Square Online (eCommerce): reseller training

Adam Nieland (Square): Awesome. Thanks, Mike, and a pleasure meeting everyone here. Thanks for taking the time to meet with us and go over eCommerce today. My name is Adam Nieland. I've been with Square for seven years now, and with Weebly and Square almost nine. I started with Weebly, which got acquired by Square in 2018; I started at Weebly in March 2017, so almost nine years coming up with them. And I've been in web hosting since 2013. I started out at a place in Phoenix, Arizona called Endurance International Group, a conglomerate web hosting company that owned about 70 different hosting brands. So I cut my teeth in sales there: inbound, outbound, some management.

But now I'm a product specialist within eCommerce here. Really pivoted in 2018 and 2020, when COVID hit. Needed product specialists to help get people onto the platform and understand how businesses were going to operate without people physically in places. People needed pickup and delivery, all that stuff. So I really cut my teeth as a specialist in 2020, and it's been a good journey the last five years: being a product specialist, growing with the platform, and understanding people's needs in eCommerce. So, happy to dive into Square Online and all the eCommerce products here.

I just want to get a quick understanding of the different types of business. I'm sure there are tons of different ones, but I can go through retail and food and beverage on the eCommerce side of things. Are most people wanting to see more retail-driven? I can start with retail and move to food and beverage.

Mike Collins (Square): I'll maybe answer for them. I mean, let's definitely do both, for sure. There you go. Whatever you feel comfortable with. I know these guys would love to see both, for sure.

Adam Nieland (Square): Cool. I'll start with food and beverage, and then I'll hop over and show some site examples from live sellers using the platform. A lot of these I use daily in my demos with live sellers, so you'll be able to see what I showcase and what our products do. And definitely ask questions, anything you need to know about this. But I'm going to go ahead and get started here, and pull my screen up and share.

This is the back end of the Square Online dashboard. It says, welcome back. Once you get logged into the online dashboard, I'm just clicking on Online, and it takes me here. Then I can click Add a site. I can have up to 10 sites per Square account, which helps a lot of people with cost. You don't have to pay for a hosting plan per website. It allows you to be a little more versatile: create a custom domain name and assign it to a unique site. Say you have multiple businesses, or different facets of a business that each want their own URL or link. You can create those. It's very easy, and you can create and assign a hosting plan to them.

You'll see it says Square Online premium account; my demo account has premium. I'm going to click on one of my demo accounts, this Leaf and Lemon. This is a restaurant site that has pickup and delivery options in it. I'll click Website, Edit site. There's a whole bunch of bells and whistles here, but I'm going to start with the site editor, to show you how to build a site and what the tools do. Then we'll work backwards through the product side of things and the fulfillment side, then I'll switch gears, show some example sites, and then we'll go into retail.

So this is the homepage when I first get logged in. The Order online page was chosen as the homepage, but you can click a dropdown here to switch which page is the homepage. This one showcases the food and beverage products. Here are your categories, and as I scroll, you'll see the categories follow down the page with me. If I click Preview, you can see a live version of what that looks like. If I click Salads, it takes me down to salads; click Catering, it takes me to catering, and vice versa. I can even have subgroups, so maybe I have soups under salads.

If I click into a product, it takes me to that product page. It has a description, and any modifiers show up here. When we get to the item side of things, you can make modifiers location-specific: maybe you have different modifiers, different variations of a product or different pricing at different locations. You can do that too. And you can set what's available for pickup or delivery.

When I first come in, a pop-up asks me to choose pickup or delivery, and if there are multiple locations, you choose the location. Within the pickup and delivery settings there are hours of operation and your prep times. Do you do same-day delivery or same-day pickups, or do you allow future scheduled pickups? You can adjust all of these directly in the fulfillment settings, and we'll get there in a second. I just wanted to give you a preview of that pop-up screen for food and beverage.

Once you select that, there's Schedule your order. If you allow scheduling ahead, I can do same day and choose between the open and close hours that day, or I can see how far in advance they allow scheduling. I can see a full calendar view if I'm a customer and want to choose a future day. Pretty straightforward stuff, but that goes through what you can do for food and beverage.

I'm going to go a little deeper into the actual page building. If I click the dropdown here, it shows all the pages that have been built, and maybe I want to look at my homepage and see how it's coming together. This is a theme, by the way. This one is called Lemon and Leaf, and you can choose this theme and put in your own pictures, backgrounds and color schemes.

These are all called sections. The sections are modular. They come with the themes, but that doesn't mean you have to keep them: you can trash them or arrange them in any order you want. Maybe you like one but want to click in and see what the options are. There are a bunch of different layouts you can choose from, and you'll see the look switches when you click on one. The information can be centered, right-justified or left-justified. There are color schemes: you can adjust the colors within your color palettes, which show here, and I'll show you how you set those color palettes to your branding as well. That lets you easily change background colors based on your color palettes.

That gives you an idea of what sections allow you to do. You can delete them and rearrange them, and if you want to add a new section of your own, there's a repository of sections. The themes come with some sections built in, but you can build the page out how you want it.

Any questions so far on anything you've seen? This is powered by Weebly. It's Square Online, and it's called Websites now; it's switched its name. But basically this is powered by Weebly. Weebly was acquired in 2018, and that's what this is built on, but it's called Websites now, powered by Square.

I'm going to move outside of this editor and go back into the online dashboard, to go through a few other things on the left-hand side. You have Fulfillment here. If you click Pickup & delivery, it takes you to the pickup and delivery settings by location, where you set those hours, which we'll get to. Then you've got shipping. Even if you're food and beverage, you might have some swag or merchandise you ship, so you can make things shippable. And retail, obviously, is heavily driven by shipping. You can have pickup, delivery and shipping on any food and beverage or retail site.

Then there's also QR code ordering. That one is food and beverage specific, because it's more for menus. It's powered by the online site: whatever site you build, you'll see the design for this Leaf and Lemon site, and that same design, color schemes and logos show up in the QR code menu too. If I go to QR code, this is where I'd set up an in-person menu for a specific location. If I click Get QR code, I can go to my QR code; let me share this screen real quick.

You see the same color schemes here: the orange buttons, the cream backgrounds, even the item images are the same. The items might be different, or a limited menu, but this is more of an order-and-checkout menu. It has instructions you can tailor: customers pick up at the counter if it's quick service, or an instruction says your server will be delivering your item, and they get a text message when the order is ready. So this lets people scan a QR code and order in person at a restaurant or place of business.

(Reading a question from the chat: does anyone have 10 sites, or is that just premium?) Oh yeah. You don't always have up to 10 sites on an account; that's the max you can do. But basically it lets you build out different sites for different concepts of the same business, like catering versus an ASAP menu, if that helps.

Outside of this, it lets you do QR code ordering too. I won't dive too deep into it; there are help articles on all of this content that we can share with you. I'm going to go back to my main online dashboard.

If I click Edit, just to give you an idea: those QR code, in-person hours can be different from the online hours. You can also create specific stations. Maybe you have a patio, or a putt-putt business, or a dog park. You can put QR codes in specific stations, so when someone scans one there, the staff know where it was ordered from, and if they're delivering it, they know where to go.

When you create those stations, you set how many tables or chairs, whatever you call that station: holes, for 18-hole putt-putt. If I click in, you can see how it was set up. What do you call that station? Putt-putt ordering. What are they? Holes, 18. How many do you need? Then it gives you an individual QR code for each one, and that could be a putt-putt hole, a booth, a table, a bar top, whatever you need. That encompasses that.

I'm going to switch gears and go to the main Square Dashboard. This is my homepage, what you'll see when you first log in. I'm going to go to the pickup and delivery settings to cover that for you. If I click Settings, then Account & Settings and Fulfillment methods, I've got my online pickup and delivery, and I'll click that.

While that's loading, I see another question pop in. (Reading from the chat: can table numbers be embedded in QR codes?) Yes, they can.

(Reading from the chat: for catering packages, how far in advance can the restaurant let customers order them?) You can customize that at the item level: you can say this item has a different prep time than my blanket prep time. In the pickup and delivery settings, which we'll cover in a second, you have a blanket prep time, for all your items on average. But if you have an outlier item... I have an example site I can show you while we're talking about that.

I'm going to go to Macri's Bakery. They have an ASAP menu, a soon-as-possible menu, where you can order their pre-made pastries and goods for the same day, within 30 minutes or so. But they also have a catering page, where they created a featured item section, and on those items they set an item prep time. If I click this sandwich tray, you'll see this is a two business day prep time. If this item is added to the cart, it trumps the entire cart, because the longest prep time in the cart is what goes. So if I added this item, it would be a two business day order. That lets you do individual catering packages with different prep times.

Real quick, I'm going to hop back to my dashboard, where I was about to show how you set up pickup and delivery. These are blanket times: you can do scheduled orders and set your minimum prep time for same day. I'm going to click on a location that doesn't have anything set up, so you can see things fresh. It says pickup and delivery, and you can say yes, I want to offer them. Once you do, you get a kind of questionnaire, and you fill it in based on the business's operations.

We'll go through this together. Calculate and assign pickup times automatically: if I choose yes, people get that pop-up where they choose a time from open to close, based on the open and close hours and days we set below. Basically, do you want people to pick a time between open and close, or just come anytime? Come anytime doesn't really work for food; you have to know when they're coming. That's more for retail: come anytime, I've got it in stock, it's on my shelf. Or you can say, I actually do want to know exactly when you're coming. Those are the choices.

This one asks whether you allow orders for the same day they're placed, or only on following days. If you choose following days, it asks whether that's one calendar day, two, three, whatever it is, and by what time. I'm going to assume I'm doing food and beverage: I'll offer same day, and I prepare orders as soon as they're placed. Maybe you have a bakery that makes batch orders by a specific time; you can do that too. But for a simple restaurant or quick service, you prepare them as soon as they're ordered.

From here you set the prep time. It can be available immediately, or, for food and beverage, you'll want a buffer, and you can customize it. There are some preselected options, but if I start typing 10, I get 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days, so I can decide how much prep time I need. That's for my same-day pickups.

This next one is how far in advance I allow scheduling, if I allow beyond same day. Technically I can do 365 days, but I can say I only want seven days out, or 14 days, or a month, whatever it needs to be. Down here you can do some order staggering. It's not the most robust thing, to be honest. But you can say, in a 15-minute window I only want to accept five orders at the normal 10-minute prep time. If I get a sixth or seventh in that same 15-minute window, it adds a five-minute buffer, making that a 15-minute wait rather than a 10-minute wait, and it resets every 15 minutes. If you want to use that, you enable it; if you don't, you just don't turn it on.

Then Print tickets sets when you want order tickets to print. You can print at the prep time, when the order needs to be made, or as soon as the order is placed. That links to your KDS, your kitchen display, if you have one, and/or a kitchen printer, and it prints and displays on both if you have both.

A quick scenario: it's eight o'clock, I'm ordering lunch for 12, and I have 30-minute prep times. It's going to print at 11:30, because someone's picking up at 12 and you have a half-hour prep time. That's how it works if you print at the prep time. If you print right away, it shows in your order manager as an upcoming order for 12 o'clock and prints right away, so you can see it right away if you want the latter. It stays in your order manager as upcoming until it hits the prep time, then moves to active. There are two statuses there, upcoming and active, so you know whether it's an ASAP order or something scheduled for later.

I did see another question pop in. (Reading from the chat: if a merchant is integrating with DoorDash or Uber Eats, are their prep times honored?) I believe it's based on where the order comes from: if they're ordering directly from DoorDash, it goes by that prep time. It really depends on where you're integrating to. If you're integrating through DoorDash, it goes through their prep times. If you're integrating from Square's side, there's an integration prep time there as well. You manage those sales channels, and they take about five minutes to set up. But that will honor those prep times.

Going back to this, down here are your hours of operation. Pretty self-explanatory: uncheck the days you don't have hours when people can order, and set the right time zone. You can set restricted dates, holidays or dates you don't want people to order on, repeat those every year if they recur, and add as many as you need. So that lets you restrict dates for ordering.

Then curbside pickup. It was popular during COVID, and people kept it as a resource for customers who want to stay outside; Target does it, and a bunch of restaurants do it. If you offer that, checkout asks for the make and model of the vehicle, so you can identify them more easily, and there's even a contact number so they can tell you they're here. If you don't want to do that, you just don't check it.

Other little bells and whistles, like a minimum order amount: most people don't use that for pickup, but they will for delivery if they have their own drivers. And if you have pickup instructions, like come inside, go to the back, wait at the counter, ring the bell, whatever it is, you can add those special instructions. They show up in the confirmation email and texts that go out when an order is placed. That primarily covers pickup; pretty self-explanatory.

The settings are very similar for delivery, except for the first couple of questions, so let me cover those. This is different from doing third-party DoorDash delivery. This is what's called on-demand delivery, if you choose the third party here. It's a direct agreement between Square and DoorDash and these other third-party companies. You don't need an existing connection with them, because you're just connecting with Square, which dispatches the drivers for you. One of them is DoorDash Drive, so you'll see DoorDash here.

(Answering a chat question that was not read aloud.) And then, yes, yes, we do own the data. So the customer data will be taken from these orders within Square here. If it's the third-party route, I believe that data is within DoorDash. But if you're doing on-demand delivery here, that data would be customer data that you have within your customer directory within Square.

When you set this up, if you choose Best available, that uses DoorDash first. If DoorDash is busy, it connects to an aggregator called Nash. Nash has 150 different local delivery companies it can dispatch to when DoorDash is busy. So if you want to be part of that integration too, you choose Best available, and that way you rarely miss out on a delivery.

And then if you just want to use DoorDash, depending on what region, you're going to have $8.99, like Florida. California is a little more inflated. Other parts of the country, like the Midwest, most parts are going to be $6.99 up to five miles. But depending on your region, it'll tell you what that fee would be, and you can make your best business decision on which partner to use, based on the delivery options and pricing. But the customer pays those fees unless you decide otherwise.

So below here is who pays for what. The first choice is customer pays full delivery fee. You could say I pay for all delivery fees. I pay a percentage, a fixed amount, or the customer pays a specific amount and I pay the rest.

A lot of that is used for promotions. Maybe you have a special holiday or an anniversary, and you're saying we'll pay for your delivery over a certain amount. Most of the time people choose customer pays full delivery fee, and use this for orders over a certain dollar amount: let's say you buy $200 worth of product, and we'll pay all your delivery fees. That's something you can use here too. This can be changed daily: today you're doing a promotion, tomorrow you're not. Once you hit Save, it updates live on your site, so you can run different promotions daily.

(Reading from the chat: how is the merchant charged for those Drive fees? Subtracted from the batch, or charged to their card on file?) In the back end, it shows you the breakdown of your delivery fees, and Square automatically pays DoorDash out. So you're not going to have to worry at the end of the month about paying some amount out. It's coming out at the time of that transaction, and you'll see it in a report as well.

For the sake of time, I'll run through this down here. You can set up a service fee, for example to recoup packaging, utensils, stuff like that, and you can set a specific dollar amount or percentage. Or you can say you don't want to do that and just do the standard fees. Other than that, the same pickup settings are down below, so I won't repeat myself, but it looks the same. Just make sure the hours are right: you can use the same hours for pickup and delivery, or differentiate them if they're different. That encompasses pickup and delivery here.

I'm going to leave the page and double-check if I have any new questions. (Reading from the chat: does this order balance with their POS?) Yes. All of the orders balance with the point of sale, and you can run reports on in-store and online sales, to differentiate them or see those sales together. That's all within the reporting area.

Real quick, I'm going to pivot to items and the item library, because that's pretty important, and then I'll switch gears to go through retail and show you some example sites. Once you've imported your library, you can set stock levels if you need to, or sell unlimited. Most food gets set to 86 instead of out of stock; it'll say unavailable. You can 86 an item from the point of sale, and that automatically removes it from online, or any sales channel you have it on. But if you have a true stock level on it, it'll just say out of stock. You can decide how that shows: the item can disappear online altogether when it goes to zero, or stay there and say out of stock. That's basically how you manage stock levels.

At the item level, of course, an item can have a picture or multiple pictures. You can put it in a category, assign items to specific locations if you have multiple locations, and do item-level pricing based on that. I'm going to click on an item to go through it: Baklava. Some people also do holiday preorders, or preorders in general, for specific items. Going through a product, you have the basics: the item type and the name. You can set a kitchen-facing name, so if you have a nickname or shorthand you want the kitchen to see, that shows on the kitchen printouts. Then descriptions, and you can upload images: a primary image and secondary images.

You can say which locations the product is assigned to, and which sales tax applies: maybe you have multiple sales taxes and want this item to fall under a specific one. You can assign categories and option sets like small, medium, large, different color options or different quantity amounts. Down here is the item price, and if I need to track stock, I turn on stock tracking and set a stock amount. Then I can say where this is sold. That's important for online sales channels: if you have multiple websites and sell this product across a couple of them, you choose which websites it shows up on.

Here's Sell as preorder. To sell an item as a preorder, the first step is to make it available for pickup or delivery. So I'll click Edit and, in real time, make this a pickup item, and then click Sell as preorder to show you. Let's say I wanted to sell this for the Super Bowl or Valentine's Day coming up: I have a special meal or package and want to see how many presales I can get. I can set a date range or a single date for pickup, and choose when that date is. We're really well back there, in 2025. Okay. Let's say I want this for Valentine's Day pickup, on a single date.

Then I set the hours: maybe the location's normal fulfillment hours, or maybe I have holiday hours, and I can adjust those. I can even set a cutoff time for the preorders. It has to be at least 24 hours before the pickup date, but I could make it a few days before, if I need to get enough materials together. Let's say I want orders in by Sunday the 8th, which gives me until the 14th to get inventory and all that together. Other than that, you don't have to sell it as a preorder; it can just be a normal everyday item.

And of course, at the item level, you can set an item-level prep time. This goes back to that catering question: am I going off the location's default, or setting a custom prep time, like two business days? I can change this item that way, so if anyone adds it to the cart, it has a longer prep time, more of a catering prep time.

Real quick, I'm going to double-check some questions. (Reading from the chat: can the restaurant retain some of the tip on deliveries?) With delivery and tips, if it's third party and you're using on-demand delivery, those tips go to the DoorDash or Uber drivers, or Nash drivers. If you're using your own drivers, those tips go to your drivers, and you can allocate them.

Let me get to another question. (Reading from the chat: does the online next available time recognize orders that are already in, and adjust the available times accordingly?) I'm not sure. Can you elaborate on that? I just want to make sure I understand.

Reseller: Yeah, sorry. Let's say they have five orders in the POS in store, on site, and three other orders online. If I click next available time, is it going to account for that, like, hey, this isn't going to be ready in the normal 15 minutes, it's going to be 45 minutes to an hour, because we already have eight orders ahead of you? So it adjusts accordingly.

Adam Nieland (Square): Gotcha. Unfortunately, it's not smart enough to look at a queue of in-person orders plus online orders and put them into a specific order. It goes in the order it was received. And the order staggering we were talking about in the pickup and delivery settings only looks at online ordering. So that would be more of a product request for our engineering and product teams, to build some of that functionality out.

We do have a partner called Per Diem that I've actually just recently worked with. If you have needs like this, they just built this out at the end of December, so it's literally fresh. Per Diem is a really good partner if you're looking for something around peak times: looking at overall wait times from in-person and online orders, with a more robust threshold, and extending prep times based on peak times. Because right now, you set a prep time, say 15 minutes, or you set order staggering, like a five-minute buffer every three orders, reset every 15 minutes. Those are about it.

Then there are some things you can do on the point of sale, like busy mode, but that's more manual: you have to trigger it as an employee on the point of sale and say, extend my prep times right now. If you want to automate that based on your busy times, a partner like Per Diem lets you set your peak times throughout the week, the days, the month, and it automatically adjusts the prep time based on how many orders you have. You can set those smart peak times. So that's a partner, if that helps answer that.

Reseller: Awesome. Thank you.

Adam Nieland (Square): I'm going to go through a few of these others too. (Reading from the chat: do you have images for size options, a sample image of cups?) Do we provide stock images?

Reseller: No. There are other online ordering platforms out there I've seen where, if you pick a large cup, small cup or big cup, it shows a small cup, a large cup, a big cup. I didn't know if there were images on the sizes.

Adam Nieland (Square): Gotcha. So when you select a specific variation, does it match up with the picture for that variation?

Reseller: Yeah. Or can you upload pictures or something? I don't know.

Adam Nieland (Square): Absolutely. By variation, you can assign a specific image you want to have. It can be a standard cup, or an individual small, medium or large cup, so when they click it, it shows them that. Yeah, absolutely.

Reseller: That's awesome. Thanks.

Adam Nieland (Square): Yeah. And you can even do that with modifiers too. If you had a modifier like add onions or add pickles, you could put a picture on the modifier, which is kind of cool.

Reseller: That is cool. Thank you.

Adam Nieland (Square): (Reading from the chat: can you have multiple websites for one location, for example a separate site for regular ordering versus catering?) Yes, you can have separate sites for one location, and you don't have to duplicate the location if the prep times are the same.

But if you're looking for a workaround where one site has a blanket prep time for ASAP and another site has a blanket prep time of, say, two business days ahead, technically you'd have to create a second location, even though it's the same address, and assign that location to the other site, because you assign locations to websites, and products to locations.

So technically it would be two separate locations with the same address. That way you could go into the pickup and delivery settings for the catering one, say we nickname it catering, and set a blanket two business days, or whatever it is, for those catering items. Any items assigned to that site follow that location's ordering settings. That's how you'd do it, technically.

Otherwise, you could have just one site, very similar to that example, Macri's Bakery. There are so many different ways to do the catering option, but you can just add an item section, so you don't have to build two sites, and add the items that have the unique prep time on them. It's the same site. The only difference is that if the cart has a same-day item and a catering item, the longest prep time trumps. So technically, if I ordered a sandwich for today and a catering item for next Tuesday on the same ticket, everything is for next Tuesday. That's why you'd probably separate those. But does that help answer that?

Reseller: Yeah, I think so.

Adam Nieland (Square): Okay. Is there anything else I can clarify for you there? Any confusion?

Reseller: No, I'm just trying to process it all. I think it can do what we want. We have a particular customer who wants a completely separate catering site.

Adam Nieland (Square): The thing is, you can have up to 10 sites, and as many locations as you need. The only thing is, if you need a secondary site and do the workaround of adding another location, you have to assign that location to some hardware. So it might require another iPad or another device, so the orders come in. That's the other thing: sometimes these workarounds require more hardware.

Reseller: So if we just set all the non-catering items to have their prep time, and all the catering items to have a longer prep time, and the catering site only has the catering items and the other site only has the other items, it shouldn't be a problem, right?

Adam Nieland (Square): Yeah, it shouldn't be a problem. And the cool thing there is you can assign those locations to one printer, so that would work. It's just that if there are separate locations, you do need at least one more device. That can be a phone with the free point of sale app downloaded, or an iPad or whatever. Just having another device open means the order is received, and then it prints to the same printer. But yeah, that would work.

Reseller: Great. Thanks.

Adam Nieland (Square): (Reading from the chat: does the store need a terminal or hardware other than a printer?) The printer is just so you can see the physical ticket, and if you have a KDS, orders show up there too. But beyond that, you just need a point of sale. It can be the free downloaded app, or a register. As long as it's open and signed in to the location that's receiving the orders, you get the notifications and they show in the order manager there. If you want a handheld, or whatever devices you need to see those orders, it really depends on the operation and who's staffing them: employees walking up to tables if it's full service, or, for quick service, generally a register with a customer-facing display is great, if you have customer loyalty, so people can earn loyalty points.

(Reading from the chat: can customers split checks themselves and pay with QR code ordering, or do servers have to split for them?) Great question. Right now, if I'm at a table and scan the QR code, technically you can do what's called group orders, so people can be on the same check if you want. It won't split that check, unfortunately. If they want to be truly separate, they each scan the QR code on their own phone, put their own order together, and are charged at the time of that order. Right now, I think splitting the check from one QR code order is a product request, unfortunately. But they can scan individually.

One thing that's kind of cool, as I add on to that answer: in the QR code setup, you can set the timing of QR code orders. Say I'm at table 10 with my wife, we're ordering on my phone, and I scan the QR code. There's a setting that says wait a set amount of time for the whole table to get their orders in, so it comes in as a group even though people are paying individually on their phones. That way I don't get my food before the rest of the table. Otherwise, you can print the ticket immediately and have the kitchen make it immediately. So there are a few settings for that too. But I'll definitely let the product team know it would be great to be able to split a single QR code ticket.

I'm going to hop into retail, since we've got about 15 minutes left, and I think going over shipping and the other things that come up for retail would be a good use of our time. So here's my retail account. Now that I'm on this side, I'll go to Settings, Account & Settings, and into shipping, so you can see some shipping setup.

What's great is there are a bunch of different aggregators out there you can create shipping labels with, but the one I recommend is Shippo, because it integrates directly with Square, so you don't have to log out. We also integrate with ShipStation, ShipBob and Easyship; there are a bunch of them. And we have the Square App Marketplace, where you can type in shipping labels and it tells you all the partners we integrate with. But Shippo is the one I always start with, because it integrates directly with Square.

If I click Get started, it tells me: if you want to create labels, connect Shippo and Square together. Connect your account, and it takes you to a login where you sign up or log in to your existing account, and it connects it to your Square account. It asks you questions during that onboarding, like adding a card on file, so when you go to print labels you have a payment method on file. It's not going to charge you; there's no monthly fee for it. It's just when you go to create those labels, it has a card on file to process and create the label for you.

Then you connect the carriers you have, so when you create labels, you're purchasing from those carriers and it creates a label from that carrier. Pretty straightforward, and it just makes it more convenient. When you get an order for shipping, there's a to-do list that says create label, directly from your Square account, rather than logging into some other software. Even though it integrates and the order information would be there, it's just so much more seamless to have it here.

After that's done: what location am I shipping from? Once I've got the ship-from location assigned, I can set up what region I'm shipping to, and what the rates are. Is it flat rate? Shippo does work in Canada, and we do Canada Post as well, so that works too.

If I click Add profile, I can start a profile for a new region I want to ship to. You can see this one is U.S., Canada. That's my nickname; it's internal, for you. So if I wanted to do a West Coast profile, I can, and then select the country. Once I select the country, I choose which territories and states. These are grayed out because I already created a profile with all these states in it, so I'd have to delete that profile and start over. But you'd be able to select those West Coast states if I didn't already have a profile. That way, when people order from those states, I'm only charging the rates I set up for that region. You can make as many profiles as you need, so it charges the right rate per region.

If I click Edit or Add rate, I can name the rate, which customers will see. Then, how do I set up that rate? I can do a flat rate, free shipping over a certain dollar amount or weight, or a rate based on order total, number of items, or order weight, which is popular, obviously, because that's what the post office generally does. If I click on that one, you'll see I can start a scale: zero to five pounds is some amount, and so on. I can redo that; that's just the example. If I set 0.25 pounds, it automatically starts the next row just over that, so I can put a different dollar amount on it, maybe eight bucks. I can keep adding rows as I need, and it follows that scale. You can do that with any one of these rate types.

Real-time shipping is on our premium hosting, and once you've set up your courier, it lets you select priority levels. Maybe I'm using UPS or USPS: I can say I want overnight, or one to two day. If I check those priority levels, the customer can choose at checkout: overnight, two-day or seven-day ground, whatever. It charges the appropriate courier rate based on the destination being shipped to, the distance, and the weight of the product. That requires weights at the item level: under the variation there's a field for weight, for shipping, and it totals those weights up.

You can add weights in bulk: check a bunch of items and click Edit, and there's a column for weight; enter it and click Save. So you can do that on multiple items at once. You can even export your items, fill in a column, and re-import your product catalog, and it will have all of those too. That's, in a nutshell, how you manage shipping.

Real quick, I wanted to show you some sites people have. This is one called RichMen Looks. He sells suits, and does really well. He's got a cool site, and he models all his own stuff, which is cool. He's got different collections you can click into, and it's a really cool custom suit site. Once you click into a product, it shows the different sizes and stock levels, and you can choose store pickup or shipping. This is that product page, and you can see he has multiple product pictures, with the primary one at the top.

Within the editor, product pages have different layouts too, so you can choose whether the information is on the right side or the left side, whether pictures are circular, that kind of thing. And you can show what's called similar items, showcasing other products similar to that one, so people shop around. So that's one of those retail sites.

Here's another one, a pro cricket outfitter. You can see a mega menu for different categories of products and subcategories. If I were looking for a helmet and knew a specific brand, I could click into that, it takes me to that shop, and I can start ordering. There are even filters. Let's say I go to pads: I can filter by availability, so I don't see anything out of stock, only in stock. Then I can set a price range, a minimum of 100 bucks, whatever it is. And I can say I only want things for pickup. You can apply filters and clear them too. It just helps you set those up.

(Reading from the chat: can a hair salon display both time-based services and physical products on the same products and services web page?) Yes, you can. I think I can go to an example site that I know is one of our themes. It's called Iris and Onyx. Iris and Onyx lets you have services: I can click Book now, it takes me to those services, and I can book them. And if I just want to look at products, I can click Products.

Reseller: What I meant was, looking at products, they display their services there, so they don't have to click Book now to see the services. Is there a way to see the services under products before clicking Book now?

Adam Nieland (Square): Yeah. You can sell a service like that, but you wouldn't be able to book a specific time, so it wouldn't match up. If you want them to actually book a service at a specific time and day, that goes through the booking link up there, Book now. This is more for the products, separately. If you did add a service here, it wouldn't really have a time attached to it, so it wouldn't really make sense.

Reseller: I just wanted to advertise their prices for the services without the guest having to click Book now.

Adam Nieland (Square): You can do this; this is what people do. They put in a services tab and list the prices here. They're not bookable, but technically you can create that.

Reseller: Are those prices in sync? If they change the price of the short haircut, $90, in the time-based services, is that $90 automatically updated there?

Adam Nieland (Square): Let me go into it, because I haven't been in this theme in a while, so let me double-check for you. I think that's just a text and image section. I could be wrong, but I just want to make sure real quick.

Reseller: I'm only asking because my fiancée uses Square for her salon that she owns. Loves it, long-time customer. I helped set up her website, and I could not figure out how to do that.

Adam Nieland (Square): Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. No, that's a great question. It might be a product request, but real quick, I'm going to share my screen and go into that Iris and Onyx demo site. I can click on that services page, and it tells me right away what the back end looks like. So we'll go into services. It's just text and image.

Reseller: So that's the way I set it up with just text and image. So every time she changes her prices and for the time-based service, I have to go into the website and mainly type in.

Adam Nieland (Square): Gotcha. That's great feedback. I'll let the product team know.

Reseller: That would be awesome, if they would update with those prices.

Adam Nieland (Square): And also, if it's a haircut or another salon service listed there, would you like it to link to a booking? If they clicked on short hair, for example.

Reseller: That would be gravy. That would be icing on the cake. At bare minimum, just a guest-facing menu of the time-based services without clicking Book now.

Adam Nieland (Square): Awesome. No, that makes sense. I appreciate that feedback. I'll let the team know.

(Reading a question from the chat: is there a preferred third-party platform for online stores you'd recommend for a retail clothing store?) WooCommerce, BigCommerce. WooCommerce is a big one, because it does still sync with inventory and things. But I would definitely recommend WooCommerce. WooCommerce is going to be your best bet. You're building with WordPress, with all the plugins too, so when you're building that WooCommerce site, it's a lot more customizable. So I'd definitely recommend WooCommerce.

Reseller: Is there a way to prevent guest checkout?

Adam Nieland (Square): Prevent guest checkout, so they have to sign up and be a customer account? Unfortunately not. It doesn't force that; it just lets people sign up if they want to. So unfortunately there's no way to prevent that.

Reseller: But it'd be a nice option, with these chargebacks that are happening, trying to chase down and find out who the cardholder actually is.

Adam Nieland (Square): Yeah, no, I totally get it. I'll definitely relay that to the product team. Thank you for that.

(To the reseller who asked about third-party platforms in the chat.) I also saw you said the limitations on retail or SKUs. Real quick, I'll show you. Just a rule of thumb: it's generally about 100,000 SKUs. You definitely get slow online. But just to show you, I've got a good example site. It's a gaming site. They've got about 7,000 products on there, which is a pretty robust site. Some people have more, but that's above average. Let me share my screen and show you just how many SKUs, so you can see it live and how it loads.

Here it is. It's called Gamescape; they're out of San Francisco. If I go to their shop and click there, you can see at the top they've got 6,183 results, and how many different categories they have, like card games. It's going to load a little bit, but that's not bad for having about six products. It took about two and a half seconds to load, and everything's there. So not bad loading, even with that many products.

(Reading from the chat: how about beer and wine retail stores? Can they sell online and deliver through DoorDash?) Yes. DoorDash does deliver alcohol in specific states. If you qualify, it tells you in the pickup and delivery settings. There's a checkbox that says I plan to deliver alcohol, and at the item level you just make sure it says this product contains alcohol, which you can do in bulk too. So yes, you definitely can do that.

Real quick, there are a couple of others here. (Reading from the chat: can you use a handheld to take pictures and send them to your site?) Yeah. We've got what's called the Photo Studio app too, which is really cool. You can do light box stuff, real studio stuff, for free. I definitely recommend the Photo Studio app.

But I think that's all the time I have for today, guys. I really appreciate you coming out and asking the questions, and hopefully this was useful for you.