Shipping Label - Integrate with Royal Mail Click and Drop

[Jools]

Royal Mail supports integration with various online stores and marketplaces

Integration with Square would be great so that shipping labels could be automatically created, and postage paid

https://www.royalmail.com/sites/default/files/click-how-to-guide.pdf

https://personal.help.royalmail.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11716/~/click-%26-drop---connect-your-ch...

Regards

Jools

[#2]

Hello everyone, this is Alex from the Square Online product team. We know how frustrating it is to have been told that a Royal Mail Click & Drop integration is on the roadmap for two years, and we're sorry that we haven't yet been able to launch this for you. Behind the scenes, we're in the process of making some fundamental changes to our shipping product, so we decided to build all shipping carrier integrations (not just Royal Mail) in a way that aligns with our long term strategy. This will take us time to fully execute. We also understand that you have to make decisions about how to operate your business, and that an expectation of a Royal Mail integration has been a key factor in choosing to continue using Square. Unfortunately, we don't have a concrete update that we can share with you on our plans or timeline for this today, but we'll be sure to post in this thread when our beta is ready for you. 

[SGM1]

@tranguyenSeems like Square really need to give UK users a serious answer on this as shipping is a critical part of any online platform!

There does seem to be a disconnect between what Square are working on and what UK users want and need to develop our businesses on your platform.

[doc_choc]

Anybody have Dave's mobile number? Perhaps he could lobby on our behalf 🤔 

[MJD]

I believe this is already a very highly requested feature and one that is being worked on, however this may take some time as it will need co-operation from both square and royal mail to create an auto input bot that matches royal mail's ToS 

[tonydow]

You sound very defensive of Square but, you must admit as evidenced in the other thread, this has been ongoing for nearly a year for something that has been implemented on other platforms in two weeks. I don’t know about auto input bots and RM ToS but it can’t be too onerous if others can do it in a reasonable timeframe. Where there is a will…………..

[MJD]

I'm not being defensive of square, I just understand what goes into coding these things is not easy at all and takes a lot of trial and error, I also do understand your point, this has been going on for a very long time now. What I meant by the auto input against RM ToS is that there'd have to be opened a backdoor around CAPTCHAs and such human verification tasks, therefore there is a lot to think about and take into consideration when building such a tool. Also because it would be on royal mail's end that all this would be going off, royal mail would likely have to input/provide a section of the code to make this all happen, it's unfortunately a much bigger task than it may seem and will hopefully be sorted soon.

[Dapplefrost]

I agree, however, Wix are also dragging their feet with this.
When I have spoken to royal mail, they told be by email that the system with wix is set up, they are literally just waiting for the okay from Wix themselves. 

The reason they aren't in a rush is because they are making money from sellers using third party shipping apps to generate royal mail shipping labels.

We currently have our main website with Wix, but have a free website semi-built on square as we use square for our POS system and would like to eventually move over to square so everything is all done in one place, but until square improve their online system, I don't think it is a move we are willing to make just yet. We are even thinking of ditching wix and square all together in favour of shopify, but we are still looking into how we can link a working POS system to that so that all our sales can be seen in one place and have our printed receipts show the items customers have ordered. At the moment as we have wix and square working together, our square receipts only show "custom amount" and not the items actually purchased. We would have to keep track off two lots of stock if we was to add all our products onto square just for the sake of having items show on recipes and that just seems like too much of a hassle.

[MJD]

If its any help I believe Shopify can sell you a Shopify brand keypad style chip and pin reader and likely other POS equipment, if that's the move you feel is best for your business, here's a link to that Shopify hardware. It may be best if @tranguyen can give us all an update on an RM integration though. 

[tranguyen]

Hi everyone, thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. I can appreciate your frustration, especially since this feature has been requested for a very long time. I want to check in and let you know that all the posts here really help us to make the case for pushing the integration forwards and get eyes from different teams as well.

Also apology for any confusion regarding my last post! To clarify, the way that we've approached the Royal Mail integration is by working with third-party partners who already have an integration with Royal Mail in place to roll this out.

In my last post, I mentioned that we are looking at having something in place by the end of this quarter. After checking in with the team again, they are hoping to have something ready by the end of the month. However, if there is any changes, I'll following up on this thread with everyone. 

[MJD]

Well this sounds like a win, with the end of the month, thanks for this information tra, very reassuring, all I’m waiting on now is auto sending digital products, then I’ll be all set for the most efficient service possible! 

[JandN1]

I hope this is true. Royal Mail intergration is really needed for us Uk users. Many other providers offer this so I hope square really do launch this by the end of the month. I look forward to hearing more.