Getting up and running with SquareOnline

[AWM_Rob]

Hi

I'm pretty sure you've all been through something similar to the challenges I'm facing getting the online website bit to work correctly and wondered if you had any hints, tips, or workarounds you could share, or could just make me feel a bit less frustrated by screaming along with me into the wind.

here's my challenges so far:

- cannot sell/give away free items. I can't have a free subscription, or a 100% discount, or a free giveaway product. The checkout throws the famous error that something went wrong and to try again later. Support say you cannot have a zero amount in your basket as the checkout isn't capable of bypassing the payment flow if the amount is 0.00 and will try and charge the 0.00 to the customer card. Urrghh! 

- automatic discounts per customer group don't apply on squareonline website. Weird but true. Like you probably have, I have different customer groups set up. I want to be able to give, say, all my email signups a standard 5% discount at the checkout. Nope. Can't apply any automatic discounts based on customer groups. If I operate square retail it works fine in person, but for the website? nope. If I set an automatic discount for an item, that works fine - but I can't set it for a category, or a customer group. Sigh. Support say to use coupons... but I already know I can use a coupon, I just don't want to get into coupons for member discounts and they're not controllable in the long term, and I want signups, not a free-for-all. Anyway. 

- The "how to get it" message on the basket screen. there's no amount of settings that will make it go away. In the end I made a script in settings->tracking that uses css to hide the How to get it text and link, which seems to be fine as Support said 'The option of "how to get it" will not prevent the clients from ordering' which seems to be true. It seems to make no difference to the rest of the ordering flow. Maybe it does for instore pickups or something but I have those turned off and it was still showing. Anyway, it's gone now.

so yay, that's my first week into this integration and I'm already frustrated. the rest of the square eco-system seems to work really well and I just cant get my head around why this is the bit that's broken, and broken in such weird ways. 

oh well

x

[Summer2024 · Accepted solution]

Hi, @AWM_Rob ! 

First, welcome to Square! But, I'm sorry it’s been such a bumpy ride out of the gate. I'm going to outline some workaround options for some of your concerns. 

Free Products / 100% Discounts

Here's what other sellers have done:

Use a £0.01 workaround product (like “Freebie Processing Fee”) and discount it back down with a coupon or manual override. Not great, but it gets the transaction through..

You’re doing the right thing avoiding generic coupons. If you’re using Square Loyalty, it can mimic some of this behavior by assigning rewards after X number of purchases, but it’s not ideal for one-off group-based deals.

Otherwise, the most sustainable option is integrating with a third-party ecommerce tool (like Ecwid or WooCommerce) that connects to Square but offers more robust discount logic, though I know that’s not ideal for everyone. 

“How to Get It” Message

You’re absolutely right, this message is persistent even with all fulfillment options turned off. Your use of a CSS override is a totally acceptable solution (and one many community members have done too). Just keep an eye on any future updates that might affect that class name, but for now, you're in the clear.

I have passed along this feedback to our product teams as well. 

I hope this helps!