No, we were only off-line for about 3 hours.  The card came back as declined, and from what I was told by Square customer service was that it is policy to dump all collected data when the transaction is declined.

I am less upset about the charge being declined (I knew the risk) than I am about Square dumping the data that I collected.  Save the customers name, signature, and the email address that we collected and entered!  That way I have a link to identifying my customer.  If I take a check that is declined, I have the customers name, address, and phone number so I can collect.

I just got burned for the first time on a payment made during a short offline period at the farmer's market today.  Actually, I'm not even sure we were really offline, but that's what it said.  All of us vendors had their Square go out so we had to enable off-line mode.  I thought it was weird, though, since I still had 4 bars showing on my connection on my phone.  I'm wondering if something was going wrong with Square itself.

Anyway, I get home and am checking charges just now, and it says one of the payments taken during the few minutes we were offline failed.  It doesn't say the transactions was declined, it says "Payment Failed".  It has the ending 4 numbers of the card, but that's all.  I guess I'm going to have to see if the guy that bought the Baby Back Ribs and Bacon from me is honest and comes back next week so we can try it again or settle up.  It's too bad there isn't a way to run the transaction again,   I don't know if a "Failed Payment" necessarily means the card was declined or if it just means something was wrong and it could be retried.  Live and learn I guess.

Thanks for posting about this @FarmMom. I'm sorry to hear about the connection trouble that you experienced at your Farmers Market this weekend.

'Payment failed' typically means the card was declined by your customer's bank — you did nothing wrong! Unfortunately, banks don't share the reason a card is declined with Square. This means even if this happened in real time, your customer would need to contact their bank to find out why the transaction wasn't approved. To complete this charge you will need to contact your customer, or wait for them to reach out to you. 

If you're using Offline Mode in future, I recommend verifying the name of the card holder, and the expiry date (to check the card is valid). You could also consider taking a note of your customer's phone number or email address, just in case you need to reach out to them to run the payment again.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this! If you have questions about this specific transaction, or if you'd like us to confirm if you were in Offline Mode on Sunday please, contact our Support team directly. We're happy to help! 

These scenarios are why I will not process off line.  For me, the risks are too great for a charge to not go through.  Even though you have the customer's email and phone.  There is nothing you can really do to collect if the decline to be honest and make good on the transaction.  Especailly a small transaction amount such as a rib dinner.  

Good post. 

Squares system went down and I get back to my terminal 24 hours and 24 minutes after initial offline transaction to find it failed. No way to save and retry. 

Will never use offline mode again. 

@Wildartsweb I'm so sorry to hear that you've lost sales. Were you using Offline Mode when these transactions were processed? In Offline Mode transactions aren't processed until regain your internet connection so you won't know if a card is declined until you reconnnect. If you don't want to use Offline Mode you can disable the feature from the app. Tap Settings > Offline Mode > use the toggle to turn the feature off.

If you're not using Offline Mode and a card is declined you should see the error message that the payment failed in the app right away, not later in the day. I recommend making sure you're running the latest version of the app and that the software on your device is up to date. You should also make sure you have a strong internet connection at the location you're taking payments and turn off Offline Mode as I mentioned above if you don't want to use it.

You could contact our CS team too as they can check your transaction history and help understand what happened with the payments that were declined unexpectedly. 

I'm really sorry again for this experience. If you have any other general questions please let me know.

We have used offline mode numerous times in the past and have only lost  a few times. The last few days we lost several sales, of what seems to be approximately $185.

So now I want to verify, while using offline mode- not only are we supposed to input all the customers info into the app, but also write it down, just in case it gets declined? 

Or is the information that we collected in the app (signature,email or text/phone) saved for 72 hours, so that we might be able to contact the customer to collect?

So in offline mode, the system does not save anything? I thought somewhere in other comments, that it would be saved for 72 hours? I was able to retrieve, info such as the last 4 digits, not sure why I cannot see the rest that was collected.

Then in regular online mode, when we collect a signature and an email or phone(text) for the receipt, none of that is saved? 

@WeigtInc The transactions themselves do save until you're able to upload for 72 hours but there's never personal information such as phone number/name/etc stored in our system.

So those things would be what you'd want to take down in case of a decline to contact the customer again. 

EDIT: [Personal information redacted]

Ashley, today I received 2 separate emails stating cards not processed while offline w/last 4 card numbers. This has never happened before, don't even know how to tell if offline.

What can I do now?

Once a card is declined in Offline Mode, unless you personally collected contact information, there is no way to rerun the card again or contact the buyer.

On the mobile app, when your internet connection drops and you enter Offline Mode, the entire top of the app is bright red with the word "Offline" across the top. Normally this section is black and will say "Reader Connected" if you have a Contactless Reader connected to the device.

If you want to prevent Square from running cards in Offline Mode, go to More->Settings->CheckOut and switch "Offline mode" from On to Off. With this option set to off, you never have to worry about Square running cards offline. If your connection goes away, Square will not allow you to run a card.

Thanks for helping us out by providing this great answer @kalessaradan!

@Mays2014 we've gone ahead and removed the personal information you entered in your post. It's important to recognise that although we're here to support you, the Seller Community is still a public platform and personal information should never be exchanged here.

In the event you need a member of our team to review account-specific information with you, please contact our Support Team as your first port of call. 

In addition to the steps provided above, you can visit our online guide to Process Card Payments with Offline Mode to enable or disable this feature. 

Thank you for sharing this tip, @kalessaradan!