Square Messages for UK

[Cherrylmm]

I would like to suggest Square Messages to be available in the United Kingdom or the ability to be able to text/communicate with customers when their orders are ready for collection through Square Orders.

We offer a refill service on most of our products and we use the Square orders function on the Square register to do this. Everything works perfectly apart from the last step which is to notify the customer that their order is ready for collection. 

I have searched everywhere for a work around and there just isn't anything available for the United Kingdom.

At this stage I would even be happy if we could send an email but nothing is available.

This is a crucial part of the ordering process and it would be really useful to have this function.

[doc_choc]

@Cherrylmm I think this is in the pipeline, but just hasn't arrived this side of the pond yet. I think it would a great feature to have for our business too. Lets hope it is working its way up the to-do list. 😀

[Sineaid]

Hi @Cherrylmm & @doc_choc,

Thanks for your support of this feature request. 

I've gone ahead and reached out to our product team, to see if there is anything I can share in terms of timeline for a potential roll out of Square Messages in the UK market.

I'll let you know as soon as I learn more. 

[Sineaid]

Hi @Cherrylmm & @doc_choc,

Thanks for your patience while I looked into this.

I've had an update from our product team to confirm that Square Messages is not yet road-mapped for launch in the UK. If there is any movement on this, either myself or another moderator will circle back here to let you both know. 

As an alternative, it may be worth having a look at some of the 3rd party integrations on our App Marketplace.

For example, Square integrates with Notify Customers, so you can send order confirmations and mass text messages.

Hope this helps! 

[Cherrylmm]

Hi @Sineaid & @doc_choc 

Thank you @Sineaid for the update and the suggestions but I did look into 3rd party apps and in particular "Notify Customers" but I couldn't see how it would integrate with Square Orders and when I dug deeper into "Notify Customers" they have put the following message on their website:

Order Notification Feature: Discontinued

Notify Customers was originally an app that allowed food services businesses to send order notification text messages to their customers. We discontinued this feature as of March 2024 for two main reasons:

1) Square now offers an order notification service.

2) We decided to focus efforts on our text message marketing features. Interested? Restaurants and Food Trucks are currently using texting to announce events, promote special deals, and provide other business updates.

Learn More about text message marketing on Notify.

Here is the link: https://help.notifycustomers.net/article/33-order-notification-feature-discontinued

So I am back to my original request of asking for a way of notifying customers that their order is ready. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

I would prefer not to log into a separate system just to send a text message and it would be lovely to be able to go into "Square orders" whether on my desktop, phone or Square register to send the message and not use our personal phones. 

[Sineaid]

Thanks for flagging this @Cherrylmm!

I looked into the discussion around order-ready texts, and can see that their availability is limited to the countries which currently support Square Messages (Currently the US & Canada). So, it's unfortunate that Notify Customers have decided to discontinue this service across all markets.

If I can find an appropriate alternative, I'll be sure to let you know. 

[Sam_400º]

Yup, this all sucks! 

Online orders get SMS updates and it works pretty much perfectly. 

In store orders (inc. the newish option in restaurants) are tied into a different Square system (SMS marketing) that isn't available in the UK for GDPR reasons that haven't been sorted out. 

It's really one of the many areas where global isn't considered when the teams at Square do their development. 

[doc_choc]

@Sam_400º sure is frustrating. In an every challenging market (its getting tough with the all those troubles out there) we need all the marketing tools we can to be equally, if not more better than our competitors, requiring us to have equivalent and preferably better tools to achieve this. You never know it might land here one day...was that a flying pig overhead 🐖 😁