In-House Delivery with Square Online
With Square Online, you can sell prepared food and beverage items online and offer nearby customers a way to have their orders delivered by your own couriers or delivery staff. Customers can even sign up for text alerts to receive updates as their items get prepared and dispatched.
| Don't have your own delivery staff? Try On-Demand Delivery. |
Local delivery is even better when set up with in-store and curbside pickup, that way customers can choose the fulfillment option most convenient for them. To learn more about building your website first, check out getting started with Square Online.
Pricing
Note: Waive the In-House Delivery fee by upgrading your Square Online subscription.
With In-House Delivery, you won’t have to pay commissions; just a flat fee of $0.50 + tax per order. You can choose to cover the fee, pass the local delivery costs on to your customers or cover local delivery for orders over a certain amount (e.g. free delivery for orders over $50). The fee will be deducted from the total for each local delivery order you receive in addition to the usual transaction fee.
Set up In-House Delivery
To set up In-House Delivery:
From your Account & Settings page, go to Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery.
Select Set up location by the location you want to enable delivery for.
After completing your pickup details, indicate that you want to offer delivery by selecting Yes.
For In-House Delivery, choose the My own couriers option.
Decide if you’ll calculate and assign delivery times automatically.
Select Continue to check which sites your location should be available on.
Select Continue to review your settings so far and finish. Then, select Edit to configure additional settings.
Set up delivery-related settings, including a delivery region (either by postal code or radius), estimated delivery time (added to the prep time), delivery and service fees, minimum order amount and no-contact delivery.
Choose if you want your orders delivered at specific times or any time during your delivery hours.
Toggle the ability to mark orders as Ready before marking as Complete, and select when you want your order tickets to print.
Set the hours and days of the week customers can have their orders delivered.
Adjust any remaining Location details and Site visibility settings.
Select Save when finished.
Continue below for specific details on some of the steps and settings outlined above.
Delivery settings
As you set up In-House Delivery, you can adjust the following delivery settings.
Indicate if you’ll calculate and assign delivery times automatically by selecting Yes or No.
- Schedule manually: By selecting No, you can manually share the delivery details with your customer. This allows you to manage order scheduling in a way that works best for your business (e.g. time slots, availability windows, pre-orders, etc.).
- Schedule automatically: By selecting Yes, we’ll calculate the delivery times automatically. This lets customers choose a delivery date and time based on your business hours, prep time and estimated delivery time.
Set up a delivery area using postal codes for the specific areas you’ll deliver to or a radius around your business address.
- Postal code: The postal code option is pre-filled with your location postal code. You can enter multiple codes by hitting enter after each one. This option is best for highly populated urban areas.
- Radius: To use the radius option, enter a number for the distance of your delivery range, and choose miles or kilometres. This number should represent the maximum straight-line distance – not driving distance – that you’ll travel for a local delivery. The radius center is based on your location address. Customers outside of the radius you entered will see a message that they aren’t in the local delivery zone.
If you schedule delivery automatically, the time you enter here should reflect the minimum and maximum amount of time it takes for you to deliver an order. This will be added to the prep time and shown to customers when they place an order.
Charge delivery and service fees to offset any incurred costs.
- Delivery fee: You can set a fixed price delivery fee for all orders, or offer free delivery for orders over a certain amount and charge a fixed price for all others. If you deliver by radius, you can also adjust the fee amount based on the distance.
- Service fee: Charge a service fee by a fixed amount or percentage of the order total.
- Fallback delivery fee: If you deliver by radius, customers will be charged this fallback fee if their delivery address falls outside the rules you’ve created.
Order timing settings
You can also adjust the following settings related to how orders should be timed.
When you indicate that you won’t calculate and assign delivery times automatically (i.e. will do so manually), you can complete the following:
- Short message: Provide a short description of when customers can expect to get orders when they’re not automatically assigned times. This is shown in the cart and included in order notification messages.
- Instructions: Provide more detailed instructions. This is shown during checkout, in order notification emails and on the order confirmation screen.
When you indicate that you’ll calculate and assign delivery times automatically, you’ll have several questions to complete to set up the auto-scheduling system. Questions can include the following:
- When can orders be delivered? Orders can either be delivered at specific times (e.g. 12:30 p.m.) or any time during your delivery hours (e.g. 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.). By default, your customers will see an all-day delivery window based on your delivery hours.
- If a customer places an order during your fulfilment hours, what is the soonest that the order can be delivered? Delivery time can either be on the same day they place the order or on a following day (i.e. one or more days in the future).
- Do you start preparing orders as soon as they are received? If delivery times will be on the same day, you can indicate either that you generally start preparing your orders once you get them, or start preparing orders after a certain time. The second option is best if you wait until a certain time of day to review your orders and start preparing them afterwards.
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How much time do you need to prepare an order for pickup or delivery? If delivery times will be on the same day, you can determine how much time it takes you to prepare an order. You can also set different prep times for individual items by editing them in your item catalogue.
How far in advance must a customer place their order? If delivery times will be on a following day, you can indicate how many calendar days before the customer would need to place their order. - Do you want to let customers schedule delivery orders for future days? Toggle this option on to allow customers to schedule their delivery orders up to the number of days you enter (between seven and 365 days in the future). If toggled off, customers will be scheduled automatically.
- Do you want Square Online to limit the number of orders that can be picked up or delivered at the same time? If you’d like to control the number of orders that can be delivered at once, select the toggle and set the number of orders you’d like to allow. Incoming orders will be automatically assigned a local delivery time based on your settings. Learn more about limiting pickup and local delivery orders in Square Online.
Note: You can test if our calculations match your operations by using the provided Fulfilment Calculator. What’s shown in the calculator is what’ll be shown to customers at checkout.
Workflow settings
Workflow settings should correspond to how your business operates.
You can mark delivery orders as Ready before marking as Complete. This notifies the customer that their order is prepared and ready for delivery. You can change the order status from Ready to Complete when you’re done with the order. If you leave this off, you won’t be able to mark orders as Ready.
You can choose when you want your order tickets to print.
- Print order tickets based on pickup and delivery time: Order tickets will print based on how much prep time is required before the order is due.
- Print order tickets when the order is placed: All order tickets will print when the order is placed, even if the order is scheduled for a future delivery time.
You can also configure your Square Point of Sale to automatically print orders from Square Online. Learn more about printing your orders and setting up printed tickets for orders in Square POS.
Fulfillment hour settings
With these settings, you can set up your delivery hours as well as any restricted dates that you don’t deliver (think major holidays).
These are the days of the week when customers can have their orders delivered. Customers will still be able to place orders outside these hours. Select the first toggle to decide if you want your pickup and delivery hours to be the same or different.
The days and times you see here are synced from your Square account. If you haven’t added business hours for your location, you’ll see the default hours instead (Monday–Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.). You can edit the hours and days here without affecting the settings in your Square account.
Check the box for each day that you will offer local delivery, then enter the delivery hours. You can add multiple time frames within a day by selecting ”+”. This lets you exclude specific hours if you don’t want to handle deliveries at certain times of the day (like during your lunch).
Select +Add date to create restricted dates for any days that you won’t offer local delivery. For example, you might exclude holidays that occur during your usual business days. You can add multiple restricted dates, and set them to repeat annually or occur only once.
Note: The hours you add to your website in the Square Online site editor on the Location and hours section are for informational purposes only, and do not function as a setting or sync to your pickup and delivery settings. They must be added in the area described above to function as a setting.
Location details and site visibility settings
These settings help set up your location details and which sites they should appear on.
On this tab, make changes to your location display name, address, phone number or email address. You can use the map to adjust the location used to determine your delivery area. Dragging the marker to a new position won’t change the address you’ve entered.
Note: Changes you make to the address or contact information here won’t affect your location settings in your Square account.
Advanced settings
After your main setup is complete, you can also configure other advanced settings that will apply to every location you’ve enabled for delivery. To do so:
From your Account & Settings page, go to Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery.
Select Advanced settings.
Under “Large order settings,” set a quantity limit to prevent unexpected large delivery orders, and include an optional custom message explaining how to place orders that are over the quantity limit.
Select Save when finished.
Update fulfillment and prep time settings for items
If you haven’t already, be sure to visit your Square Item Library to assign Local delivery to the items you want to be fulfilled via On-Demand Delivery. You can also set up individual prep times for those items if some of them take longer to prepare. To learn more about updating fulfillment methods and prep times for items, check out how to Set up items for your online store.
Preorders for holidays and special items
If you’re selling items for pickup and local delivery which are only available on certain dates (holiday specials, for example), your customers can pre-order on Square Online and get the items when they become available. To learn more, check out how to Set up items for online pre-ordering.
Manage In-House Delivery orders and alerts
When you’ve finished preparing an order, navigate to the order in your Square Order Manager. Learn more about managing online orders with Square.
When you enable local delivery, you can also turn on text message notifications so customers receive texts about their order status. Learn more about customizing email and text alerts from Square Online for more information.
Buyer experience
When a customer visits your Order Online ordering page, they’ll need to enter their address before viewing the menu. If you have multiple locations set up for local delivery, the customer will see the menu for the closest location. If the customer’s address is outside of your delivery area, they’ll be asked to enter a different address.
Once a customer places a local delivery order, they’ll be given the earliest possible delivery date and time based on your hours, order limiting, prep time and delivery estimate settings for the chosen location. If no-contact delivery is turned on, customers can check a box to request that before paying for the order.
They can also leave a tip on the order during checkout. Learn more about checkout options for more information on tipping.
Orders with mixed fulfillment methods will affect checkout. If a customer has items in the cart with different fulfillment methods (such as an item for local delivery and another for shipping), they’ll see a message on the checkout screen letting them know they need to purchase these items separately.
Switch local delivery types
To switch between the local delivery types of In-House Delivery and on-demand delivery in Square Online:
From your Account & Settings page, go to Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery.
Select Edit by the location you want to change delivery types for.
Go to the Delivery tab.
Under “Couriers,” select how you’ll deliver your orders: My own couriers for In-House Delivery or On-Demand Delivery for third-party courier services like DoorDash.
Complete all other details and select Save when finished.
Turn off In-House Delivery
From your Account & Settings page, go to Fulfillment > Pickup & Delivery and select the toggle to turn off local delivery under the specific location. You can turn it back on at any time and restore your previous settings.
You can also temporarily stop accepting all online orders regardless of fulfillment method. Learn more about your checkout options with Square Online for more information.