Role
I was part of a two-designer team that expanded Square’s fulfillment capabilities from online-only orders to all order types, including in-store orders. I worked closely with product and engineering teams and helped shape the product strategy and eventually successfully integrated fulfillment flows into Square’s core platform.
Timeline
November 2022 to January 2023
Project context
What is fulfillment?
Fulfillment flows include orders that are placed now but are received later—like pickup, delivery, or shipping. Most delayed fulfillment orders are placed online because customers aren’t physically at the store when they want pickup or delivery.
Fulfillment at Square
Square’s fulfillment flows are actually all placed under the umbrella of Square Online because the functionality was acquired through an acquisition. This essentially meant that Square sellers needed to have a Square site in order to use pickup and delivery through Square. This works okay for basic use cases, but when Square wanted to scale to more advanced fulfillment scenarios, the current system was unable to scale. To allow support for advanced use cases, we needed to move fulfillment flows to a more central parent in navigation.
Advanced fulfillment use cases
3P pickup and delivery services (Doordash, UberEats etc)
Although it is not required for sellers to have a Square website to set up and customize pickup, delivery settings, sellers do have to navigate through a lot of settings that they may not use in order to properly set up their business to use 3P services.
Holiday preorders
Preorders should be ordered in store as well as online. Think Thanksgiving pies or a limited Mother’s day cake. Requiring customers to order through their online website introduces an additional obstacle which decreases sales.
Product drops
Product drops are a popular way for sellers to drive engagement and hype around new or limited products. Requiring customers to order through their online website introduces an additional obstacle which decreases sales.
Orders from warehouses
When a store is out of stock, other locations should be able to fulfill the order and ship directly to the customer.
Discovery
The two main teams involved in this migration were the Square Online team and the Commerce Platform team.
🤝 Stakeholder workshop
– xx
– xx
– xx
Solution
Migration options
From the workshop, we narrowed down our options to two types of migrations. Both of these options achieved our requirements of being able to move the flows entry points from Square Online to Square’s core settings. However, they had other pros and cons that we weighed with each type of fulfillment.
| Wrapper | Rebuild-from-scratch |
|---|---|
| ✅ Quicker to build ⛔️ More difficult maintenance in the future ⛔️ Retains an older look and feel that feels out of place with newer flows |
✅ Can improve flows based on feedback ✅ Can use updated design system ✅ Easier to maintain in the future ⛔️ Takes more work to redesign and rebuild |
Pickup & Delivery flows
xxx
Shipping flows
xxx
Education and Notice
xxxx