[New] Updated checkout on Square for Retail speeds up order creation

[tranguyen]

Hi Sellers,

It’s now easier for you to create orders and choose fulfillment methods with the refreshed Square for Retail checkout experience. Streamlined orders mean faster checkout, so you can serve more customers and keep growing your business. 

Try out the refreshed checkout experience - enable it on each of your devices in Settings > Favorites. We'll onboard you automatically on July 5.

What’s new?

Creating orders is now easier.

After adding items to your customer’s cart, you can now easily toggle between In-store, Shipment, and Pickup and add customers’ addresses. You no longer have to select Create Order to do so. Now available on the go from your iPhone and iPad.

Fulfill orders from any location.

With Square for Retail Plus, if an item is out of stock at your current location, you can offer pickup or shipment from any of your locations so you don’t lose out on a sale. Easily view inventory counts across your sales channels and choose where you want to place the order. 

When you accept a payment for the order, the sale is credited to the location where the sale is made, and inventory syncs automatically at the location where it’s fulfilled.

This Square for Retail Plus feature is available on Square Terminal, Square Register, and iOS apps.

Tax calculations are automatically applied.

No more manual tax calculations. When you start a shipment order, the correct sales tax by state is automatically applied. We’ve already registered the states where your stores are located, but you can add more in the tax settings in your Square Dashboard.

For more information on getting started with the updated checkout experience, visit our Support Center.

*Square does not provide tax advice and is not your tax advisor. You have the ultimate responsibility for your sales tax obligations and should consult your own tax advisor.

We would love your feedback. Do trial periods help your team adjust to new product updates? Do you like learning about multiple updates at once? Please comment below and let us know what you think.

[#2]

Thank you for providing feedback on the updated Square for Retail Checkout experience, especially with regards to variations. We can see how frustrating it can be to use this new cart if you have many variations, and that scrolling can cause delays to your operations.

In the new item details, we optimized for flexibility allowing you to interact with the item grid as well as the cart even when the item details are open. As a result of this, we reduced the vertical space that item options are taking and instead opted for a horizontal scroll behavior. 

We are currently working on an improvement after hearing your feedback, which would allow you to see significantly more variations at once, without scrolling, and also allow you to search by variation or modifier name. We will contact you once the new version of variations is ready so you can give it a try! 

In the interim, if you prefer to stay on the original cart building experience, simply navigate to Settings > Favorites and toggle the checkout experience to “off”. Remember that opt-in and opt-out of this feature is on the device level, so ensure to make the change to each of your devices running Square for Retail. 

If you have opted out of our new checkout experience proactively, we will exclude you from the feature rollout at the end of the introductory period, planned for July 5. You can remain on the old cart building experience and continue processing without disruption. 

[TCSlaguna]

Thanks @Candlestore 

I will try it out this weekend. 

I wish Square had told us this has been fixed. 

[TCSlaguna]

Interesting, for us next to "Select Variation" it doesn't say "Select". It has the first Variation name (in this case Amethyst): 

We would much rather prefer it said "Select" 

We are happy with the list of variations once you click it. Much faster!!

[Candlestore]

@TCSlaguna ;

6.31 showed Select   Square for Retail 6.32 is showing the first variation..... urgggg I liked the Select too over showing the 1st Variation.   Both of these are ALOT better than the 3 or 4 variations and the Scroll to see the next 3 or 4 variations.  I try to use my Scanner mostly to scan variations but sometimes I mess up and put wrong barcode on an item, ie 100 pack vs 20 pack of incense sticks and I gotta look it up.  So it is very few times I look up items on my square stand so I missed this in update 6.32 till you pointed it out here. Thank you for that.

[TCSlaguna]

@tranguyen  @toni_rtl 

Any way we can get "Select" back instead of the first variation? 

Thanks! 

[TCSlaguna]

@BofBArtStudio would prefer the first variation not be the default variation as well, as stated here. 

[TCSlaguna]

Square for Retail 6.38.1 introduces a new variation selection interface: 

We have items that have 100 variations. We do not put a picture for each variation. 

You can see how this is quite difficult to read the names of the variations, and that by having images for each one it takes more time to scroll. 

I would love the option to go back to a list without pictures. 

I would love your thoughts on this @BofBArtStudio  @Candlestore  @homeprogreen 

[homeprogreen]

Well this one isn’t thought out very well. I have items with 173 variations and none have pictures. This variation selection definitely wouldn’t work for me. They have access to the SS group so I have no clue why they haven’t taken advantage of that and scheduled a time to talk with us to find out what kind of checkout experience would work best. Maybe @tranguyen could reach out to Isabelle and set something up. I am more then happy to make time instead of instead of seeing it go from bad to worse

[BofBArtStudio]

I forced mine back into the old checkout experience. So I haven't had to deal with that yet but that looks like it would be really troublesome.

I also have most of my variations and products on barcodes so I can just scan them rather than looking them up, but I do have a few that I press a button to view the variations and the pop-up box comes on because I have the old check out experience. But once they force me into the new checkout experience I will have to rethink that.

[Candlestore]

@TCSlaguna ; With all these changes in Square and issues like this I have not updated to the Newest version, I am still on 6.37.1 and the image you show would not work for me either.   Too hard to see the difference in items and read the names of the items with the image when in a fast paced retail line.  This is why I have been switching too Square Generated SKU's, to get even smaller 2D barcodes for my smaller items.   Then I do not have to Select a variation, but just scan the Variation and it is entered to the cart.  Now IF you have a Scanner, you could make a Quick refrence Barcode sheet next to the register to scan.  I have done this for my popular items if a barcode falls off so I can get to the ITEM quickly then select my variation. But having the same image makes this impossible to find or read the Variations quickly as you have pointed out.   Take for example all my 100 packs of Incense (item I need to look up the most) all are packaged the same, and all look the same.  All incense sticks basically look the same in a picture, Brown 11 inch sticks with a Darker brown area from the top to a few inches from the bottom.  SO images do not always help for speed of checking someone out.

[jettys]

Another big issue that we noticed with this new update, is that it no longer notifies you that a product is out of stock/low available stock when adding to the cart — whereas in the previous interface, it showed both an exclamation mark beside the out-of-stock variation, and gave you a warning pop-up when you attempted to add to the cart. 

A big issue for our business as we are a landscape supply company; having to rely on product inventory as the cashiers don't physically see the product, but just cash out the customers and send them to get loaded. So, not having a notice that a product is out of stock is going to cause a lot of headaches for us. 

[MayaP]

Hey @jettys, I did confirm with our team this is expected behavior. If you don't like the pictures you can change the tile color, and it'll update all of them to just be gray or whatever you want in visual browse edit mode. I am sorry these changes are causing more of a headache than helping. I will let the team know. At this time though there is no plan to change it. 

[jettys]

I don't mind the photos, it's the fact that it's not telling us when something is out of stock. 

[TCSlaguna]

I mind the photos. It is not efficient when you have 100+ variations to choose from. 

[DecotaNaturals]

I agree I don’t mind the photos, but not being able to tell if it’s out of stock is annoying. 

[bmillingco]

I also miss not being notified of low stock. I would love to do store pick up but am afraid I would oversell stock because I sell out of a warehouse and don’t physically see a lot of the product when sold.

[SuesSweets]

We are an ice cream shop and sell ice cream scoops with one of 4 modifiers (cup, waffle cone, sugar cone, cake cone). We often get families at the register with a combination of these options. We do not have a "default" option and on the old interface, whenever we selected a scoop from the register screen, we would get a pop-up asking which of the 4 variations the customer wanted.

The new "updated checkout" (v6.40), however, (which Square dumped on us 2 weeks ago) defaults to "cup," even though we don't have a default modifier. As a result, if the customer doesn't have a cup, we have to modify the sale, which requires extra touches on the screen to change the cup to a cone. This gets worse if we have multiple scoops in a single sale since Square adds "cups" to any existing "cup" item on the sale (our workaround is to add cups last).

With the new interface, Square has essentially doubled the number of screen touches our employees have to make to close the scooped ice cream sales. This is a HORRENDOUS waste of time. Now that the weather is getting nicer, we are selling more ice cream and Square is making the register experience incredibly inefficient.

If we can't revert to the old interface, can we get the new interface to pop-up the 4 options when we select the scooped ice cream from the menu? (again, we do not have a default option selected in the modifier menu on the dashboard).

I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this question.  Please redirect me as necessary.

thanks in advance,
JohnC
Sue's Sweets

[SuesSweets]

nevermind.  I found the option in settings to disable the new interface. I got warnings about missing out on the great new features, but I'm not sure what those are.  Sorry to waste the space here.

--jc

[homeprogreen]

You didn’t waste the space. This isn’t Square support. This is a community of Square users that try to help and answer questions as we can. It’s Sunday night and a lot of us are relaxing with our families so not a lot of users on to answer wuestions. The answer you were looking for is listed further back in the thread. I am glad you were able to find it

[SuesSweets]

thanks @homeprogreen 

Just to follow up.  The "workaround" to disable the new POS interface is short-lived since Square will sunset the old layout on April 2nd.  And Square support informed me that the issue I was seeing (always getting a "cup" instead of a pop-up window with the list of serving modifier for our scooped ice cream) was a result of our modifier setting "Customer can only select one modifier".  This setting gave the desired result with the old interface, but for the new interface, to get the pop-up window showing us the different serving options, we had to disable "Customer can only select one modifier".  

[homeprogreen]

Oh this is going to be bad when April 2nd hits. Thank you for letting us know about the modifier setting issue so that we can make sure that it’s disabled before the switch

[SuesSweets]

for each item using our "ice cream serving" modifier, we had to edit the modifier configuration to set the min and max required.  This had been implied before by setting "customer can only select one modifier" in the modifier description itself.