We've been using Square for 3 years now in our mobile pizzeria business. We have an oven on a trailer and set up a tent with all our equipment and payment processing underneath.
We often go to remote locations for trail running events and music festivals where there is a weak signal due to being in a forrest and/or with many people using their cellphones in a dense area.
Our Square Stand + iPad will often in these scenarios switch between online & offline mode, or it will just stay in offline mode.
The issues we have are as follows:
Although it is technically in offline mode, it will still try to process credit card transactions sometimes as if it is in online mode, perhaps because it momentarily gets a weak signal and thinks it can do this. Then it takes from 1-3 minutes to attempt to process (which is a LONG time for a customer & our business to wait when we're often trying to process over 100 transactions per hour), almost always ending in failure, and then suggesting to retry or go into offline mode. When we click "offline mode" it almost always will then immediately process, but the problem is, it will attempt to do the exact same thing the very next transaction!
This then forces us to accept cash only, which is extremely inconvenient for our customers, and it prevents my employees from receiving digital tips, which are usually much better than cash tips.
It sucks there is not an option to force it into Offline Mode, only to enable the use of offline mode when online mode is not availabe, which as described, usually results in the system having one foot in each mode and causing massive delays in our throughput.
We often have to reset the Square app and reset our Verizon MiFi hotspot in order to temporarily solve the issue, but it usually comes back within a few transactions.
The other issue we face is that when there is weak signal and the system is acting like this is that our digital order screens, which print directly from Square via the FreshKDS app, can sometimes drop orders, thus leaving customers waiting for an order that was never made because our system lost it.
We are looking into buying some kind of cell phone booster that should hopefully help fix some of this by improving the strength of our signal, but it seems there should be able to be a better fix on Square's end to prevent this from happening. Being able to force offline mode would seem to do the trick as then the system wouldn't get confused and would still be able to process credit card transactions in offline mode, and then we can upload them within 72 hours when we have consistent signal again the next day.
Please let me know if there is some way to force offline mode as I haven't found it after searching every option in the system, or if you have other suggestions on this or if there's a possiblity for Square to add this feature. Thanks!
