Feature Requests: Pickup & Delivery

[DeliVolv]

As a food truck, the square online store needs a few more options before I'll be able to use it, unfortunately.  I'd like to be able to eventually set up most of my payments to online orders, and reduce the load on my cashier.  Here's a few things I'll need from square in order to move to online sales.

Rolling locations: our location changes daily, an easy way to set up location based on the current day, or not requiring location data at all

Rolling hours: again, our hours vary daily, having to set-up weekly hours on the store makes no sense to my business, simply turning on and setting up a maximum allowed time for pickup each day would make the most sense

Throttling orders: My cashier creates a bottleneck that helps slow ticket orders from coming through the window.  This allows the kitchen to handle large fluxes of orders smoothly with no customer complaint.  The online store doesn't offer this and we could get any number of orders all for pickup at the same moment, which would completely overwhelm the kitchen.  Allowing a maximum number of orders to be placed per pickup time would be helpful.

Texting orders: As a mobile venue, especially in the mountains, our internet connection can vary dramatically.  It would be awful for orders to be placed without getting the notification for them, adding an option to not only send orders to your POS but also to text them, decreases the chance of missed orders.

Square started out as a mobile payment solution for people on the Go.  I'd like to see them find their roots and address these issues with their new business plan. 

Right now currently using foodtruck.pub for online orders, as they allow all these options.  But I'd like to fully integrate with square and not charge my customers the "convenience fee" for using a third party. 

[isabelle · Accepted solution]

Hey @DeliVolv-

Thank you so much for taking the time to leave this feedback. We're launching a lot of new features now that our Square Online Store powered by Weebly is completely rolled out. We recently rolled out our delivery feature, but I'm not sure if that's applicable to your needs. 

I want to make sure I fully understand all of these feature requests before passing along this insight to the appropriate team. My questions are as follows:

1) Rolling locations: what would be the purpose of rolling locations? Is this price based? Or do you track sales based on locations (within the Online Dashboard)?

2) Rolling Hours: Unless I misunderstood your post, I think we have rolling hours where you can select a specific window for pick up and delivery orders to be available. You can change these as needed:

3) Throttling orders: This is a great idea. I can see how it would be useful for online ordering availability to pause when hitting a certain amount of orders. This would be helpful to a lot of businesses rather than manually having to adjust a setting. 

4) Texting orders: Do you mean as the business/seller the message you receive when an order has been placed? You would like to receive that via text?

This is all really great insight, and I appreciate the way you've stated how these features would be purposeful to the greater to-go seller community at Square. 

[DeliVolv]

Hey @isabelle, thanks for the response.

The point of rolling locations is for customers to know the pickup location.  I have a different pickup location each time I am open for business.  I currently set my online store to my commissary address which I never have nor ever will serve food at, because it forced me to put an address in.  As long as this isn't displayed on the customer side, it shouldn't be much of a problem, but it would be nice to be more clear for my customers.

My hours change at every event or location I set up at, which varies daily.  Again, square forces me to put in a pickup range for the week, so I just put Sunday for 1 minute, since I am not open this week. I could continue to do this for weeks I'm closed, and change it manually, for other times.  

Throttling and Texting orders are a biggest deals for me.  I live in the mountains, and since we're mobile, don't always have internet connection.  I would hate for orders to be placed and not receive the notifications for them.  Foodtruck.pub allows 2 different business side phone numbers to be texted the orders, pickup time, and name.  This adds an additional buffer so no order goes unnoticed. 

Thanks again for the response

[DeliVolv]

Hey @isabelle  I noticed when testing out the square site, that it shows my location to the customer.  In order for the functionality of a food truck, and to allow preorders, I would need to have multiple locations and hours for each day of the week.  Without this, it is going to be very confusing for my customers, as it will likely display the wrong location.  Do you know if it is possible to at the very least not display my location to the customers, as this is going to be very confusing for them when they place preorders? 

Also it doesn't allow me to not put in my hours for this week, even though I'm currently closed for the week.  If i choose a day and time range that I'm open for someone could possibly order from me even though I'm not open.  Is there a way to choose closed? 

[isabelle]

Hey @DeliVolv-

Thanks for your reply. I see your issue here.

You can update the address for the location in Square (under Account and Settings > Locations) and it should sync over and update it within your Square Online Store. I don't think there would be any issues from changing it every day, apart from being tedious. Let me know if this workaround will work, until we launch a feature that allows you to hide the address.

Thanks again! ✨

[DeliVolv]

Hey @isabelle  unfortunately, for preorders, it will still be very confusing, if I have multiple locations throughout the week.  I also don't feel very comfortable showcasing the online store, when there is a possibility I will receive an order even though I'm not open (because it forces me to choose open hours each week). 

For food trucks' purposes, it would really only make sense to allow us to change our hours and locations for each individual calendar day (perhaps allow recurring days by the week, biweekly, etc if we want). 

I will unfortunately have to continue using https://foodtruck.pub until these features are implemented.  Thanks so much for the responses though, I hope you will take food trucks' (I imagine a large number of your clients) needs into consideration for the next round of updates. 

[isabelle]

Hey @DeliVolv-

Thanks for your reply. Really sorry to hear that we won't be able to meet your needs at this time. 

I'll make sure to follow up if we have any updates on these feature requests/limitations. 

In the meantime, @pessosices, do you have any suggestions for mobile trucks that want to accept takeout/pickup orders with a rotating location? 

[pessosices]

@DeliVolv @isabelle 

This is definitely a tricky one.

The only real idea I would have is putting up a Text box at the top of your page with your schedule of locations & days. And then just change your hours in the settings.

But then when someone orders, it will show the wrong pickup address which would get confusing.

If it was a semi-regular schedule, my suggestion would be setting up multiple square locations, but it still might not be 100% clear on which one to order from and for when. And since your schedule isn't regular, it probably wouldn't work anyway.

As for setting as closed, @DeliVolv - you can toggle off "Accepting Pickup orders" under Pickup & Delivery or toggle off "Accepting Orders"  under Checkout in the Online Store Settings Page, so you don't have to deal with changing hours when you're closed.

Otherwise, not really sure of a solution here other than implementing those features for ya, which hopefully Square can do at a certain point!

[DeliVolv]

@pessosices @isabelle  it seems many customers in my tests are missing the "schedule for later" button when pre-ordering and are instead choosing the default "pickup as soon as possible" this is causing them to place their orders either too early in the day or even on the wrong day sometimes.  Is there a way to make this selection more deliberate? Either by removing "pickup as soon as possible" or by not having either selected so the default isn't already chosen for them, or by making the default "schedule for later" 

[isabelle]

Hey @DeliVolv-

Do you mean that you have the Schedule For Later option enabled, but it's not visible or obvious enough to customers?

Let me know so I can pass this information and insight onto the appropriate team! 

[DeliVolv]

@isabelle That's correct, the default response is still set to "pickup as soon as possible" and because many people don't read unless they have to, they skip this section and hit next, I would prefer to make them deliberately select one or the other, and preferably default to "schedule for later".   

Also during my tests last night I noticed that if you save your information with a phone number, when you make a new purchase using that saved information, it also automatically selects "pickup as soon as possible" and doesn't even make you hit next or anything, it takes you directly to the finalize button. (With a bit of useless paragraph telling them to review the information above, which will not solve the problem of customers not reading.)

[EMT]

desperately seeking many of these features too.. 

It creates so much more "work" to have to go in daily to change our locations and hours and also "remind" customers via our facebook posts that they can only order "the day of." Plus, if I don't toggle our "accepting orders" button off immediately when our serving hours end.. then I'll get a random order that comes through for the following week at that location, and 9x out of 10 the customer doesn't even realize that their receipt actually says your order will be ready at XYZ NEXT Friday.

My BIGGEST ISSUE though is the throttling orders.. i hate to sound like i'm complaining that we have too many orders, but it becomes a nightmare when endless tickets keep printing for the same pickup time!

Wondering if there is any resolve on the horizon for these issues? I hate to seek alternative POS systems bc I've been using square for almost 8 years, but I'm going to have to do something soon because I fear that our customers "understanding" during these difficult times will begin to wear thin. 

[PreOrder_Apps]

Hi. We're a Square Partner that specializes in custom, branded mobile apps powered by Square and we have all these features already except the X number of orders per time slot. 

We specialize in creating custom solutions, so we also have a specific GPS powered Map feature that's really cool that shows/tracks a food truck real-time and a schedule page. Then as far as Locations & Schedules go, you can simply add multiple locations in your Square Account and your app will instantly pull them all and we have Order Cutoff Times (start and end) for every "location". 

We could easily code the X number of slots. We made the logic for another client, so we'd just have to add it to the App. 

Here's a rough version of it when we were initially building the logic:

https://demo.thnapp.com/checkout

... you can basically choose a building and a day and it'll show you all the available time slots for that say. This is simply to demonstrate that we have the logic written. I'm sure you'll want that all hidden where the Customer simply chooses from available Time Slots (and each of those has a fixed limit).

All of this is basically pretty easy stuff. We're fully integrated with Square's API. Oh and we have Twilio's famous Text Messaging API integrated with all our technology already, so it'd be easy to send orders via text. 

this is us: https://getpreorder.com

- Ken