

Square Pickup - mikegreenspan
https://squareup.com/pickup

======
ignostic
I don't think most people realize how hard online-to-local-pickup is for a
retailer. "Interested in local pickup? Give us a call." is going to be a
better customer experience 9 times out of 10. I hope Square gets it. Retailers
- many of them with limited resources and technical skills - face big
technical, UI, and logistical issues. I'll give one implementation example
that shows all three; this applies to all retailers who don't stock everything
in the store OR have multiple locations.

The retailer must essentially keep availability counts for items that can be
sold online (if different), then a separate list per store. These lists _must_
be accurate or you're going to have angry customers showing up to grab items
you don't have - and anyone who has done retail knows how hard accurate
inventory can be, especially with entry-level staff.

Once inventory is accurate, these retailers must then program their sites to
show which items are available for pickup at which locations. THEN if you want
to allow customers to pick up items that aren't in the store, you need to
communicate when they can pick it up based on delivery time.

It gets complicated: do you have the customer choose their closest store up
front, even if they don't want to do local pickup? This implementation wastes
online buyers' time and creates a barrier to browsing. Do you have customers
choose the store when they check out? If so, the option might not be available
for the items they've chosen thereby frustrating your customer. Do they choose
the store on the product page? The product page is usually your busiest page
already, and you generally don't want to add any steps between it and
checkout.

Regardless of which option you choose, you then have to figure out how to deal
with available at nearby locations. Do you really want your user selecting all
3 nearby locations to check availability for pickup? Do you want to display
every nearby store that could fulfill pickup? How do you give them the message
that it's available nearby? Should you share the negative when it's not
available nearby either to prevent them from checking each store?

The questions just go on.

It's not impossible, but _there 's a lot that could go wrong here for two or
three-store retailer_. Even Target got it wrong when I recently tried to buy a
wedding gift. They wanted me to wait 2 days for them to deliver a vacuum to
the store, even though they had half a dozen in stock when I called.

~~~
cpher
Not related to Square, per se, but to give you an example from a completely
different domain-- car sales.

My wife and I were researching minivans in our metro area. We got calls from
the dealership asking if we're still interested in the vehicle. We said 'yes'.
One hour before we drove to the 'burbs' to check it out, I called to confirm
the availability of said vehicle. They said 'yes, it's still here.' We get to
the dealership only to find out that the vehicle was sold THE DAY BEFORE. A
major car dealership didn't have a system in place to know their inventory at
any given point in time. They're a part of a weird "sharing" system between
dealerships that can borrow/trade/steal vehicles from their partner
dealerships-- all within the same "family" company. But they clearly had no
way to track this activity.

It seems that inventory control/management spans many domains. Needless to
say, they lost our business and we bought from someone else.

~~~
eli
Maybe they wanted to get you on the lot even if the car you wanted was gone.

~~~
cpher
It's possible, especially given the research available to anyone with a
smartphone. They were a big dealership, but the whole experience smelled of a
shady used car salesman.

~~~
jusben1369
Yes sadly the sales guy thinks like this i) Tell him the car is not here they
don't come chance of sale = 0%. ii) Tell them the car is here then it's not
here but maybe sell them something else = 10%.

------
rdl
This is (to me) the most interesting thing I've seen Square do since they
launched. It's a bit pricey, but there are lots of great examples of
pickup/takeout working well -- chipotle, for one. If smaller stores could do
this easily, I'd be a lot more likely to order from them, especially if it's a
larger/group order where spending the time on the phone is a pain (and often
incorrect).

I don't think the economics of a lot of the delivery services work, especially
for single-person or other small orders; here, it's pure cost savings. The 8%
cut is ...ambitious, but it might make sense, and they can always drop it to
something more reasonable like 5%.

~~~
nwenzel
For business with a limited sales window and highly perishable inventory
(bagel store in the morning), standing in line may be the bottleneck
preventing more customer and order throughput. If the store is able to expand
their capacity via an order ahead app allowing them to capture new sales they
would not have otherwise gotten, 8% seems much more reasonable.

Of course, some existing customers and sales will also move in that direction,
so the answer here may be, as is often the case, it depends.

What I find truly fascinating is that Square is(was) a "payments" company. Or,
more specifically, a credit card terminal company. But this offering and their
recent acquisition of BookFresh makes them more of a back-end for small
business. They may be one of the few companies to have figured out how to sell
to small business at scale.

Apparently the answer there is, find something small, complicated, and
annoying... fix it. Build that toehold into a platform to take on the larger
opportunity.

------
cowsandmilk
For food trucks, this seems interesting. Most food trucks I see using square
enter the orders directly into square already. If I can avoid the line at a
food truck by putting in my order and just wait for them to call my name with
my food, that would be pretty amazing.

~~~
joeframbach
Busy food truck lines are not great for calling names out. With a line of
people yapping, and traffic noise, you have to be nearly under the canopy to
hear your name called, and there's only room there for ~8 people (crowded). So
they'd have to send you an update to your mobile device, which now creates
more questions like, how to communicate to the person in line that's been
waiting for 15 minutes that no, you are not cutting in line. Once you navigate
the line to the truck, do you show your phone to the person and hope they have
good organization of orders pending pickup? Does Square help the business with
that aspect?

~~~
crater
> So they'd have to send you an update to your mobile device, which now
> creates more questions like, how to communicate to the person in line that's
> been waiting for 15 minutes that no, you are not cutting in line.

Something like a pick-up window would work.

> do you show your phone to the person and hope they have good organization of
> orders pending pickup?

In my opinion, if the food truck has implemented this Square software, they
might keep "organization of orders pending pickup" in mind. Showing your phone
to the person should be enough, (with some sort of simple identification on
the phone message).

I don't know if Square Pickup does this but I'm just arguing against your
doubt that it wouldn't work.

~~~
awad
I used Paypal to pay for something in-store recently and they identified me by
matching the selfie that I took in the app (that showed up on their iPad
screen tied to my name) to the same one shown on the app on my phone that I
held up for them. Pretty neat/clever and would work just as well here.

------
chris_va
8% per order.

Yikes.

~~~
jpschwinghamer
[http://qz.com/182961/grubhub-and-seamless-take-a-13-5-cut-
of...](http://qz.com/182961/grubhub-and-seamless-take-a-13-5-cut-of-their-
average-delivery-order/)

------
abalone
Overall I can't help shake the impression that this is kind of a "Yelp move":
your core business model isn't that hot, so break the glass of the nearest hot
business model and copy it. Yelp's done that with daily deals, checkins, etc..
This is Square doing a "GrubHub".

But, finally a product from Square with a fat profit margin (an extra 5.25%).
I wonder if this is a sign of their future monetization strategy.

Their base processing fee of 2.75% + $0.00 is probably actually pretty low-
margin for the particular "very small business" market they're targeting.
There are big advertising costs, lower volumes per business and probably
higher fraud rates.

And upmarket from that, medium-sized businesses are used to commodity
processing fees closer to 2%. The whole "free reader/register" pitch is not as
appealing there, where a higher processing fee would end up costing a lot
more.

Maybe their strategy is to break even on the base processing to get mindshare
and sell premium services like this. The challenge, as with all "Yelp moves",
is that it makes you a follower not a leader.

(P.S. I don't mean to single out Yelp too much here.. plenty companies do it.
I think they came to mind because they're also in the small business space.)

~~~
_zen
> your core business model isn't that hot

You can't just make a statement like that and play it off. Citations? I see
Square devices used everywhere in retail, and no, I don't live in San
Francisco or the Bay Area.

~~~
thrownaway2424
I do live in the Bay Area and the only place I have seen Square is at coffee
shops and farmers market stands. I don't think it has that much traction and
their growth is reported to be poor (or negative, I forget which). The mag
stripe reader was a cute hack but when you get down to it the service is
pretty expensive and you need a huge up-front investment in equipment,
compared to ordinary cash registers which are dirt cheap.

~~~
olivierlacan
Square is a POS system, comparing it with a cash register is ridiculous. Many
POS systems sold to restaurants fly well above the thousands of dollars with
shitty UIs that take hours for employees to learn (knowing the turnover in the
food industry, it's a lot of wasted time).

~~~
natrius
Not anymore. Clover costs $500-$1000 and works for categories of retailers
that Square doesn't, particularly table service restaurants.

~~~
warfangle
Must not have been Square that I saw a server using to swipe cards on an iPad
mini, then.

(edit: nope, it was Breadcrumb)

------
rpedela
Is this kinda like GrubHub but more general? Or is it more about making it
easy for businesses to take pickup orders on their websites?

~~~
bri3d
From a quick read of the docs, it's just simple status management - basically
a kitchen ticket tracker. Orders move from Pending to Accepted to Done and
parties are notified along the way.

[https://squareup.com/help/en-us/article/5227-accept-
pickup-o...](https://squareup.com/help/en-us/article/5227-accept-pickup-
orders)

The most interesting part to me was this:

"Square’s standard fee of 2.75% will be applied to the total amount of each
pickup sale for a limited time, until July 1st, 2014. After this time, the fee
will be 8% per pickup order."

~~~
smackfu
Steep, but this part sounds expensive:

"If an order isn't accepted within 2 minutes, a Square Team member will call
you directly, so please keep a phone nearby."

I do think Square could better explain why this service is 8% while everything
else they provide is included in the 2.75% normal rate.

~~~
cath4rsis
"While the 8% fee seems high compared to Square's standard 2.75% transaction
fee, the average merchant fee for food ordering services is about 13.5%, McKee
says. Square is offering a promotional rate of 2.75% per order through July
1."

[http://www.paymentssource.com/news/square-piles-on-new-
featu...](http://www.paymentssource.com/news/square-piles-on-new-features-for-
online-in-store-sales-3017729-1.html)

------
frostli
This is totally the right direction Square is heading to: provide
complimentary service which makes the real profit. 8% seems steep but you get
their super low 2.75% credit card processing fee so the total package is still
appealing.

It's like bundle sale: have something charming as primary item and earn real
money by less attractive add-ons.

------
Pyrodogg
One other contender in the restaurant domain is EatStreet.

As a consumer I've had great service from EatStreet and their local restaurant
partners. No idea what the vendor side of the process is like. Square is
building quite a tie-in to their handy hardware as much as the app itself.

[https://geteatstreet.com/](https://geteatstreet.com/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/following-competitor-
grubhu...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/07/following-competitor-grubhubs-
successful-ipo-online-food-ordering-platform-eatstreet-raises-6-million/)

------
richardlblair
Novel, but I sure hope they aren't banking on this.

I worked for a retail store in College that had this implemented with their
POS. The setup was similar, without the iPads. More customers would still
order the product from the warehouse and have it delivered to the store rather
than pick it up that day out of the stores stock.

So, it's my experience that this will not work. However, I wish them the best.
Maybe they can shake things up a bit.

