Hi my merchant needs to receive online orders from his custom website (without customer pre-paying online) and view/print out the order via the regular square app. Customer would then pay in person either with cash or a card swipe on the square device.
This doesn’t seem to be possible as square requires a payment to be made via their API to have order appear and print.
Is it possible?
Hey @hidethellama welcome to the forums!
You’re correct, unfortunately, and the Orders team is aware of this. Currently, an order must be paid for before it would show up in the Square Dashboard on POS application. I’ll update this post to be marked as a feature request, because we certainly hear this often.
Hi, is it possible to get access to this API as a partner? I work with 70 restaurants in LA area and process over $500k of orders a month that would all benefit from this feature. I have submitted an application, but i’m not sure what your criteria is — not sure if i would be able allowed to join in a reasonable timeframe.
We do have our own app but it’s convenience to use square as they can process in person payments and printer support is good.
Great to hear you’re interested in becoming a partner, but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of insight into the requirements either. All the applications and reviews are handled by a completely different team than the ones monitoring this forum. Please send me a message here with your application id and I can find out if there’s been any status updates on our end.
With all that said - I’m not even sure if the feature exists even to partners yet (not as far as I know). So even if you were a partner, I don’t think you’d be able to use this functionality since it hasn’t been fully implemented.
Thanks for the help! The feature should exist as doordash and postmates are able to send orders to regular Square POS (not restaurant). I did apply on a page specifically mentioning a different set of API for this feature, however I am having trouble finding it, will post back.
I would like to add my support for this feature as well or at least request some kind of solution for the proposed problem that the original poster has.
Currently, the only workaround that we have for this is to add the items ad-hoc and charge $0 so that we can create a payment. Is there a better solution available?
This feature is available to large companies like Doordash and Postmates.
I think square is trying to entice people to use their own payments processor for online orders as well.
However I think that is a loose-loose tactic, as during the 2 months of silence from Square my company built their own app that receives orders and prints to any thermal printer. We wasted development resource to replicate what Square excels at.
If Square had allowed for orders without needing Payments API, we would have had many Clover system users move to square for in person payments to have 1 unified device.
Hi @sjosey, any update on timing for this feature request? Thank you!
Hi @sjosey, just wanted to +1 this as well - super interested in this feature!
Appreciate all the interest here! Definitely still being looked into but no ETA on when it would be coming unfortunately.
@sjosey Any updates here? My team really wants to use the square API for support payments for restaurant pickup orders in-person. However, for us to be able to do this we need the kitchen to be able to view the order and make the order before it is paid for. Payment is done in person when the client is ready to pickup their order.
only way i know is to set the final amount to zero dollar.
for us we just built our own restaurant-side app to support that.
@hidethellama is it possible to on-board my clients to the restaurant-side app you and your team have built?
The only way we’ve been able to get around that annoying problem is to push the order into an invoice. The invoice then will show up on the POS and allows you to take payments on it. We’ve requested this solution for over a year and keep getting the same runaround on it.
thanks for the possible work around - will try
@Spiderwoman thanks for sharing this - are there any annoying aspects or downsides to this workaround, based on your experience? Seems promising on paper!
The only one I can see right now is not able to do a split payment at the POS system that would be tied to different payers/customers. You can do that on orders, but not on invoices.
There is another solution, albeit as everything else Square seems to do it’s half a job. The Square Retail POS app has a great feature “Save Basket” which you can then create a list of orders and then charge the customer when required. 2 issues, the first is this feature is not available on the standard POS app. Not a problem you may think! Well the 2nd issue is the Retail POS app is only available on iOS and I have android phones!!! Cant seem to find this feature within any API but this would solve my problem if available on android
For our use case, it is incredibly inconvenient to only be able to use the payment API and not be able to process cash orders/card swipes in-store. This feature would be extremely useful for us.
I just want to add to this feature request- my app aggregates multiple POS inventories and so it handles payment processing outside of Square. It’d be nice to be able to create the order without going through the payments api so that the merchant would have visibility to manage fulfillment.