Have Modifiers been discontinued?

[BofBArtStudio]

Way back nine+ years ago, maybe before variations were available, we had Modifiers.  

So some products that were created back then had Modifiers set for them.

Yesterday, I noticed that those products no longer display their options in square retail.

I quickly changed those products to variations instead of modifiers so that they would work properly.

But just curious...

Did modifiers go away?

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @BofBArtStudio.  Modifiers haven’t gone anywhere.  If they had, the Community would have been destroyed by thousands of posts by this time.  I was curious after reading your post, so I fired up my Retail POS (which I never use, but…) and checked it out.  As is always the case with the Retail POS there were more changes to the order flow.  

One thing I noticed was that the Retail POS now prompts me for the variation first, then the first modifier set attached to the item.  I have to press either Save or the back arrow at the top to view the rest of the modifier sets to work with. Seems like a clunky flow, but the modifiers are there (see screen shots).  

[BofBArtStudio]

My screen doesn't look like yours.

I have the old checkout experience.

When I clicked an item that had a modifier, it just adds to the cart with a zero amount (or whatever the base prices prior to choosing modifiers).  And then I had to click the item and then I could see the modifiers. It didn't do the pop-up anymore. It didn't give any kind of indication that there was anything else to do. So I just changed all of my items with modifiers to variations.

It seems the modifiers and variations are about the same anyway, and at least with variations, it still pops up and lets you choose which variation you want.

But on my square for retail with the new checkout experience disabled, I have verified that if you have an item that has modifiers, the base price of the item adds to the cart when you click it and no longer pops up to let you choose the modifier options which have different prices of course, and there is no indicator that you need to click the item to do anything.  

We had modifiers set for our box size. It was $5 base price Plus whatever box size you are purchasing.  So now when I click the button for the product it just adds $5 to the cart. Nothing else and no indicator that you have to choose which box size.

Also this is on Square Stand with iPad using Square for retail and a fully updated iOS and square version.

Later on when I get up to the shop, I will take some pictures of it if necessary.

[_Violet]

Hi @BofBArtStudio - Thanks for reaching out to the Seller Community. Additionally, thank you, @TheRealChipA for your input 🙏

For this type of issue, I suggest that you get in touch with the Square for Retail Support Team. They can do an impersonation so they can see what you're seeing and get a better understanding of the behavior happening on your end. If you haven't already, please reach out to Support directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[BofBArtStudio]

Okay thanks. I'll have to wait until a weekday to do that as I know they're not available on the weekends.

It's not that big of a deal because we can use variations.   Variations and Modifiers are pretty much the same thing, so I was just curious about the change since a few days ago.

We accidentally sold a large box the other day for $5 (instead of $24.95 that it should have been) because someone on the team didn't know that things had changed on how the item is chosen. But I quickly transferred it to use variations and it's all fine now. again I was just curious

[_Violet]

Hi there again, @BofBArtStudio - I just wanted to let you know that you have access to 24/7 phone support, if you are subscribed to Retail Plus. You'll just need to enter your customer code when prompted to get through.

To find your customer code:

1. Log in to your Square account.
2. From Square Support Center, click Ask our support assistant or Contact.
3. Type “customer code” in the chat and click on the Customer Code link.
4. Select your location > Next.
5. Your customer code will appear with our contact options.

Note: This customer code is used to validate your Square account. Treat it as you would any other sensitive account information.

Message

[BofBArtStudio]

Spoke to support.

He said that the best thing for us to do is just make a list of items that have modifiers and have those available to our team so that they know that when an item is being added to the cart, every item that gets added to the cart for a customer, we need to check the list to see if it is an item that has modifiers.  so the team has to do this extra work to know if it's one of those items or not because there's nothing in the system that's going to tell them that they have modifiers.  He said that this is something that was changed with the latest update and it is no longer something that tells us that there's a modifier.  He also said that I could put in a feature request if I would like to have a pop up or any kind of indicator to tell us that there's modifiers.  We just have to know that there's a modifier for any given item. He said he doesn't know why that got changed a few days ago and he said that it's above his pay grade..

So if a customer is at the counter buying 15 different items, the team has to check the list that we need to create according to this guy and tape it to the counter so that they can double check if it happens to be an item that has a modifier.

So again I'm just going to use variants instead of modifiers because at least those pop up to tell the team that there's multiple options for a particular item.

It's just strange that the latest update made that change because it really doesn't make any sense to me at all. But again it's okay I can use variants instead and at least those still pop up to choose which variant you want.

Thank you.

[BofBArtStudio]

I guess disregard this entire message now. We were forced into the new checkout experience this morning and there's no longer a way to go back.

Therefore, modifiers pop up again.

I have a whole lot of other problems with the new check out, but at least modifiers pop up again.

Sorry everyone for the alarm on that. I didn't realize that they had just taken modifier popup away for the old checkout experience and that it still popped up on the new check out experience. 

😞

[TheRealChipA]

Ugh.  I’m sorry to hear that on multiple levels, Cheryl.  I’ll admit that watching the issues that occurred from this recent Retail rollout, I’m certainly glad that Restaurants had extensive testing and feedback on its radical redesign, which turned out to be a really good update in my opinion.  It might not be perfect, but at least it didn’t cause the problems that I’ve read about retail sellers having to deal with.  Live and learn, I guess! Ha

[BofBArtStudio]

Okay here are the pictures.  I made a brand new item called box and gave it a base price of $5 and then enabled the modifiers set for small medium and large each with their own additional price.  

I added the item to the cart from the button that I just created and it only adds in the $5 base price.  Then if I click on it in the cart, then the popup comes up.  But no indicator that I need to click it to choose options, so very easy for someone to sell this for the base price of $5.00 by mistake no matter what size box it is.

Variations work fine so I'm not that worried about it. This was just a product that we had from 9 years ago that we created that I think was done before variations were available or maybe we just didn't use variations for some reason. It seems like variations and modifiers are pretty much the same thing.

I was just curious why it stopped working a couple days ago suddenly.  Because just a few days ago we were able to have the pop-up come up for the modifiers when we clicked the button.

We press the button named BOX  and $5 goes in cart

 then we click the item in the cart and the pop-up comes up to show the modifiers..  the modifiers used to pop up automatically when we pressed the button.