Use a subset of Canadian postal codes to specify delivery area

[laylow]

It is common to see businesses mention that they delivery to M2 to M9 postal codes. These are the first two digits of the forward sortation area (FSA) of Toronto-area postal codes.

I was interested in allowing deliveries to M4, M5, M6 eligible postal codes for my business.

But after some testing, I determined that the delivery settings in Square Online did not allow for me to put just those first two characters which map to larger geographic area.

If I set it this way (M4, M5, M6) and saved the settings, a postal code that technically matched was considered invalid when trying to buy. I had to put the full three-digit FSA for Square to recognize it as a valid postal code that the business delivered to.

So instead of just adding three codes to the list, I ended up having to manually type ~50 of the codes. Copy and pasting a comma-separated list is not supported.

Is this expected? Or am I doing something wrong? Typing ~50 is fine but won't scale well if/when we expand our delivery area. At the very least, it is unclear what format is required and how matching works. I did not find a help article that discussed this. Thanks!

[Valentina]

Hi there @laylow! Welcome to the Seller Community 🎉

Have you considered setting your delivery area by radius instead of by adding all of the specific postal codes near you? This article from our Support Center goes into a bit more detail about how this setting functions, if you haven't stumbled upon it yet. I hope this helps!

[laylow]

Hey @Valentina, thanks for the reply!

I did consider that but wanted to use postal codes for two reasons: Firstly, our business is located on the west end of town. So a radius would need to be larger than desired to reach the east end of the city. We wanted to delivery to Toronto city limits (approx) and not just the west end and municipalities to the west if using the radius method.

As well, I wanted to be able to clearly tell customers which addresses we were delivering to and were not delivering to. Providing a radius does not make it immediately clear if we delivery to a customer's address or not unless you are measuring on a map. Customers know very quickly when reading the postal codes we serve (M4, M5, M6, etc.).

[Valentina]

That being said, I think you've set up your delivery areas in the way that will best suit your business for now! From a bit of research (as I'm American 😊), I found this nifty breakdown:

A forward sortation area (FSA) is a geographical region in which all postal codes start with the same 3 characters - it looks like you'll need to specify the 3-character postal codes in order for our system to properly recognize these areas. I hope this helps shine a light on what you're seeing here!

If I've not cleared anything up here, please be sure to get in touch directly so our Customer Success team can dig in with you, @laylow!

[laylow]

Hey @Valentina, that is exactly what I did and what is shown in the screenshot I provided in the original post. Those are all three-digit forward sortation codes which I typed manually.

Updating Square's logic and allowing it to recognize the first 2 characters instead of requiring all three characters of the FSA would make selling delivery orders to these zones much more manageable. As you can see, I had to type in 10s of codes manually which will not scale well as we expand delivery and is prone to errors.

Secondly, I appreciate the research and confirmation on the FSA. But would be great if your note about Square requiring all three characters of the postal code in the input field was in your help documentation. I searched but didn't find this info so I had to test it out myself and noticed that the system failed when I just input M4 vs M4A, for example. Thanks!

[Josh123]

Did you ever find out how to upload different postal codes without having to type them in manually? I’m currently staring down a spreadsheet with over 3500 of them that I really don’t want to have to input one by one