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software shutting down during busiest time of business

I operate a specialty grocery market located in Cranbrook, BC. Our inventory is ~5000 items.

 

Our entire POS system crashed on one of the busiest and most important days of our operation โ€“ our one-year anniversary celebration. We had been preparing for this day for weeks with much social media and live radio presence (the latter of which is instant and very expensive). Our store was full and there were lineups at both our tills. Both of our tills stopped working and continued to shut down each time we tried to sign back in. We took every precaution before the day โ€“ made sure the software was up to date on both iPads and that both iPads were fully connecting. The tills were shut down for approximately 25 minutes.

 

When the iPad tills stopped working, I tried to use my phone to process customerโ€™s orders. It worked for one and then Square shut down on my phone as well. We had no way to check prices, no way to process credit cards; we were forced to hand write orders after trying to locate prices for items and take only cash. Many people walked out. It was extremely embarrassing, frustrating, stressful, and VERY unacceptable. This is the fourth time this has happened on our busiest days in the store; on special event days when we have many customers and are processing many orders/hour.

 

I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this. I need this to be troubleshot before our Christmas season starts. Does anyone know if Square will go good for lost revenue? Are they able to look at our statists that day and extract data from the sales trends to compensate for the loss during the down time?

 

We had many customers walk out and grumble as they left. As a business that has nothing but an uphill battle because of Covid, supply interruptions, transportation disruptions from a major flood event, inflation of food prices, and simply being in our first year of business, we expect a POS system to be part of our foolproof foundation. Alas, this has not been the case and we have had just as many frustrating days with Square as with the afore mentioned. As inconvenient as it would be to switch POS companies, I am not above making this change.

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Square Community Moderator

Hello @MorchellaMarket,

 

Thank you for reaching out and bringing this to our attention. I hate to hear this happened during your anniversary celebration. I am sorry we let you down, I can only imagine the frustration and disappointment. I certainly want to take a deeper dive into this to see what could have happened. 

 

1) What is your wifi setup? Wireless or ethernet? 

 

2) This happened on both the Square Stands and your phones? 

 

3) Has this happened previously? 

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1) we have wifi

2) yes, this happened on both stands and my phone and another phone that also had the app. They all started to shut down within minutes of each other.

3) yes. It seems to happen everytime we are very busy. It is extremely frustrating and disappointing, yes.

 

I was given $2000 in processing fees, but since those were used up in under a day, I question the actual monetary amount this saved my company versus the $1000 plus in ACTUAL sales that were missed because of this shut down. I hope someone can show me that this offer actually providing a monetary benefit to my company that is of significance. Otherwise, I will take it as another placating gesture from square (creating more frustration and disappointment...)

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Square Community Moderator

We do see you have reached out to support multiple times about this. Since this seems to be happening prior to some of the outages we had, and this continues to happen even after replacing the Square Stand the issue seems to be more than the hardware.  We need to get some more information and investigate this further. Can you do a speed test for me and let me know what the upload and download speed is? You can go to google and type in a speed test and use any one of the options that come up, or you can use speedtest.net as well. I appreciate your assistance in help getting this resolved! 

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The speed tests on both of our ipads are very good. One is 159.4 Mbps download and 139 Mbps upload. The other is 96.6 and 141.

 

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Square Community Moderator

I was looking back through some of the case history, but I am not seeing we ever filed a ticket when you previously called into support. Is that correct? I think at this point that is going the best route. 

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