Feature Request: Feedback Wanted, Delayed Orders

[kellyj]

@pessosices @vinesandrushes @londontea @Donnie-M @bagelboss @ryanwanner @TeaLeafCafe 

Hey beta friends!

We've heard your requests for a way to turn off Square Online orders In-App and streamline control of your orders, including change times for pick up, delivery, and shipments. Our team has been hard at work on this, and we need your help to take a look at these designs and give us some feedback.

What I need from you:

Please take a look at the images that are most relevant to your business. For instance, if you mainly fulfill orders for pick up, please take careful consideration of the first prototype for how this function may impact your business. Same goes if you mainly fulfill orders by shipment. You are welcome to give feedback on this either way, but we're most interested in the ways you would use this now for your business.

Delay Order for Pickup and Delivery

Delay Order for Shipments 

Delay Order for Delivery Windows

There are two ways to engage in this feedback request, in a perfect world, I'd love both. 

1. Click here to take the survey. We'd love you to take this survey first, before posting or reading comments in this thread. This is so we can have feedback based on your business.
2. Once you've taken the survey, please feel free to engage here in the community and let’s talk about what works and what doesn't. This is a great place to share feedback about the other designs that do not apply directly to your business. 

What's next?

Once I get the feedback from the surveys/conversations here in the community, we'll pass this on to our team and update with progress that we've made. 

*Please remember that the Beta Community is a place to discuss these design updates and features and when you join the Beta Community you sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) to not post, share or use these images elsewhere. 

[pessosices]

Awesomesauce!

Looks great! Just filled out the survey, thank youuuuu

[londontea]

Please let me have this now! 😂 At least twice a week we get an order for a ridiculous amount of croissants, and we never have enough. It takes 20 minutes to bake from frozen (because who has the patience to make fresh croissants?), while our prep time for pickup orders is 15 minutes. This results in stressed employees and unhappy customers. 

I'm very interested in the shipping aspect. Currently there is no given "ship by" date, unless I've missed a setting? I would find this just as helpful as the pickup delay. We get slammed with shipping orders after our newsletter goes out; it would be very useful to be able to let customers know that our TAT will be longer. 

[bagelboss]

Brutal honesty is the name of the game, right?? 😬😬😬

I hope I don’t hurt feelings with my survey response. I’m super duper against this work around to an online store ON/OFF toggle.

We can’t delay someone’s craving for food. Telling them it’ll be available another day simply won’t work for them — and that’s assuming that the Hail Mary of a notification that their order is delayed is even acknowledged.

It’s gotta be all the nopes from me on this one! Sorry!

[Donnie-M]

I can see your point on this.  For me lets say it is noon lunch rush and I have cookies baking and they will be out in 10 minutes.  An order comes in for cookies, or whatever item for pickup in 5 minutes (I am making up times here).  I can hit the updated order time for pickup 10 mins later to let them know their item will be delayed.

We encourage all of our customers to sign up for the text alerts on orders.  It has helped tremendously.  We update orders as soon as they are ready and use a 10 minute prep time.  Often a customer in the waiting area will get the ready text and then come look for their food.

[genusCavia]

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@Donnie-M wrote:

We encourage all of our customers to sign up for the text alerts on orders.  It has helped tremendously.  We update orders as soon as they are ready and use a 10 minute prep time.  Often a customer in the waiting area will get the ready text and then come look for their food.

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Thats a great tip. How do you encourage customers sign up for text alerts ? is there a prompt field you use for this ?

[pessosices]

@genusCavia & @Donnie-M 

It used to be a checkbox that customers had to opt-in for text reminders -- now it's automatic so customers don't get a choice, and will automatically receive text reminders, which makes things a lot easier and better!

The default setting is that the customer has to enter in their phone number, which works out great - as long as you don't change the setting and make entering phone number Optional.

[Donnie-M]

@genusCavia 

2 step approach

Under the pickup instructions in the online store we add to make sure you enter your phone number and accept order updates for the fastest response.  We also made a little handbill/flyer about online ordering to put in each bag that says: Did you know?

We explain about saving your CC information securely for quick online ordering, we comment about order ahead, and  text/email order updates.

The last line of defense is our cashiers are really good at asking if they received text alerts with the order and if not give them some help.

[genusCavia]

Thanks @Donnie-M  greatly appreciated.  I will try this workflow out for sure. 👌

[pessosices]

@bagelboss - I would definitely agree that this doesn't solve the issue of being able to temporarily quickly and easily turn off ordering, but I think maybe "all the nopes" goes a little too far? It definitely can serve a bunch of other purposes for a bunch sellers in a bunch situations, as @Donnie-M shows and as @kellyj explains in the post - modifying pickup/delivery/shippings times quickly & easily can definitely be useful

[bagelboss]

Wish I agreed @pessosices . Relying on a customer to even read & acknowledge that their pickup time has changed is super far fetched to me...

My customers are usually visiting on a tight schedule. Delaying their pickup time is not a solution. It will not be well received.

While I never want to have to tell them we can’t take their order, at least in those cases, they know before they’ve spent a dime. Telling them ”So I took your money and told you that your order would be ready in 20 minutes, but then sent a new email that it’s really going to be ready at [adjusted time or date]...” is a customer service nightmare waiting to happen.

I hate to be negative, but I can’t think of one positive that this offers for a restaurant. I’d rather go in to the back end and adjust the order time estimate if we are falling behind. Doing it after the order is placed is a miserable idea. #unpopularopinion

[pessosices]

@bagelboss 

I get that - and maybe in that scenario, it wouldn't work for some customers.

But what about the scenario where the customer calls in or emails saying "Hey, I won't be able to make it today, can I pick it at 8 PM or Tomorrow?"

You could then go in, edit it, so then your employees know not to prepare it until 8 PM or Tomorrow, or not to expect the customer until 8 PM or Tomorrow.

This definitely happens to me occasionally, and I have to tell my employees and hope they remember, or write out a post it note and post it letting my employees know that they can close at regular time and not call the customer or wait after closing time for the customer to come.

And in the scenarios that @Donnie-M and @londontea and @tlukemire posted, even if every customer isn't guaranteed to see it or be happy about it, at least there is a mechanism in place to update the time and notify them, so the ones that are watching their texts are not just sitting around waiting for a text that comes 20 minutes late, and then get angrier that they weren't notified it was running late.

Everyone's business and customers are different - and even if you can't imagine it helping yours, doesn't mean it doesn't offer one positive for one restaurant.

[bagelboss]

@pessosices there’s already a “schedule order” feature that can be set up from the Weebly side. We have that turned off.

Our model (and loads of other QSRs): ticket prints, order gets made...

Again, we’re dealing with timelines and cravings. What I’m hungry for today and is convenient to today’s schedule may not be what I’m looking for tomorrow.

As the business I have no interest in entering that sort of “negotiation” with hopes of success. As a customer, I’d probably have placed my last order with the business that’s willing to operate that way. 

[pessosices]

@bagelboss 

Yes there is the schedule feature, but sometimes customers don't see that and booked it for ASAP - or after the order gets put in, customer's life changes and they need to come later.

That's my model too, but my products are frozen and can sit in a freezer indefinitely. But I like to keep tabs on where my orders are, and this will help me do that.

It's not a matter of "negotiation" it's a matter of keeping the communication loops open, and keeping information on when orders are coming in and going out. I don't really understand what you mean by that last line, but to each their own I guess.

All I'm saying is that just because it doesn't work for you, doesn't mean it wont work for ANYONE. 

And clearly by the comment section here, it would work for at least 4 businesses.

[bagelboss]

@pessosices I thought we were giving feedback about how this feature would be perceived by our own businesses...

I’m not attacking you for liking it; I don’t know your business, nor your customers.

It’s not for me, it’s not for my business, it’s not for my customers.

[pessosices]

@bagelboss Fair enough - I understood your comments, especially the "I can’t think of one positive that this offers for a restaurant" to mean that you were saying that this feature wouldn't have any positives to any restaurant. That's why my initial comment to you (and every comment thereafter) said just that - that this feature can help a bunch of sellers in a bunch of situations - not that this would help you.

[bagelboss]

@pessosices I can’t think of one. That doesn’t mean that 100 don’t exist. I just can’t come

up with them. 

[tlukemire]

We would love to have this feature for our donut shop as soon as it's ready to roll out. We can use it to help the flow of our pick-up orders and better serve our customers that order online then call and request a different day/time for pick-up. If we get bogged down with too many orders for a given time we can shut that time off for our online store and then possibly alter the times for some existing orders to delay them a little and catch up. Think this is a great proposed feature!

[Donnie-M]

Waiting for the square online store app that can be customized for each location and push notifications for orders

I like the options.  It is still needed to be able to 86 items from the online store with a simple on off instead of inventory control.

This is something we would use daily to compensate and proactively communicate with customers.  More communication improves the guest experience.

Donnie

[kellyj]

Thank you so much for all your feedback around this upcoming feature. We're putting together the results to present to the team, your conversations have been amazing and we appreciate your participation so much.

If you haven't had a chance yet to submit your feedback, please do so!

@thesweetpraxis @Provision @ryanwanner 

[ryanwanner]

@kellyj I hate to be this guy along with @bagelboss , but I do think that this is definitely nice to have, I have a hard time seeing it being overly useful in a QSR setting.

The flow of how to change pickup times that you showed in the links works great for how to do it, but I didn't see anything stating how/if the customer would be notified about the change in time, which is where I think the focus should lie.

If this is paired with the Square Messaging (alpha program: ok to talk about it here?) however, it would be great. We as merchants NEED a way to effectively communicate with a customer. Having that available through the app and dashboard would be best. The customer gets a quick text from us stating we have an issue and what they'd like us to do about it, we adjust the time, and the day goes on.

Example: with DoorDash, there is a little chat icon on the side of the app screen. If we have a problem with an order, we tap on that icon, answer a quick dropdown (what's the problem type of selections), and then get a chance to make a quick note to the DD team. The chat then closes until a DD team member responds, then it gives the little circled 1 notice in the corner of the chat icon. We reopen the chat, answer any questions they may have, and solve the problem.

From a customer standpoint, I'd be wary of random texts stating that a pickup time of an order has been changed without hearing from the merchant first. If the communication part is resolved, then I think the solution you and the devs have come up with would be perfect.

Yes, we could do this with the phone (we do already!), but it would just be a lot smoother of an operation to be able to do this directly from the PoS.

[Edited to add] One other thing that was alluded to upstream in this thread that I'd like to bring back up: if we do adjust the pickup times, will the online ticket reprint with the adjusted times? I can see some SERIOUS communication breakdowns and heated conversations arising from this.....