How to Sell Online and Allow for Pickup Orders

[tranguyen]

As the new reality of social distancing is setting in we wanted to offer some solutions to help you keep your business up and running.

If your business faces reduced foot traffic or if your local government instructs you to pause operations, our Square Online Store can help your restaurant or coffeeshop stay afloat by enabling you to take orders online for in-person pickup.  

How in-person pickup works:

1. Your existing Item Library automatically imports into your Square Online Store.
2. Customer orders made via Square Online Store connect directly with your Square Point of Sale system.
3. You won’t have to change your current process and can go forward with accepting online orders quickly.

If you haven't tried Square Online Store yet, check out this video for a comprehensive set up guide:

For more specifics on enabling pickup and local delivery features, have a look at these resources:

• Turn on Curbside Pickup for Restaurants
• Turn on Local Delivery for Restaurants

We hope this helps you navigate through the days ahead. If any you have questions or insight on what's worked well so far — please reply below to share your experience.

[the-refill-lady]

I started to experiment with this but my issue was that I am a mobile business with a single inventory that applies to all locations. At the beginning of lockdown I was toying with doing click and collect at the different locations where I was trading. This feature is designed more for bricks and mortar businesses with multiple locations that have their own inventories. It would be great if it had the flexibility to allow for a mobile business to manage click and collect orders for multiple locations without expecting each location to have its own inventory.

In the end, I decided click and collect and delivery were too soul destroying to pursue (I'm on my own and run a refills business - putting product in paper bags all day was enough to make me consider closing up altogether) but it may be worthwhile to consider how this feature is designed for your mobile customers.

[tranguyen]

Hi @the-refill-lady, thank you so much for sharing this! We develop Square Online Store on an ongoing basis thanks to your feedback, so I'll be sure to take note and pass this to our Product team so that the feature can become more robust and flexible to business needs.

[Sam_400º]

I like @the-refill-lady - good business & clearly a straight thinker! 

@tranguyen sort of along the same lines, total pain in the bum that you can't check out unless all the items are 'collect' from the same place. 

I'd love to be able to have people order from several locations (next to each other - a food collective) & complete a single checkout. This is quite individual I know - but tried to have a donation option for one of the local schools when people are ordering pizza, but it would make the checkout fail as it was seen as a digital item. 

[Helen]

Helen here - I definitely see how that would help @Sam_400º. We're seeing some sellers set up similar food collectives in the US too. However, to achieve this a business has to add new items in their existing Online Store (i.e. creating a new item and including the restaurant name in the item name/details), and then they pay the participating restaurant(s) outside of Square. Hopefully we'll be able to share a solution for this in the near future! 

[Sam_400º]

@Helen 

My 'perfect' solution for the 5 vans that park up together here: 

One Square account (probably mine...) 

5 different locations, each having their own menu & deposits directly as Square lets each location have a different bank.

Would be easy to set up the online store to have a page for each van. 

-- Up to this point, everything would work with the current situation -- 

Customer adds everything they want to the cart from all the different menus & checks out, selecting their pick up time. 

Each trader has their iPad (or Terminal if I manage to convince the T team to add orders to the menu!) signed in to their location & receive the orders. 

Customer comes along & we all have their food ready. 

-- At the moment you can't check out if your cart contains items from different locations so this doesn't work --