Automatically changing items with 0 stock to "hidden"

[JKO]

I sell one-of-a-kind items. When I sell a piece, it changes the inventory to "0" and says it is "out-of-stock." However, it stays visible on my site, forcing me to change each item with 0 inventory to "hidden" manually. Has anyone figured out a way to work around this? 

Thanks!

[Gold]

HI, it can seem to be a nuisance having items in your store that are no longer available.  Out of Stock items can be very good for your store.  Out of Stock items already have their SEO in place displaying successfully in web searches.  Customers are brought into your store and can then search for similar items. By hiding your items, customers receive the 404 error page, which is not good for business. 

[JKO]

Hi Terri, 

It actually does not help. As I noted, I make one-of-a-kind items and displaying them implies that I could make the item again. I may not have the stones or other materials that would allow me to do that. I would like functionality that would hid the item (ie, change the status to hidden) when the stock level reaches zero.

[PartyManiaMD · Accepted solution]

Hi @JKO , you should easily be able to hide any out of stock items online.

If you go to your Square Online, go to the "Items" Section of the site, and select "Item Preferences", under Stock Settings there is a Toggle for "Display out of stock items on site".

I was running into the same issue except I'm out of stock of hundreds if not thousands of items at a time due to the way the party industry works.

[JKO]

Thank you! That really helps. Do you know how that intersects with the "hidden/visible/unavailable" tags? So if I have that set, an item can be marked visible and if the inventory is zero it still won't show, right?

[PartyManiaMD]

That is correct, anything set to visible that is out of stock will not show up on your site while out of stock. 

I have had no reports from anyone regarding 404 errors and we've had online sales for over a year, although I guess it's possible if your products are linked to in blogs to want to keep them up, at the end of the day I'd rather have a clean website than a bunch of out of stock products and so would customers.

[jane_gordon]

Hi, I am having a similar problem: I found the toggle in Item Preferences, and have turned it off but all out-of-stock items are still visible on the site. Any other suggestions?

[PartyManiaMD]

@jane_gordon You might have to reach out to Square Support so that they can check things on their end if you have it set to not show out of stock products and your quantities are turned on and set to 0.

It's best to have an example of which item is still showing on your website and that is out of stock so that they can quickly determine what's going on.

Sometimes there are syncing issues so if it's still an issue after changing the toggle and it's not resolved then definitely reach out to Square support.