Asking for reviews when customers pay before they receive anything
If your customers pay in advance, an instant review request asks them to review something they have not received yet. The fix is a delay: keep the payment as the trigger, but wait until after they have had the thing before the request goes out.
This affects more businesses than you would expect — celebration cake orders, deposits on work booked weeks ahead, pre-paid classes and courses, anything invoiced up front.
How to set it up
When you configure your integration you choose two things: which campaign customers should receive, and what delay should sit between the trigger and the campaign.
So instead of "order paid → ask now", you get "order paid → wait 7 days → ask". The customer collects the cake on Saturday and hears from you afterwards, when they actually have an opinion worth giving.
Pick the delay from the gap between paying and receiving, and add a little. If cakes are usually collected a week out, seven days works. If it varies, err later — a request that arrives slightly late still gets a review, while one that arrives too early either gets ignored or produces a review of the ordering process rather than the cake.
For Square specifically, the step-by-step is in Integrate Square with Cloutly. The delay is set on the integration, so check for it when you connect.
When only part of your business works this way
This is the common case: a café where people pay and eat straight away, plus cake orders paid weeks ahead. Same owner, two very different timings.
The answer is two locations in Cloutly, one for each. If they are already separate in Square, mirror that. Each location gets its own integration, its own campaign and its own delay — immediate for the café, delayed for the cakes.
You also get the side benefit of clean reporting: you can see which side of the business is actually generating reviews, rather than one blended number.
See Adding and managing new locations.
Your regulars are safe either way
Worth knowing if you have a café: customers who come in every week will not be asked every time. Cloutly tracks each contact and will not put someone through the campaign twice — see Will my regular customers be asked every time?