Allow customer to select tip amount BEFORE presenting/processing payment.

[JonTenfold]

We recently moved over from Clover to Square in my cafe. My staff and I rely heavily on tips to make up a good portion of our take home every week. Clovers customer facing screen defaulted to presenting guests with a tipping screen BEFORE payment could be made, this meant at the very least no one walked away from their order before finishing the transaction and had a lead up to a higher top rate. In the 8 weeks since moving to Square my staff has received $1.22 LESS in tips PER HOUR.

If Square could mirror Clovers customer facing screen to ask for a tip BEFRORE payment is presented/processed I think at the very least our customers won't walk away before even just selecting "No Tip" and would potentially get my staff back to the hourly tip rate we had with Clover. 

[kristen]

Hi @JonTenfold, welcome to the Square Community! Thank you for taking the time to share your feature request. Your idea is super timely; we recently created a post to recruit sellers for our Tip Before Payment Beta. We already have plenty of testers so we're no longer recruiting, but we will publish a Product Update post when the feature goes live. Make sure you click the blue subscribe button and you will get a notification as soon as that post goes up. Thanks again for contributing, and we will see you around the community!

[JonTenfold]

Thank you @kristen! I'm so excited there is a beta, and super pumped to see if this will roll out as a product update. I am a bit flustered because I'd been asking about this feature since our first cafe switched over to Square in November of 2024, and once we switched over at my second cafe back in June I've asked my contacts at Square SEVERAL times about this and was always met with silence, or a response that they were still waiting to hear from the new feature department. So while I'm glad there is a beta, it's kind of a blow to the gut that I'm only hearing about it too little to late. 

[kristen]

@JonTenfold I totally get that - and you're not alone in having that sentiment. Unfortunately we've really had a disconnected process for getting feature requests to our Product team, and then getting Product's updates back to our sellers. The bright spot? We've been working on making some big fixes to how we use feedback shared here in the community. We are simplifying processes both here and internally at Square, which will make it simpler for you all to share product feedback and get valid, timely updates.

This all is launching in a couple weeks, so you'll want to subscribe to our Community News to read the post about the changes, and you'll also want to subscribe to our Product Updates blog to get notifications about new feature releases. As far as the beta test group goes, they haven't started testing yet so I reached out to your Account Manager and gave him the name of Product Manager in charge of the beta, in case you want to see if there's still a chance for you to get in.

Thank you again for stopping by and sharing your feedback. It's another post to remind us why we are doing the work we are doing. We're really looking forward to giving a better experience to people like you!

[TheRealChipA]

@kristen I, too, am looking forward to seeing this feature after Beta.  Since I was gone from the Community for a few months, I probably missed the beta recruitment phase, which makes me sad.  I've never said anything about this because it didn't really affect me that much.  But having this tip before payment feature will fix a few thorny issues:

1. My employees always feel awkward when our connected terminal is stuck on the tip screen and they know why and struggle with whether or not to ask the customer to finish their payment (only to be met with the TIP ME screen! LOL). As it is, they just wait for the customer to walk away and then select "no tip" for them.
2. Having tip before payment active on our accounts will remove that pesky Visa/MC limit on flagging suspicious tips.  Some customers are very generous, and having those tips questioned by the payment companies is demoralizing.
3. In general, the payment flow will be much better for everyone.

Glad to hear this is on the roadmap!