTHS which is then emailed to the customer. I can fulfil 10 orders on NOTHS in the time it takes me to do one on Square Online. Its is very frustrating as there is no other way to print out shipping labels on Square Online apart from using the shipping companies they have integrations with in the US. We also use another platform, we made the recommendation of integrating with Click and Drop, which they did in less and two weeks, speaking with them it is a pretty straight forward thing to do, even, dare I say it 😬 Shopify has an integration with the Royal Mail Click and Drop system. I'm sure Square do not want to be left behind when their competition are identifying these crucial opportunities. 

[TheSpell]

It's definitely not a difficult thing to do, nor should it take long at all. This definitely has not been 'in process' all this time. It seems as if they're a bit hung up on 'looking at options' when Click & Drop is definitely the most used and most suitable for the huge majority of small businesses. I think that's different in the US from speaking to friends there, and that they use a variety of couriers far more. Given that every other platform (even the awful ones) have caught on to the fact the C&D is crucial in the UK though, you'd think it would stick by now 😕

[signature_home]

@tranguyen - Just checking in again to see if there is any update since 3 weeks ago? As many others had said, even if you can confirm whether its something that will be imminent or whether we are talking 12 months plus? (Not that I would be happy with the latter) but at least we would have an idea and be able to make an informed decision on where we go and what we do in the short term other than continue going through painful copy and paste methods. 

[tranguyen]

Hi @signature_home, thank you for following up on this.

I'd love to give a specific timeline but unfortunately the short answer is I don't know. We're pursuing this integration with a number of partners. From chatting with our Partnership team, our target is to have something by this quarter but the timelines may change depending on how the integration perform in testing, potential unexpected issues or bugs and more. 

I'm still keeping an eye for any new development on this and will surface this thread to the team again as well. 

[Dapplefrost]

@tranguyen 

In other words, it could still take 2 years or so to sort out, despite this being so damaging to us as square online users...
By the sounds of it, are you also implying that the integration might not even be with Royal Mail!?

When you say 'a number of partners', I want to make clear that here and now, the priority is Royal Mail. I don't think many users here care about Hermes, DPD or Yodel etc (though it may be nice to have those options in the future) so if you could make sure Royal Mail is actually on that list of 'Partners' we as a community would appreciate that.
It would also be very reassuring for us as a community if you could make sure that Royal Mail is at a priority to be integrated sooner rather than letter, even if we have to wait for other courier providers. It is Royal Mail that 95% of us probably use these days, so that should really be at the top of your list, especially when (from what I can see) similar integrations with different companies are already available in the US.

Look, I know you might not be able to give an exact time frame, and there are bugs to iron out, but if you could make sure that Square are actually prioritising what we need (Royal Mail, online user customer accounts) rather than what square thinks we need or what will be more profitable to square, then I'm sure more online users will stick around, myself included.

Thank you in advance ❤️

[doc_choc]

I feel there is a lot of frustration from the community on this. I'm no expert in the field, but we use a third party platform to sell on. We made the suggestion to integrate with Royal Mail, it took them less than two weeks to implement which suggests that most of the know how is there and the tools to complete the integration are in place. All the orders go straight across to the Royal Mail Click and Drop upon accepting the order in the portal, once the shipping label is printed it pings the tracking number back to the portal and marks as dispatched automatically. Its really niffty and not complicate, giving both our business and customer confidence to shop with us. To be honest if these integrations are not on the road map for completion by October 2021, providing basic functionality we as a business can not continue to use Square Online, we don't want to change as Square is a nice system and have been loyal to it for many years but if it can not deliver such basic of fulfilments it is unfit to use for an online business within the UK.

[Dapplefrost]

What third party do you use, and is that for your website itself and online sales, or is it a system you connected to your square online website?

Thank you in advance 🙂 Just weighing up my options as I feel like I should take my website else where away from square, which is a shame as we love our square POS system, and having two different systems will make things very awkward to do stock checks.

[doc_choc]

It wasn't for use with Square Online in any way, we use a couple of market place platforms which we sell on, both are integrated up with Royal Mail Click and Drop. It was just the speed at which they did the integration. As I say I'm no expert but they made it look very easy to implement. I think they see it as a necessity if you are in the business of fulfilment for an online business, so I'm not sure if Square are really looking to seriously develop the online side of their business or if it will just whittle away with time, we will see. Their competitors seem a little more in tune with the online side of the business, they even offer free integration with Royal Mail. It's all there and I'm not sure my business can afford to wait for Square to implement some basic functionalities in a few more years time, like Royal Mail Integrations, gifting functionality and so on...its a bit of a shame but they have their business priorities and we have ours and they don't seem to be the same at this point.

[doc_choc]

Sorry didn't see your last para, we are in a similar position re the POS, but you have to do what's best for your business needs, especially as online has picked up some moment in the last year.

[Dapplefrost]

Would really love to be able to integrate my Square Online store to Royal Mail, but can't currently do so.
Would love to see this in the near future so that we don't have to manually enter addresses onto our royal mail click and drop account. Would make life so much easier, epically if it can automatically add all the tracking details as well so our customers can check their tracking in their online accounts.

Would be a bonus if this can also automatically trigger a dispatch email from our site as well, or at the very least have the tracking included in the dispatch email if we have to trigger those to be sent out ourselves.

[MJD]

I believe this is already a very highly requested feature and one that is being worked on, however this may take some time as it will need co-operation from both square and royal mail to create an auto input bot that matches royal mail's ToS 

[tonydow]

You sound very defensive of Square but, you must admit as evidenced in the other thread, this has been ongoing for nearly a year for something that has been implemented on other platforms in two weeks. I don’t know about auto input bots and RM ToS but it can’t be too onerous if others can do it in a reasonable timeframe. Where there is a will…………..

[MJD]

I'm not being defensive of square, I just understand what goes into coding these things is not easy at all and takes a lot of trial and error, I also do understand your point, this has been going on for a very long time now. What I meant by the auto input against RM ToS is that there'd have to be opened a backdoor around CAPTCHAs and such human verification tasks, therefore there is a lot to think about and take into consideration when building such a tool. Also because it would be on royal mail's end that all this would be going off, royal mail would likely have to input/provide a section of the code to make this all happen, it's unfortunately a much bigger task than it may seem and will hopefully be sorted soon.

[Dapplefrost]

I agree, however, Wix are also dragging their feet with this.
When I have spoken to royal mail, they told be by email that the system with wix is set up, they are literally just waiting for the okay from Wix themselves. 

The reason they aren't in a rush is because they are making money from sellers using third party shipping apps to generate royal mail shipping labels.

We currently have our main website with Wix, but have a free website semi-built on square as we use square for our POS system and would like to eventually move over to square so everything is all done in one place, but until square improve their online system, I don't think it is a move we are willing to make just yet. We are even thinking of ditching wix and square all together in favour of shopify, but we are still looking into how we can link a working POS system to that so that all our sales can be seen in one place and have our printed receipts show the items customers have ordered. At the moment as we have wix and square working together, our square receipts only show "custom amount" and not the items actually purchased. We would have to keep track off two lots of stock if we was to add all our products onto square just for the sake of having items show on recipes and that just seems like too much of a hassle.

[MJD]

If its any help I believe Shopify can sell you a Shopify brand keypad style chip and pin reader and likely other POS equipment, if that's the move you feel is best for your business, here's a link to that Shopify hardware. It may be best if @tranguyen can give us all an update on an RM integration though. 

[TheSpell]

Just to reiterate and support what others have said, 'options' and 'partners' is the issue.

Royal Mail Click & Drop is NECESSARY AND A PRIORITY

Any other courier is nice to have, sometime in the future maybe. But after C&D.

A quick google will tell you that statistically Royal Mail is the consumer's preferred service in the UK by far. We send 2-3 billion parcels a year total in the UK. Royal Mail delivered almost half a billion in the LAST QUARTER of 2020.

We all use Royal Mail. Some will use other couriers for bulk or bulky orders as well. But (I can't stress this enough) the BASIC NEED is for RM C&D. It's one company for you to deal with for integration, and it shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks. I'm sorry some of us are losing our rag a bit at this point but the answers we're getting are 100% fobbing us off. 

Please please can you let us know what your priorities are as a company, so that we have enough time to get set up elsewhere well before the Q4 2021 orders set in.

[doc_choc]

Totally agree it needs to be ready for, but preferably before Q4 2021.  Last season was difficult putting it politely to fulfil orders on Square Online, can't do it again to be honest so we need some solid timeliness to enable our business to forward plan. Square it's not a difficult one but you need our businesses to succeed, for Square to succeed...give us the tools we need for success...please. 

[SGM1]

@tranguyenSeems like Square really need to give UK users a serious answer on this as shipping is a critical part of any online platform!

There does seem to be a disconnect between what Square are working on and what UK users want and need to develop our businesses on your platform.

[doc_choc]

Anybody have Dave's mobile number? Perhaps he could lobby on our behalf 🤔 

[tranguyen]

Hi everyone, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I can appreciate your frustration, especially since this feature has been requested for a very long time. I want to check in and let you know that all the posts here really help us to make the case for pushing the integration forwards and get eyes from different teams as well.

Also apology for any confusion regarding my last post! To clarify, the way that we've approached the Royal Mail integration is by working with third-party partners who already have an integration with Royal Mail in place to roll this out.

In my last post, I mentioned that we are looking at having something in place by the end of this quarter. After checking in with the team again, they are hoping to have something ready by the end of the month. However, if there is any changes, I'll following up on this thread with everyone.