Hello Sellers! In a past thread I brought up the issue that while the Square Register for Retail Interface is perfect for those that sell a large quantity of products and has features that make the checkout more customizable is lacks speed and designed to be aesthetically pleasing rather than speeding up checkout. I found that using the free POS side of the register to be ultimately more faster in all aspects but missed those Retail features such as, price adjustment, barcodes on receipts to bring up old transactions and having the images on the items when adding to cart. I say all of this to bring of issues that the Retail side still has a speed issue even after the summer update and adding a Scanner-Scale to our setup.
We recently purchased a Magellan 9800i Scanner-Scale for our store to speed up checkout as we are continuing to grow and want to maximize our single register until we ultimately need to get another in the future. One of those upgrades was the Scanner-Scale as it eliminates that time we need to take to pick up a handheld scanner and scan each product that has a barcode. In our store we have a lot of Vegetables, Meats and Fish. I can say for sure that this is a perfect scale if you want to speed up check out as compared to the CAS PD2 that we used previously. It can instantly will give you the weight on an item and scans really fast even on default settings. However, it has become more difficult to make this process as fast as the free POS side. Some of the noticeable issues are,
- Laggy Screen/Item Tiles Pages. (Ex: Frequently when swiping between pages, the register tends to swipe to a completely blank page where I then have to press on the page name itself to get to the page I need instead of swiping. Not only this but when swiping between pages on the register it will think I am trying to swipe down. So on top of the lag and the blank pages, it can get the pages stuck and be really annoying when moving fast)
- Small Buttons in obscure places. (Ex: The "add to cart" button for weighing items is right under the tare button which can be mis clicked most of the item if not careful. One thing the free POS side of the register has over the Retail side is a giant keypad so little mistakes can be made while the retail side provides a smaller and harder to press one.)
- Unnecessary Steps. (Ex: When pressing onto item tiles to weigh products such as vegetables and fish, it brings you to a secondary screen if you we have variations. What makes the process difficult is that the variation buttons are far away from the "add to cart". This is only the case on the Retail side and not the POS side as the buttons are basically next to each other. Not only this but when I am finished weighing an item from the variation, it doesn't go back to the main page but stays inside the variation. This goes hand in hand with the small button issue because I have to now press the tiny back arrow just to get back to the first screen.
- Side Screen. (Ex: When weighing items on the retail side, the side screen that comes up doesn't give off a "Yes or No" situation. On the POS side of the register, when weighing a product from pressing an item tile, the keypad/add button is plastered on the screen giving you either the option to add to cart or not add to cart aka a "Yes or No" situation. On the retail side you only get a side panel with the smallest button to add the product to cart. The problem is that you can often forget to click away the panel and while moving onto another item with a scanner, it won't add the product into the cart but will however pull up the item to the panel.
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- Hard to Push Buttons. (Ex: Pressing to the keypad has become "harder" I find that I need to add a lot more pressure on the screen just to click one number, and for fast transactions I am accidentally adding $0.10 rather than a $1.00 so I'd have to delete and reenter to numbers again but slower.) Kind of beats the purpose of being fast right?
As much as I love love love, the Square Register and how aesthetically pleasing it looks, I still know there is room for improvement in terms of functionality and it can be so much faster. I am more than happy to add additional suggestions as many other sellers might have the same issues that I am having.
