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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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I second that it would be useful to have a quick/easy way to shut down online selling from square or weebly app.

Ideally, it could be setup to include a popup banner or other clear messaging, not as it is now when you toggle off online ordering and it just appears that each item is not available (that is too passive)

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We are a small retail bread and pastry bakery. We would LOVE it if we could set up a pickup day for certain items..

For example we are baking (24) White Sourdough Breads on Saturday, and Today is Monday. We can select a "prep" time for this item but would have to change the day from 5 days on Monday to 4 days on Tuesday, 3 days on Wednesday, etc. after closing time so it would give the proper pickup time for the customer.

It would be nice to make sales for the Saturday Bread bake daily, and then have everyone pickup fresh bread on Saturday. 

Where this is tricky is we also sell pastries every day for next day pickup as long as the order is placed before our online store closing time.

It would be helpful if customers who bought the bread Monday got a prompt to come in on Saturday to pickup their entire order on the same day.


I hope this make sense. We currently have been baking bread and freezing it so we can accommodate last minute orders for next day pickup. We have several customers that would like to get freshly baked bread.


If you have any questions please let me know and I can try and clarify the situation. I have zero skills in coding or what it takes to make this happen. So I understand if its not feasible to do. But this would be a game changer for a lot of small artisan bakeries doing the same thing.

Thanks,
-Teddy


EDIT:

Also it would be nice to add quantity discounts on items and pull it pull from the same inventory.

Example once someone orders 14 Cookies, for each lot of 12 it is at a discounted price.

Single Price per Cookie 1.49 
Dozen Price per Cookie 1.37

(12) Cookies @ 1.37 ea.
(2) Cookies @ 1.49 ea.

 

Thanks,

-Teddy

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I would love the ability to personalize the marketing emails. A field to add [FIRST NAME] would go a long way in creating connection with my customers.  

 

I would love to be able to address my marketing emails to the recipient, such as Hi Sally, rather than Hi everyone.

 

The place where the lack of connection is glaring is on the auto-generated birthday emails.  If we had a First Name field, we could construct the email to read, Happy Birthday Jane! - it would increase our sales, which increases Squares income.  Win-Win.  Thanks for listening.

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We are a small retail artisan bread and pastry bakery.

1)
We would LOVE it if we could set up a pickup day for certain items..

For example we are baking (24) White Sourdough Breads on Saturday, and Today is Monday. We can select a "prep" time for this item but would have to change the day from 5 days on Monday to 4 days on Tuesday, 3 days on Wednesday, etc. after closing time so it would give the proper pickup time for the customer.

It would be nice to make sales for the Saturday Bread bake daily, and then have everyone pickup fresh bread on Saturday. 

Where this is tricky is we also sell pastries every day for next day pickup as long as the order is placed before our online store closing time.

It would be helpful if customers who bought bread and pastry Monday got a prompt to come in on Saturday to pickup their entire order on the same day.



2)
Also it would be nice to add quantity discounts on items..

Example once someone orders 14 Cookies, for each lot of 12 it is at a discounted price.

Single Price per Cookie 1.49 
Dozen Price per Cookie 1.37

(12) Cookies @ 1.37 ea.
(2) Cookies @ 1.49 ea.

 

If you have any questions please let me know and I can try and clarify the situation. I have zero skills in coding or what it takes to make this happen. So I understand if it’s not possible to do. But this would be a game changer for a lot of small artisan bakeries doing the same thing.

Thank y'all for your hard work,
-Teddy

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Second this! A specific day for specific items would be valuable to our business (artisan bakery & coffee) all the time but would have been SO helpful on Mother's Day weekend. 

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I really really could use some way to have people come to my website, press a button, and enter a custom amount that they want to pay me. I am a therapist, and now have to make 30-50 custom links a month that get sent out to each customer so they can pay their custom amount. This is so tedious! And it takes so long! Please! Please! If this is too impractical, perhaps it could just be a page I can link to that lets customers enter a custom amount? Thanks for considering! 

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Agree, even a barcode to scan that would include the custom amount for the item would be great.

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Could you just have the item set to $1 and have them adjust the quantity? Just a thought.

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2 things I'd love:

1. A way to have a sliding scale "pay what you can" option for services. For the small arts education business I run, it sometimes makes more sense to have some services donation based. 

2. Sell a ticket to an online class where the receipt sends a zoom link. 

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Along the same idea, a "round-up" option per transaction that could be sent to a special bank account or somehow segregated from the normal balance transfer.

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I send out 200-300 invoices a week for my small business. It would be an excellent feature if we had the capability to send all of the drafts out at once instead of having to go into each invoice and hit send.  This is very time consuming as every time you go into an invoice to send it from the drafts, it resets and goes back to all invoices, which you then have to go back to the drafts, enter the invoice, hit send, every single time.  I'd love to see a shortcut created. 

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Please consider the following:

1.  Allow businesses to set the pick up times - this is very important.  RIght now, the pick up time that is generated for a 48 hour prep time is exactly the time that the customer orders.  We only allow pickups from 8am-noon, so if a customer places an online order at 6pm, the pick up time is listed at 6 pm 48 hours later.  Their receipt is giving them the wrong information and there is no way to change it.  I created a pop up window that tells the customer that the pick up time listed is incorrect, but not everyone reads it.  This is very frustrating for both us and the customer.

2.  Allow businesses to set different online order prep times.  Right now, we require 48 hours notice due to the long fermentation time of our bread (we are a bakery).  But, other items do not need that long of a prep time.  Other sites, such as Tock, allow you more flexibility with your order pick up settings.  We would rather stay with Square for many reasons though, and would love some additional flexibility for our order settings.

3.  Consider making a Square ordering app for customers to use.  During these times, less physical contact is better for everyone - an app would allow for more efficient and quicker same day sales.  The companies that you are currently associated with who make apps that integrate with Square are charging a ridiculous amount of money for this service.  When you add their fee on top of the Square fee, it can be as high as 13-15% of the sale.  

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  1. Please add the feature to pre-populate cost when receiving inventory for existing items based on the cost of the item recorded from previous inventory updates or addition of new inventory items.  Entering the cost each time an item is received is a big waste of time for very small retail shops.
  2. Please improve search capabilities specifically for customer names in the POS. Search by last name, first name or any other word that might be associated with a customer record. 
  3. Please improve the identification of duplicate of customer records.

 

 

 

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At the very least, be able to sort by last name. 

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We would like the ability to charge an open ticket without re-swiping the card. Currently, we would be required to hold on to the customer's credit card. We want to avoid all unnecessary contact and even touching the customer's credit card is unnecessary.

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Adding an online ordering for a Coffee Shop.    I tried to keep our ordering system simple. However, a lot of our customers were using the notes to add addtional options.  This led to non payment for things that should have been. I used the most common modifiers for all items that I listed.  I encouraged customers to call in their order if they did not see something that they wanted. 

 

suggestions for making a food/drink specific options for online ordering.  Like pop up questions to their order.  

 

ie:   Steak

Pop up:   how would you like that prepared

                     List of options

 

having pop ups that apply

Using the modifiers as pop up/next question with out having a huge list for them to go thru 

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This is such a great idea! 

 

The number one thing we would like to see is the ability to make a product non-discount-able.

 

We have several products that we sell at near cost and when we're having a sale it would be great if certain products can't be marked down.  If there were an option in the item set up that we could just choose to make a "no discount" that would save us so much time and money. 

 

I've read through the community before and found that people have been asking for this feature for more than two years, so it's obviously something that would benefit a lot of us. 

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I have a small retail shop (gifts, home accessories, etc.) and ventured into online sales for the first time with the Square/Weebly partnership (right as the shutdown began). It's all working well. But, I'm still struggling with creating good photography (I know there's an option available to have photos done professionally, but don't feel that we can afford that) – getting the lighting right is the biggest issue. Also, retailers have to order and bring in holiday merchandise quite early (some of it arriving in June!), if we are to get what we want. We price it and put into storage until we're ready to unveil it all. I've dialed back a bit on many of my larger orders, in anticipation of a possible downturn or (perish the thought) another resurgence of COVID-19. I'm trying to envision a holiday season where we might have to put a lot up online and still make it as wonderful as it is in person. Not sure if there's a technical solution to all that, but thought I'd put it out there. Thanks!

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We're in the same boat, we sell highly seasonal merchandise. Have you reached out to your giftline reps, many can provide images for your use for free that are better than what you can do on your own.

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Thanks: I have done that and appreciate when vendors have good photos to use... but not all of them do, so I feel like I'm still near the bottom of the learning curve.

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Super Seller

we take all our photos using our iPhone and run them through a preset on Adobe Lightroom App. We purchase our presets through Etsy and they were pretty affordable. This prob sounds a little technical but with a little bit of google-ing you can totally figure it out. 

Dina
Co-Owner Amityville Apothecary
www.shopamityvilleapothecary.com
Instagram | TikTok @AmityvilleApothecary

Podcast: Apothecary After Dark (YouTube & Spotify)
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