Q&A: Ask us anything about Square Online Fulfilment

[tranguyen]

Hello Seller Community!

On Wednesday, August 18th at 5PM BST, we hosted a Square Online Fulfilment Q&A with :

• Kevin Taniguchi, an engineer on the Shipping & Store Setup Team 
• Alex Smith, the Product Manager for the Shipping & Store Setup Team. 
• Faheem Zaman, the Product Manager for Pickup & Delivery
• Lisa Fong, the Product Manager for Self-Serve Ordering

Together, they have answered all your questions about Square Online Fulfilment settings, from shipping to pickup, delivery and self-serve ordering.

You can learn more about Square Online here. 

 

Ask us about Square Online Fulfilment

A few example questions:

• How can I restrict my shipping destinations?
• What’s the best fulfilment setup for a retail business/restaurants, etc.?

We’d also love to hear what new shipping & fulfilment features would you like to see! 

Note on account-specific questions: For your privacy and security, we are not able to address issues related to specific account status details in our public forums. If you need account assistance, please contact our Customer Success team and they'll be able to take a deeper dive.

[tranguyen · Accepted solution]

Thank you everyone who participated in our Q&A yesterday and special thanks to @alexws @faheem @ktaniguchi-sq and @lfong for joining us. You’ve given us great suggestions on how we can improve Square Online site and our Square offerings as well, and we’ll be sure to share this with the wider team.

To wrap up, here’s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

Integration with Royal Mail
We completely understand that fulfilling shipping orders without an integration with Royal Mail is very tedious and laborious. We don’t have a firm date that we can share at the moment, but it is a feature we are actively scoping. We’d love to include you in our beta of this integration once it is ready to get your early feedback.

Order email and customer communication
While Square Messaging is not available in the UK at the moment, you can add a personal touch to your customer communications by editing your store emails.

Automatic discounts & more coupon types
We are actively working on allowing for group discounts, automatic discounts (similar to how discounts work on Point of Sale app) and specific coupon types for fulfilment methods. We do not have a firm timeline for when these will be available, but I would encourage you to check out our Beta Community to join and potentially get access to new features first when we test them out.

More granular fulfilment settings
Features like setting fulfilment at an item level, charging by postal code, pre-order or setting cut-off time have been requested by a number of sellers. We’re actively working on rolling out a number of these, so please keep an eye for future Product Updates (and don’t forget to join our Beta Community to test our new feature as well).

[GreenMachine1]

I would like this facility too!

[tranguyen]

Hey @MyCoffeeStop, thanks for sharing this! It’s definitely a very handy feature to have. There isn’t a way to set up a favourite or previously ordered item pages for customers at the moment but we’ll definitely look into this.

[MyCoffeeStop]

In the meantime, I will create for them a personal page listing all their favourite products as a product category then.

My next question is,

When scrolling down the products in a category, can customers just have a facility to check/tick/select each one they want amd then put the whole lot in their basket at once, rather than having to select, go to basket, go back to page, browse, select, go back to basket and so on? X 

[notso]

Hi, when a customer selects a collection time their email receipt states the collection time ‘after’ not ‘at’ - for example 

Your order will be ready for pickup THURSDAY after 19:00

Can this be changed to say at 19:00

This is becoming furthermore frustrating for our customers and has been an ongoing issue…

Many thanks 

[faheem]

Hi @notso, I can definitely understand how this would be frustrating for your customers. We’re actively working on some updates which will update this message to say ‘at’ instead of ‘after’, for sellers that need customers to collect their items at a specific time - stay tuned!

[HughesFriend]

It would be great to be able to switch off delivery time slots for local delivery, this auto generated feature does not work for us as our timings change day to day

[faheem]

This is a great feature request, @HughesFriend. Can you share a little more about the way you do deliveries? I’m also wondering how you would like this feature to work. For example, would you want to turn off delivery from the Square Point of Sale app, or do you want to be able to create a schedule at the beginning of every day from your Square Dashboard?

[Stixx]

I would like a way to make items out of stock without having to put a stock amount in. I sell multiple products with the same item in (eg: greetings card x10 is for sale as well as greetings card x5 and greetings card2 x5) so I can’t sell one thing without manually updating everything else’s stock number.

[tranguyen]

Hey @Stixx, thanks for sharing this feature request! I know we were working on a feature to mark items as Sold Out without tracking stock but we came across a few issues so the roll out for this is currently paused for now. We’ll definitely share a Product Update when the roll out resumes so do keep an eye out for it. 

I would also encourage you to check out our Beta Community to join and potentially get access to new features first when we test them out.

[lettie16]

We run a local food take away business and deal with all the deliveries ourselves. So why am I being charged 50p per local delivery when square is not involved at all? We already get charged a percentage of each order and pay an annual subscription for the website. On small orders of £5 or less this works out to 10% of the order which seems extremely high.

I'm struggling to see the justification for this fee.

[tranguyen]

Hi @lettie16, thank you for sharing this. I may be able to help clarify this.

For context, this fee was originally waived in light of the COVID-19 shutdowns. It was originally waived through June 30, 2020 but we extended this until April and then June, 2021. The fee helps us support the areas below (and other areas that power our delivery offerings)

• Improve the customer experience: By providing real-time text alert updates, you’re giving your customers the experience they already expect from popular marketplace delivery apps.
• Have more control over deliveries: With settings for order minimums and delivery service areas (by postcode or radius), you can let Square Online do the work for you. Both are managed automatically on the ordering page, and can restrict customers from attempting to place orders outside of those settings.
• Add efficiencies to your in-house delivery operations: Compared to taking orders over the phone, orders placed directly on Square Online flow directly into the Square POS. Orders are also relayed to any existing kitchen printing systems, saving your employees time that’s otherwise spent inputting orders over the phone, or transferring orders from a third party tablet into the POS.

Many sellers charge buyers a service fee for the convenience of delivery, and we would recommend implementing a service fee that helps you cover the increased cost of doing business online. Even with a moderate service fee, buyers will still typically be paying less than they would by ordering through a third-party competitor. The service fee will also helps make sure that you have a sustainable margin.

To set a service fee:

1. Go to your site dashboard > Fulfilment> Pickup & Delivery.
2. Select your location, and Edit the “Delivery settings”.
3. Under “Service fee”, enter the amount desired to offset the cost of the local delivery fee.
4. Select Save to finish.

If you have any additional feedback about our current delivery offerings, please do let us know! I'll tag in @faheem who is the Product Manager for delivery & pickup so he can chime in as well! 

[lettie16]

Unfortunately one of our USP's is that we don't charge for delivery so I do not want to start passing this fee onto our customers as a service fee.

The only point I see as viable above is point 1 where by you may be charged to send a txt out via a provider. The other points are already built into the system that I pay an annual fee and once built require little or no maintenance from the development team so no extra to you (speaking as a web developer).

We do not use POS as we are delivery only so everything is done via the website.

I feel this fee would be better applied as an annual fee for the product for R&D and not included on each order made. Larger sellers with bigger orders can probably carry this fee but when your orders are small it seems a little over the top.

[notso]

Hi Square,

also another issue is when people pay via Apple Pay for food items they don’t receive a text confirmation - can this be solved ?? 

thanks 

[tranguyen]

Hey @notso, this is something I can help look into! Can you let me know a bit more about how customers are ordering (is it for pickup, delivery etc.) and how order statuses are update?

[tranguyen]

The Q&A has ended! Thank you very much to everyone who participated today to ask a question or share a feature request. We'll follow up with anyone who shared feedback or more details tomorrow, and we'll share a detailed summary of this event tomorrow too.

Thanks again! 

[tranguyen · Accepted solution]

Thank you everyone who participated in our Q&A yesterday and special thanks to @alexws @faheem @ktaniguchi-sq and @lfong for joining us. You’ve given us great suggestions on how we can improve Square Online site and our Square offerings as well, and we’ll be sure to share this with the wider team.

To wrap up, here’s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

Integration with Royal Mail
We completely understand that fulfilling shipping orders without an integration with Royal Mail is very tedious and laborious. We don’t have a firm date that we can share at the moment, but it is a feature we are actively scoping. We’d love to include you in our beta of this integration once it is ready to get your early feedback.

Order email and customer communication
While Square Messaging is not available in the UK at the moment, you can add a personal touch to your customer communications by editing your store emails.

Automatic discounts & more coupon types
We are actively working on allowing for group discounts, automatic discounts (similar to how discounts work on Point of Sale app) and specific coupon types for fulfilment methods. We do not have a firm timeline for when these will be available, but I would encourage you to check out our Beta Community to join and potentially get access to new features first when we test them out.

More granular fulfilment settings
Features like setting fulfilment at an item level, charging by postal code, pre-order or setting cut-off time have been requested by a number of sellers. We’re actively working on rolling out a number of these, so please keep an eye for future Product Updates (and don’t forget to join our Beta Community to test our new feature as well).

[elliestreasures]

Thank you for a really helpful and informative session yesterday and your follow up today.  Thank you too for your reply to my own query about UK customers having issues at checkout regarding postcodes.  As I can't see this mentioned in your overall summary ("best answer"), thought I'd ask if your team would be kind enough to add a line at checkout to inform customers that they need to enter their postcode without spaces - would really help clear up a lot of issues.  Thank you so much, Elaine.

[todaysarahmade]

Is there any update on when the Royal Mail (or any other shipping company!) integration will be happening? This would make SUCH a massive difference! thanks 🙂

[tranguyen]

Hey @todaysarahmade, thanks for your post! We don't have a timeline for when the Royal Mail integration will be available but our teams are actively working on this. @alexws provided an update on this feature recently here. 

In the meantime, we do have an integration with Shippo which allows you to connect to couriers like Hermes. You can find more information about the integration in our App Marketplace. 

[phillipsrw · Accepted solution]

Is there a way we delay the review requests for pre order items, without switching off the auto review email function. It confuses our customers when they pre-order and buy something then get a review request a few weeks later, but the item hasn't been dispatched yet. Many thanks

[Emma_]

Hi @phillipsrw, thanks for raising this. There isn't an option to delay the customer review email or any workaround. This will be a feature request. I will share your feedback with our Product team.