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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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Also tagging a handful of folks who have been active with API related threads in the Seller Community recently. Please take a look at the event above and consider participating in our upcoming hackathon!
@PreOrder_Apps 
@busaccagallery 
@superkev 
@anhmazingfood 
@LowGaze 
@wine20or 
@donutshoppe 
@WagBend 
@adia 
@veteranfnb 
@MikeOrlando02 
@CotillionGarden 
@jameswatkins 
@sdcole 
@werdemup 
@chrisdavetv 

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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I've begun to offer various gift packs on my small business Square/Weebly sites. When my store was closed to the public, I would simply build the custom gift packs on site and then deliver them. Something that has always frustrated me about Square is the inability to create gift packs of multiple items while still depleting inventory correctly. I know we now have options to create sales, i.e. buy two, get one free, but this only works in person and doesn't apply to online purchases.

 

I would love to see a feature where we can create gift packs, combos, etc, which auto-deplete the inventory of those specific parts and pieces, and to which we can assign a new price.

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Look at Shopventory in the app marketplace. It allows for bundling! We've started using it and LOVE it.

James Wilkinson
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I think I asked this before. I have a new venture and unable to use Square because it does not sync with Deskworks. They use a different supplier (I am using Stripe) I believe it has to do with the way customer data is stored. Anyway, I'd love to use Square as you all have treated me so great for 9 years now.

 

Thanks

Justin

Wag Bend Dog Daycare

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Small businesses cannot afford their own custom apps.  Square is a great solution for many small businesses.  I'd like to create an app to facilitate curb side pickup that would also include a contactless payment where the app would route the payment directly to the businesses square account and not to me as a middle-man.  My app would manage the pickup process and defer to Square for the payment.

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I am a retailer with over 300 SKUS. I need an app for ordering, notifications, better customer experience.  Most app square e-commerce partners say they are integrated with square but if they are, major limitations.  Need a way to sync all fields with square, especially name, photo, description, price, inventory quantity  and real time updates.  Ability to categorize and make available or hide square inventory (items) like the online store does.  This will dramatically increase square's fee based income and take advantage of the biggest trend in e-commerce - majority taking place via phones/an app that is NATIVE.  

 

This is my main need now.  

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Hello there!

 

I manage a bakeshop and we have many different orders coming through weebly for different days.  I would like to be able to search for orders by their pickup date.

For instance, search for "May 30, 2020", and see the three orders that are for pickup on that date.

 

I know that Square says that you can export the data as a csv file, so you can sort it however your heart desires.  Unfortunately when you export the data to excel or google sheets, not all the cells are filled for each row of.  So it makes very hard to sort a range by a certain column heading, because not all of the cells are filled with information.  This really only is an issue if you have multiply items in one order though. 

 

Anyways the easiest way to solve this dilemma is to expand the capabilities on the search bar for orders. 

 

Thanks for reading!

Amanda

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Yes PLEASE!! I've emailed in about this too. Just having the order section within my Square dashboard be sortable by pickup date would be a huge improvement!

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we should be able to add different language options on the website's home page so that people who don't speak English can comfortably execute the buys on our platforms

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Excited to see this! 

I manage a rental business and have been struggling to find a simple easy to use workflow to rent out gear. I would love if someone would modify the appointment tool to allow for 

- by day booking vs hour

- select a shipping option vs a location

- expedite checkout for rentals including delivery/ shipping location, waiver signing.

- Add a calendar of inventory availability that is easy to use. (this is incredibly difficult to find on the market today. 

- Track inventory and buffer days for rentals

 

The Appointment tool is so close to being able to do this! Most other plugins are difficult to use and cost up to $500 a month which is very high pricing for a small rental business. 

Please reach out with any questions. 

 

Happy Hacking. 

Janie Greenwood

Rivers To Lakes

 

https://www.riverstolakes.com/

 

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I'm having the same problem, we do balloon decor and gifts

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It would be really great if we could have different prices list settings . For example, we sell wholesale, but there is no way to choose wholesale pricing without manually adjusting each time. 

 

I would love more updated reporting.

 

And also just an all around more dedication to franchises.

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We are going to be missing out on tips (crucial for our staff) because we are bypassing the signing screen for purchases to keep surface contact down. Can you add a tipping function /option from the email receipt? Similar to how you can tip an Uber driver after the ride? This would allow us to stay safe and give our customers a chance to tip my hard working staff.

Hack AWAY!

 

 

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Yes!!!  Please do so.  

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I don't know if this would work for you, but we just have our customers order/pay online only where they can tip (we set default to 15% which about 95% of customers do)

 

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1.  Need a way to prevent overselling an item, prevent negative quantity

2.  Need to create a bundle from existing inventory with a combined price that will pull the items in the bundle from inventory

3.  Would like to be able to add items to a purchase order from viewing inventory, or switch between screens without them resetting.  Right now, I am logged in on two separate tabs to do this.

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Super Seller

I second items 2 and 3 on this suggestion. For item 1, I need the ability to go negative, but can see why some folks wouldn't, so having that be a configuration on an item would be great.

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One more request - be able to set delivery time.  We currently have one delivery run per day for orders placed before 5:00pm that day (small store, limited staff).  We have that stated in the notes, but would really like the confirmation email to reflect this.

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Agree with #2. Also, would love it if Square had inventory management which enabled me to include my wholesale price for running reports of total retail inventory cost vs. business cost/expense.

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My request (on behalf of my own farmers' market business and several others who have the same issue) is to include an option in the Online Store settings that would require customers to select their pickup location from a drop-down menu and then include the correct location hours and address in their confirmation email.

Square supports multiple locations but forces me to maintain separate inventory for each location. I have a single pool of inventory that I want customers who pick up in three different locations (farmers' markets) to order from. Right now as a workaround, I have only one "Location" enabled in Square for inventory management and I have used the location address fields to show instructions for customers to enter their pickup location in Order Notes. However, Order Notes is not a required (or standardized/sortable) field, so some customers forget to use it, and the email confirmation customers get includes a wonky pickup time and address.

 

The multiple pickup locations/one inventory thing is my most urgent request (and I am happy to field more questions about it), but I have a few other ideas:

-include the switch to stop or start accepting Online Store orders in the Square or Weebly phone apps (so I don't have to run inside and jump on a computer at opening and closing time)

-improve the order export .csv so all fields are filled next to all individual items in an order. I have to manually fill the fields for customer name, etc. in order to make the spreadsheet sortable for packing orders.

 

Thanks, the hackathon is a great idea and I hope it leads to some great updates for those of us who have needed to move more sales online in the past few months.

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