thread Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products? in Archived Discussions (Read Only)

Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

Tom — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 21:01:37 GMT

On August 19th at 11am PT / 2pm ET, our Square Hardware team hosted a virtual office hours session on this thread!

This time around, we asked you to dream big — if you could design any piece of hardware for accepting payments:

What features would your ideal point of sale include?
What would your ideal point of sale look like?
What products do you wish Square made?
Thinking about existing Square hardware, what would the most important enhancements be?

Our hosts were @ChristinainHW, @nika_sq, @Rowan, @hanswang, @GetGreg, and @nsnow. Altogether, they have ten years of experience working on Square products and they're excited to answer questions, learn about your business needs, and make sure your insights are included with the development process.

We responded to as many replies as we could on Thursday, August 19th. Looking ahead, we will summarize your questions and responses about your ideal hardware experience in a follow-up post. And, of course, we will incorporate all of your feedback as we continue to improve the payment experience!

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.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's products?

jewelcam — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 19:14:27 GMT

HI i have the Square Register and use Square for Retail

1. I have setting the Team members in the Dashboard under their Team passcode not to be able to access the Settings area on the Register but that is still accessible to them?

2.When i set for the DEVICE to time out after 30 sec. it times out while an active Team member is inserting data, it should either wait until there is 30 sec of no activity then log them out or do a auto-logout after each sale.

3. The customer display background images need to have the ability to rotate.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's products?

Steak1 — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:07:27 GMT

Will barcodes be available to print on the bottom of customer tickets---specifically for restaurant use? This will allow us to quickly scan and recall the ticket for payout at the front register.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's products?

PerroneTech — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:40:55 GMT

1. Will you be releasing a USB C card reader? In 2021 you will find phones not equipped with headphone jacks any longer. I would LOVE to just use the chip reader, but sometimes you get ones that need to be swiped.

2. When will the Square Register be seeing a hardware refresh? I'm not sure if it already has a web browser, but if it did, that would help me a lot, I could just replace my point of sales computer completely if it did as I still need a web browser to create my service tickets in Repairshopr.

3. I'd like to see Square put onto the Windows app store. This way we could perhaps use our own hardware solutions.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's products?

uniqueboutique — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 18:51:44 GMT

Can you make your products so they can run on Windows Systems instead of Apple?

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

ocp — Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:23:35 GMT

Your chip reader should be free, or the price should be significantly reduced.

Fraudulent "EMV liability shift" chargebacks from using your card swipers are killing my business!

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

Indymichael — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 04:11:07 GMT

Allow the wireless and chip icon animations at the “entering name” stage. It gives no indicator to the customer unless we type in their name first. However, we ask them to go ahead and stick in the chip, so it will populate the name correctly. It is more efficient and accurate that way. But it kinda sucks that we have to direct them manually, rather than the screen showing them the chip animation or the wireless icon lit up to guide them.
(This is on Square Register)

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

Candlestore — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 14:34:12 GMT

1) How about developing a display screen for customers to see and sign on when required for the Ipad stand that is similar to the one with Register?

2) Let users create Sub Categories for the Categories in Square for Retail.... not just for online stores.

3) Let users insert images for Categories and sub categories if you make these not just Items.

Now your team will ask why these have been requested in the past and why they are being requested now. Well some of these have been feature requests since 2016 or 2017 and seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

The customer facing display screen would be great as an add on. Why, well if this was not such a good idea why is there one with register?

Subcategories would be great for finding things on an app since every place I know of has different sizes colors or styles of items in retail and would make it easy to find if there is no barcode on said item.

Category Images would be great since I have 8 oz candles, 8 inch tappers, 8 inch formals, 8 inch candle holders, and for item category it shows 8 o, or 8 i. but with an image I could see or put a clear picture in that defines the difference. This does not even get into trying to define the candles by color options for the size or scents.

basically i could have :

Category -

Jar Candles -

sub categories - 8oz, 16oz, 28 oz, 64 oz, 70 oz, 128 oz etc

Pillar Candles-

sub categories - 2x3, 2x6, 3x3, 3x6, 3x9, 4x4, 4x6, 4x9, 6x6 6x9

Votive Candles -

subcategories- scented, unscented

This did not even get in to types of Tappers - Formals, Regular and Hand dipped and their lengths.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

DiscCrazy — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 14:50:16 GMT

Set up the remote vending so we can use a UPC scanner that attaches to a smart phone or ipad for remote sales vending would be helpful. The ipad scans, and the phone scans, but they are clunky and hard to manage for multiple items. We do remote vending at tournaments, and would love to be able to use a handheld scanner. Thanks!

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

cstocker — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 14:54:41 GMT

Please Please Please Show TABLE NUMBERS on the Orders screen, instead of just Delivery vs Pickup.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

CountryDriven — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 18:59:44 GMT

Good Saturday morning,

We have our very first huge trade show even next weekend and I have a few questions.

I bought the small iphone square to take payments on my phone and I bought the contactless/chip reader equipment but I don't have a cash register or anything fancy.

1-Can I plug the contactless card reader in to my regular laptop?

2-If so, do I need to be on a particular website (for this and my iphone) when someone swipes their card?

ANY help on how I get started will be great!

Thank you in advance1

Angel

[personal information redacted]

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

JJS1 — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 18:36:49 GMT

Feature I would love for Square to integrate into their hardware is the ability to accept EBT payments.

I've seen several others suggest, and I agree, I would love to be able to use my desktop computer to save tickets. We have a Square stand, handheld, and two iPhones we use around our store, but we take a lot of phone orders in our back office, and being able to to take orders to save to a ticket for when they want to come in to pay and pick up would be great. Someone even suggested a barcode added to the bottom of a receipt to scan and recall a ticket for payout, I'm not in the restaurant business but would great to be use from our back office to our front store register.

When using the Square app on the iPhone, it would be great for the square app to access the camera to use as a barcode scanner.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

TJae101 — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 22:57:27 GMT

I would purchase a register if it supported a label printer.

Also, your products lean heavily towards Apple and some do not appreciate Apple. Make your software run equally on Android products as well as Apple, please. Can't tell you how many times we have nearly upgraded only to find out there is no point because we don't have access to a feature because we don't own an iPad.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

TBHospitalityNY — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:06:32 GMT

Hi there!

Add bluetooth for wireless scanning with the terminal. Or add a scanner to the unit 🙂

New version of the POS should allow for more text when the "text-based" icons are selected. There's plenty of room for more text, or allow us to change the scale.

Re-order buttons... It's a must have that every single employee asks for.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

kevin724 — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 02:38:02 GMT

Automatic printing of online (weebly) orders without having to turn on printing for every in store transaction.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

kasmiller — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 02:39:34 GMT

Ability to use integrated apps on the register: i.e. Homebase

Better way to limit discounts to only certain items, not products

Loyalty rewards when applied to a transaction where a gift card was purchased, lowers the gift card amount on the sales receipt, but the customer has full amount on gift card, this makes our reports off.

Easier way to change sales tax-sales tax in our area changes by the city/county. At events this is a real pain

Label printer would be awesome

Ability to have pictures for modifications

Ability to keep inventory using modifications. Ex: we sell sodas and ice cream floats. It's impossible to track inventory on soda because we can't inventory soda on a float since that is rung up as a modification.

A longer than 4 digit code, fingerprint or key card o perform certain things on the register. It takes our teens exactly one time watching us enter our code on a giant keypad for them to know the code to access everything on the register.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

GourmetOnWheels — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 02:56:07 GMT

Would be nice if the Square terminal could connect with both Bluetooth and Wifi instead of only wifi.

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

kasmiller — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 03:20:56 GMT

In line 2-certain items not CATEGORIES

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

Donnie-M — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 10:21:25 GMT

I want to thank you for keeping hardware in the hands of us, the sellers. I love being able to use off the shelf products like an ipad or android tablet and get things done.

1. Customer facing display option for square stand. Some kind of small lcd display screen or add on to attach to the square stand. I know there are a lot of small touch displays now. I think this would be a great product if developed in house to use with the square stand. And as I write this, how about just making it where the square terminal can link to the ipad stand and function as customer facing display and dip/swipe/tap? We need this to not have to spinny spinny the tablet around so much.

2. The way the stand attached to the base: I have had 2 of the screws shear off at the base leaving me with an aluminum disc I can't get off without an act of congress.

3. How about RGB on the square stand? who doesn't love RGB lighting effects?

Donnie-M

Re: Meet Our Square Hardware Team: How can we improve Square's payment products?

KAFrye — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 14:30:13 GMT

I bought the touchless/chip reader and it has been nothing but trouble. It continuously goes to sleep and I have to press the button and wait on it to wake up before I can use it. It has slowed my business down to a grinding halt at times. Also, this past weekend, I could not even accept payments on the original square piece that plugs in. We have been with square for 7 years and this year we have had more trouble than ever.