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The results are in: Small Business Hackathon!💡

Hi Seller Community,

 

We are hosting a hackathon for developers to build software applications that enable small businesses to adapt to the post-COVID world. In order to ensure that this competition produces solutions that help solve real challenges you’re experiencing, we need your help. There are two ways to participate.

 

Option One: Share a challenge prompt for participants to solve

 

If you're a Square Seller, please share the new challenges your business is experiencing. For example, here are some of the challenges that have come up over the last few months:

 

  • For some shop owners, they have too much spring inventory that didn't sell and now have summer inventory coming in.
  • Some restaurants may require all guests to use in-app mobile ordering from dining restaurants to avoid extra interaction.

What new challenges are you facing? We want to hear more from you. Reply to this post below with your suggestions by June 10 and we'll make sure they're represented in this event.

Option Two: Participate in the Hackathon

 

If you're a developer and interested in participating, submit your entry by 5:00pm EDT June 22, 2020: The Square Small Business Hackathon.

 

Looking forward!

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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The results are in.

 

Thanks for helping make this a successful event and congratulations to all of the developers who participated! I'm following up with a highlight of the top eight submissions from participating developers. To learn more about a particular build, click the link included in the description below and scroll down to Try it Out.

 

Queue with Kyoo "Queue with Kyoo is a simple line management solution built on top of Square that helps solve the pain of long socially-distanced lines at retail shops, grocery stores...anywhere with a socially-distanced line, because of limiting the number of customers in a store."

 

 

Inventory Squared "My wife and I own a candy shop and updating inventory when receiving new shipments was very time consuming. I wrote Inventory Squared to enable multiple people to use phones (or tablets) to update inventory."

 

 

Fetcha - Just sit, we'll fetch! "Fetcha is the easiest way for food and beverage stores to offer safe table service to their customers. Once linked with the merchants square account, Fetcha builds a digital menu using all of the items already stored in their Square point of sales system."

 

 

Voice Order "As a care giver, I have been hyper-sensitive about my contacts in this COVID-19 world. In looking for ways to use technology to improve on processes, I considered my local small businesses. Order taking requires risky face-to-face dwell time that can be limited with the right solution."

 

 

StreamMD "We decided to build a Covid-19 telemedicine solution called StreamMD that allows licensed physicians to screen, treat, and test (we have access to FDA EUA home-collection test kids) patients while minimizing community spread, mitigating person-to-person infection, and reducing unnecessary and inefficient overflow of patients in emergency departments at hospitals."

 

 

Curatio "Curatio helps patients connect to doctors and receive information regarding healthcare according to the patients needs as much as possible without physically being in contact with the doctor or be at a hospital."

 

 

ProFit "ProFit targets the many needs of fitness professionals such that they can build and spread their business across a platform that encourages social distancing and ease of access for both trainers and users."

 

 

Hurdlr's Automatic Business Expense & Deduction Finder "Square Sellers self-identify into a business type, as do Hurdlr users. For this hackathon, we added a feature that goes through all of a Square Sellers expenses (via a linked credit card) and surfaces up the “likely” and “not likely” tax deductions."

 

 

To see all of the outcomes from the hackathon participants, check out the Square small business hackathon website. Note: you can view specific submissions for Retail, Food & Beverage, Healthcare, or Services & Other Use Cases by checking the box under Filter Submissions on the right side of the page.

 

I noticed many of the challenges that sellers surfaced in this post were broadly related to contactless payments, added customization for fulfillment/order management, and needing more control over inventory/item library management. Hopefully, some of the solutions from this event will be useful for your business during these times.

 

We know that all businesses are facing unique challenges and we will keep pushing forward to address them. Thank you for your patience and feedback as we continue to iterate.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center

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Thank you! Didn't know about all this, and definitely going to see if I can make it work for me.

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Admin

A lot of great image suggestions in this thread. Thanks to everyone for sharing. 🤩📷

 

@Jantiques — if any of these techniques work particularly well for your business, I'm interested to know how it goes!

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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Could really use an option for customers to select cash at checkout for delivery and pickup orders. Many of our customers are elderly and do not use or prefer not to use credit/debit cards.

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Layaway option or at least the ability to make a purchase for a custom order and put a deposit down that payments can be made. 

Ability for products to automatically come off the website when sold out.

Easier search for what products a certain customer has bought or a report for what customers have bought a certain item without going through individual purchases

A way to invoice off of live sales on facebook or instagram or the ability to partner with a program like comment sold

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Another feature that we would like to see would be coupons syncing across everything. Right now there is in store and online coupons. It would be great to be able to send out a email or loyalty code in an email and the customer could use it online, or in the store. 

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My salon offers membership packages to our clients. Which clients are being charged monthly for their selected package. I would love for square to provide and easier way to charge clients on the monthly built & they also be able to select this option when booking their appointment online. We use both square and square appointments and when they are open on the same device, they don't work well and takes up a lot of space. So please consider memberships so we don't have to use mind & body software. 

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https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/General-Retail-Discussion/Feature-Request-Cross-location-tip-pool...
Tip pooling across locations. Our back of house staff deserve tips too, and they're in a different physical location than the retail. I'd love it if it was possible to create 'tip pools' of multiple locations, via checkbox, and distribute tips accordingly. Either that, or just be able to select all the locations that a given employee was eligible for tips from. There are some who should only be eligible for the retail location, and others who should be eligible for the retail location and pickups made at the kitchen, for instance.

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Be able to offer both a dollar amount and a percentage for coupons through the customer feed back option.

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I would love the option to sell inventory by the yard (or other unit) online as well. I sell fabric and my #1 request from customers is to be able to purchase 1/4 or 1/2 yard increments online as well as in the store. 

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When creating an item in Square, you can select by yard as a choice under Variations (SKU/Item) and select precision to choose how many decimal places in pricing or quantity.

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Yes, only online it says by the yard, but can only be sold in full yard increments, not in any increments of a yard. 

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Not really a post COVID need but it would be great if my customers had the option to create an account to view their past orders and save their payment info like every other website does. 

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I'm an IT freelancer. I send out invoices to clients monthly, with each line item on the invoice detailing a specific service ("5/1, 20 minutes, fixed bug in TPS report" for example).  

Getting this data from any CSV/Excel file into Square invoices has always been a one-row-at-a-time copy/paste job. It would be great if I could paste several rows of data at once, or upload a CSV/Excel and have it generate invoices/lines.  

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It is crucial to get the time estimates of order readiness correct, but particularly now, when all orders are for pick-up. There are many ways to improve the way square/weebly currently handle prep time/hours that lead to extreme frustration of me (owner), employees and customers (of my pizzeria):

1. make prep time super easy to adjust on the fly (currently it's 7 clicks from logging into square)

2. disconnect open hours from prep time (or make that an option) I'm not sure where this is helpful, but not for a restaurant- it forces us to make our hours later than we want to be listed. Hours listed are generally understood to be the hours that you can place an order, but if prep time is 30 minutes and hours are listed as 10 and customer orders at 9:31 Square tells them to pickup the following day!! This makes no sense.

3. The email confirmation messaging customization in weebly is a mess and cannot be working as designed. Please have QA re-examine.

4. Allow total control over the email confirmation message that is appearing as if it is being sent from me or take responsibility and put your name on it. "your order will be ready after [time]" is surely not how I would say it and is generally inaccurate.

5. If I have a ton of orders before opening time there needs to be a way to automatically adjust the estimated time the orders will be ready. The logic of setting number of orders per 15 minutes should probably be applied here.

6. Limiting the number of orders per 15 minutes is a clever solution (gold star and thank you for doing something), but it should probably be based on dollars per time period as one $200 order is likely going to take much longer than 3 $40 orders. Ideally there would be a way to set times for different items (eg. bottle of wine takes no time). Also, it is unclear how the limiting functions for the time estimate and so we are wary of relying on it- what is the time estimate it is giving the n+1th order?

7. An order status option to indicate that an order is delayed that initiates an email/text to customer would be nice. Or if an order (or multiple orders) is/are not marked ready and past estimated ready time, but there are multiple orders ahead still pending, maybe a way to issue updated estimates en masse. Basically, it's important to improve estimates, but an emergency backup method to communicate delay is always extremely useful.

 

 

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Square needs to add the following customization options to its online store: 

1. Add a small banner/header at the top of the page that can inform customers about sale items [click to redirect], free shipping announcement etc. 

2. Add an option at online checkout to allow customers to answer “how did you hear about us?” With a drop down menu of choices (Facebook, online search, word of mouth, etc) 

3. More color customizations for online store such a changing a call to action button color that differs from sites entire theme color. 

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A simpler flow for customers to choose pick-up and delivery days and times. It's incredibly clunky and we lose sales because of it.

Specifically:

If someone tries to place an order outside of our designated open time, it defaults them to next available pickup or delivery time, plus prep time. We open at 3 on Fridays and collect orders all week. Inevitably, we have a majority of orders that say "Pickup at 3:15PM" (We have a 15 minute prep time.) 

It's quite complicated to figure out how to change the pickup or delivery time for the average customer and this creates a lot of friction. We lose sales and/or people just call in, frustrated.

Simple dropdown boxes, in the cart with any pickup or delivery time within open hours would save a lot of trouble.

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YES! People are SO confused about how to change their order pickup time. We're closed M-W and accept orders Th-Su and so many people end up ordering for open on Thursday that don't at all mean to. I see the logic in the way that it's set up, but something needs to change!

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I would like to see an authorization level change.  A cashier shouldn't be able to access my sales for the day/month/year.  Currently they have to be able to open the cash drawer outside of a sale.  However this authorization shouldn't also allow them to see our sale numbers.  

 

I have made this suggestion several times before since joining Square in 2016.  However I haven't seen any changes since.  

 

Thank you in advance!

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Our biz is a balloon store. We do in store retail and pickup, but our main source of income is larger designs that are delivered to the client. We started online sales with Weebly, but due to the fact our clients have events and milestones on specific upcoming dates and need deliveries or pickups by a certain time on a specific date, we are struggling to meet our customer needs with online sales. Additionally, we delivery to different areas in our state, and delivery fees vary depending on mileage. We have a pop-up which asks the customer to add delivery to their shopping cart. That is still super confusing, especially because they get a different time at checkout since the checkout doesn't let them schedule. We waste so much time on phone calls our clients shouldn't have to make.

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-Customers should be able to apply more than one coupon at checkout.

-Seller should be able to sell online items with a fixed price. Ex: have a system like the gas station does so when a customer buys an item sold by weight, seller can do a refund or extra charge accordingly, after the item has been weighed.

-Different delivery fee depending on distance/ miles.

-Maximum amount allowed to order online per item, not per total dollar amount. Ex: limit 30 bags of flour per purchase.

-Check box at check out when customers choose delivery. ex: like an agreement, where the customers agree to the delivery conditions such as: “Customer must be at home during the delivery time and if they choose contactless delivery, they are assumed responsible to whatever happens after delivery has been completed.” Something similar like uber eats does when choosing “leave at the door”.

-Option for customers to receive email when the order has been delivered. My customers have told me they receive email when the order is ready but not when it has been delivered.

-A way for the driver to contact the customer, keeping the drivers phone number secret.

-Prevent negative inventory.

-Have a live chat.

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We only sell a three course menu for curbside now. We are providing curbside pickup only between a pick up "window' of time; not in 15 minutes or 1 hour. We have to explain to our customers that an order will be ready at a different time than when our business is "open". Instead we have created a modifier so the guest can choose when to pick up between 5-6:15 Wednesday or Friday.

 

This is what we have on our order page to explain it to our customers:

Square store's software is designed for traditional takeout, as in you order a "hamburger hold the onions" and you receive it as soon as possible. During checkout, you may see erroneous and confusing content about when your items will be ready for pickup. You have no idea how much we wish we could override this automatic content! We cannot. Instead, you will be asked when you would like to pick up your items. WE WILL HAVE THEM READY AT THE TIME YOU HAVE SELECTED, no matter what else the system may tell you.

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