Online order management for take out food service with Square for Retail

[Fishman_Tim]

Hello, I am managing a retail fish market that is attached to a seafood restaurant. I use Square for Retail. We are setting up take out through the market and looking to setup Online Ordering.

Through Online Ordering I setup for customers to select their pick up time and I have setup amount of orders I will allow in a 15 min window to make sure kitchen doesn't get overwhelmed. However for larger orders I state to have my customers call in their order. The problem that arises here is that Orders put in through the POS don't communicate with the Online Order restrictions and there is no way that I can see to block off individual time slots to accommodate the large orders and the Online system will allow other customers to put in orders for that time slot I would like to block off.

How can I setup Square to manage all my ordering with inperson through POS and through Online.

Is the Square KDS able to help me in this scenario

[Breffni]

Hi @Fishman_Tim, 👋 thanks for flagging this. 

It sounds like a Square for Retail and KDS integration would work perfectly for your business.

This is something our team has been working on - I'm going to check with our Retail team on the specific details and I will follow up with you here as soon as I hear back from them.  

[PizzaDive]

FYI we use Square for Restaurants, but this is my single biggest issue with Square too. The (new) Order Manager combines everything from online into a single place, but our Checks don't show up there and there's no way to attach a promise time to a Check. So Checks end up firing on the KDS immediately even if they're not due for days/hours. If Square doesn't have it for Restaurants, I would be surprised if that functionality exists for Retail.

[Breffni]

Thanks for the details @Fishman_Tim. 

It doesn't sound like Retail and KDS would provide a solution here. 

At the moment, there isn't a way to make Online Orders and In-person orders communicate the way you need. 

The 15-min window is very specific to Square Online, and it wouldn't work the other way around. 

You could potentially look at temporarily disabling online orders when a large order does come in. You can add a pop-up banner to your site when your online orders are off, prompting customers to try again in a few more minutes. 

[Fishman_Tim]

That is too bad. Is there any 3rd party systems that work with square but are more geared to managing take out food service. There has got to be a better solution out there, cause the system as is seems totally inadequate. I thought Square was supposed to be the gold standard with this segment 

[Deb19]

There isn't a perfect fix that I am aware of.

If you have the Square App on your phone you can put Online Orders into Busy Mode quite quickly where you can Increase Prep Times & Pause Orders which can help if you are getting slammed instore. Just go to the Orders tab and there is a little clock at the top. 

It's up to our staff on the POS to be aware of how busy the kitchen is with upcoming orders so that they can advise customers at the counter of approx wait times. 

We have multiple printers (1 kitchen, 1 at POS and 1 at servery for front of house)  so eveyone is aware of orders coming in. 

[Fishman_Tim]

I usually limit the size of an online order and have a prompt to call the store to see about putting in large orders. However once i put in a large phone order through the POS there is no way to block off the time that we will be exicuting that order besides turning off all ordering

[Fishman_Tim]

Square needs to give their businesses full control over how the orders come in.

This needs to be setup as 15minute time slots. I should then be able to set limits on each time slot and be able to block or open up each time slot.

Is there any 3rd partys that would give tis kind of control that integrate with square.

We are using Tock for our online take out ordering, but it doesnt integrate with Square. Tock does allow for full control.

This could be a deal breaker for our business

[Lou8]

Hi @Fishman_Tim, 

I'll make sure to pass your feedback to the appropriate Product team. I also suggest filing out a feature request on our Ideate page for extra visibility.

I'm reviewing Square's integrated partners to see if we offer a 3rd party application similar to Tock - I'll get back to you soon with an update!

Thank you for your patience.

[grinderjohn]

Hello @Fishman_Tim  - have you figured out a solution for this? We have the exact same issue. The only thing we've figured out to do is to place orders online for the slots we want to block, and then refund ourselves later. A pain, for sure. 

[zechcamp]

@grinderjohn That’s about the only solution I could think of as well.

One thing that can make it slightly faster is to create an Online coupon for 100% off. Then during checkout you don’t have to enter credit card details, worry about the refund, or paying square fees. However, it still shows up in your sales reports which is a shame, but I believe there is way to see how many times the coupon is used which could be used to offset the reporting. Definitely a workaround, not ideal. 

[grinderjohn]

Aha. I'll look into this!

[grinderjohn]

I created a new item called Blank Space (or whatever you want to call it) that costs $0.00, that says in the description that it's for administrative purposes only. That way nothing needs to be reversed. But when I try to buy this to book a slot, it still wants to put the transaction through Square Pay, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and wants a phone number, name and email. What am I missing?

[zechcamp]

Nice, that's a clever idea! Better than a coupon. How are you hiding the item so only you can see it and buy it? I think there is a "hidden" setting right? 

If I fill in the phone, email, name, it lets me click "purchase" even though it still shows Apple and Google pay. Ended up using a Chrome browser extension to save my form and quickly fill it in the next time I need to "purchase" this item. I tried Web Developer Form Filler, a little clunky but once I got it working, now I can click the button and it fills out the form for me instantly.

[grinderjohn]

There is a hidden setting, but then I don't think you can order it? What I ended up doing was calling it "extra napkins". If someone selects it, what the heck - we'll throw in some extra napkins with their pizza. But it's still free and will block a time slot. I'll see if I can get our iPad to keep the information to fill the fields - may have to use Chrome. 

[Eddiemunster]

We have the same issue.  We're a wood-fired pizza restaurant and know that we can cook 4 pizzas every 5 minutes.  However with square only throttling orders not items, it makes it hard to give accurate times etc as a order can be for 1 pizza or for 10.  What we have done-and I'm not sure if this will work for you-is we have a manual sheet next to our POS and as we take or receive orders we mark off on the sheet how many pizzas the order is for.  As our fulfilment times increase we adjust in the order manager how long it will be for a new order to be fulfilled.  This requires the FOH staff to be on top of ordering times as the fluctuate through a busy night but the manual sheet gives us an accurate timing that we can adjust in the order manager.  Not sure it will help you but it works well for us. 

[grinderjohn]

This is very helpful. Do you let customers order ahead of time, ie earlier in the day? I'm just thinking about receiving a big order for, say, 7pm that's placed earlier in the afternoon. If you increase the fulfillment time then, it'll affect any orders that are coming in before that as well, right? 

[Eddiemunster]

Yes we do let customer order ahead.  We often receive orders all day before our food truck pops up in a location.   We occasionally get an order the day before as well. We manage our orders through our manual sheet and adjust wait times during the night in the order manager to stay on top of this.  It works well most times but occasionally we get an order comes through before we adjust the times and we just make the order happen-it doesn't occur often. 

[AnniesSeafood]

I find it remarkable that this is still an ongoing issue.  March 2024 we were told that they were "committed to finding a solution" for timed orders.  There's even no value in having the report function in the dashboard to see kitchen performance if you have afternoon calls for dinner time pickups.  And just like you ... if we get three massive orders within a 15 minute period it bogs down the kitchen especially if we also have some phone orders and a full dining room.  When we switched to square we were misinformed that online and in person integrate.  They clearly don't.

[PizzaDive]

FYI Square has made solid steps toward integrating them, that's what is behind the new "Order" tab redesign. The Beta team was only like 2-3 months away from fielding the capability to assign times to in-person orders when Square axed the whole team a few months ago. Fingers crossed its something that can be pushed to the finish line in the next year or so.

[Marketing1]

This is a great question—and one that many hybrid food service setups run into!  You're smart to limit orders in 15-minute windows to manage kitchen flow. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, Square POS and Online Ordering don’t always "talk" to each other in real time for capacity management.

You might want to explore using Square KDS (Kitchen Display System) for better visibility across both online and in-person orders. While it doesn’t directly restrict time slots, it does help kitchen staff manage and prioritize orders efficiently, including large ones that come in via phone or walk-in.

In the meantime, a workaround could be blocking off time slots manually in the online system once a large in-person order is placed, but I agree—this is far from ideal.

Would love to hear how others have handled this too. If Square adds a feature to sync order volume across channels, it would be a game-changer for businesses like yours!