[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]

Having these features easily accessible in Square for Retail is great. Thanks! 

[LiteracyStars]

I just really want thr ability to use on my Android! I don't even need all the special features. Just the scanning barcodes with my phone. 

Any idea when this will happen? 

[TCSlaguna]

@tranguyen @nika 

Swiping through 150 variations does not speed up checkout. 

The old experience for variation selection was much faster. 

 

[homeprogreen]

Exactly, I tried it and got stuck with it for a few days because I couldn’t figure out how to switch back. Easily doubled the amount of time it takes to check out customer. I can see where it might be beneficial to some sellers but really hope they leave us the option to choose which checkout version we use

[toni_rtl]

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. 

[homeprogreen]

Glad to hear that the new checkout process won’t be enabled as default on July 5th as long as we proactively switched back to the old checkout process during the trial period. The new checkout process really doesn’t work for my shop at all

[SharkysPtown]

Any news how to go back to the previous variation experience? I have a retail store, use barcodes for some designs and for others I favorite them so I can access the variation fast. Having a default t-shirt going to the cart and need to modify it from there is a PAIN. If the worker forgets to do that is messing up the inventory plus in the rush hours we just can’t waste that much time cashing out people. Imagine 1 person takes 5 of the same shirt but different sizes and colors… going through that process having a line of customers behind… I have it deactivated but still same “new” checkout for variation items. 

[homeprogreen]

Try going to Settings: favorites then swipe the checkout experence to Off 

[jettys]

I sure hope that this part of the update is going to be optional. It may be faster for some businesses, but swiping through 30+ different variations is not time-saving for my business, as we have high-selling products that don't have barcodes to scan and have many variations. Searching for each item isn't any speedier either! The current experience was the reason why I choose Square for Retail!!  Very upset if this part of the update is not optional. 

[mmerc]

Love it for my business.

HOWEVER...the update has totally messed up something with receipt printing. Just starting today they are printing like the right margin is at 50% both from the original transaction and the Transaction screen. They print totally fine in classic Square app, or if I go into Hardware and the Print Queue and view History. 

[toni_rtl]

Thank you for sharing this feedback! To help investigate more into the root cause here, can you tell me how you were printing these receipts please. Assuming this issue is still occurring - are you using your iPad connected to Square Stand for these receipts? Which printer model do you use today, and is it USB, Internet, or Bluetooth connected? 

Also I'm assuming you've already attempted app and printer restart here? Thank you!

[Studio1883]

I love the concept. I have a couple problems that will make it , in its current state, unusable to me however. 
The biggest problem, is that I cant choose pickup without adding a date and time for pickup. In my use, I would be selling an item that will be ordered, and I might not know exactly when that is available for them to pick up, so I would need to leave this blank and as it is, it wont let me do that. Can we PLEASE make that optional and not required?

Secondary, If I print the receipt, it shows the pickup date and time, but I'd need ot print a copy for fulfillment that also shows at least their name, so I can have it with their order.

ETA: I have now found that this second part IS possible. The pickup created an order and once I turned on the setting to print an order ticket , it now will put out a ticket with the name on it. 

Again, I love the concept of it and I think its a great addition, but without at least the ability to not choose a date and time, this wont work for me. 

[homeprogreen]

While these new checkout may speed up checkout for stores with online sales and multiple locations I can tell you that for my brick and mortar with a single location it’s more then doubled the time it takes to process a sale if it involves an item that doesn’t have barcodes to scan and multiple variations. Honestly it’s to the point that come July 5th when the deadline is to be forced to use the new checkout I will probably log the Square Register out of Retail Plus and just log back into the regular Square POS app which I really don’t want to do since I would give up some of the Square Retail features that I do use

[TCSlaguna]

We cannot switch to regular Square POS. We have to maintain inventory counts. 

[jettys]

Same with us - we work daily with the inventory counts and cannot switch to the regular Square POS :(.    Sure hope they decide to make this update an optional feature !

[Candlestore]

Old Experience-  Type in the Scent (this case French Vanilla) click Variations and scroll down a little... all 17 or 18 variations Created with Option Sets is on one Screen..... Slow but ALOT FASTER than the New Experience.

New experience selecting a Variation Wax Bar at the end of 17 variations....Video link to Google Drive:

Slow New Experience Selecting 17th variation 

This is for only 17 variations what if I had 120, which is what I use to have when I had Category of 28oz Jars.... Now I have 165 different scents of 28oz jars..... Oh I know tell the customer who wants White Tea and Ginger please call back in 15 minutes after I scroll through all my scents because since your doing a phone order I have no barcode to scan.    And I cannot have all 6000 items by my square stand to scan for a phone order!!!

Square should have got feedback before switching this..... just read the comments here since this was posted YESTERDAY!!

[TCSlaguna]

Great video @Candlestore. Clearly it is not efficient. 

[Candlestore]

@TCSlaguna ;

That is for only 17 Variations I would hate to page through 120!!!  Which Square says you can have for ONLINE variations and more if you do not do online.

[Craftinomicon]

Getting on the "please let people choose how they want variations displayed" train. We set up all of our items with no barcodes to the checkout screen and some have way too many variations to make it reasonable to scroll sideways through a list. Please go back to the old formatting - or allow people to choose. 

[frillseekerstx]

I would really appreciate a heads up on these changes instead of coming in on Monday morning and everything being different.  I have to try to figure out everything first and then train employees as we have customers coming in the door.  I agree, the scrolling through variations is not helpful for us at all.  

Where is my ability to save a cart?  We use that frequently in our shop.  Either for a customer to have to return later in the day or sometimes I save a cart for custom orders so that my employee know how much to charge a customer when they come to pick up their order.  This is a must have for us.