Square Stand Inventory Management When Sold Out

[LarsonJ]

I want to use square stand to sell lunch tickets in a trade show type environment at 4 different stations around the venue. I have 8 lunch options, and I would like to be able to stock all stations with more than enough physical tickets, and just have the inventory option display as sold out when the actual number of available lunches are sold out, and not allow any more sales to be processed. This way I don't have to worry about printing the exact number of tickets and some stations having extra tickets when others are sell out even if there is "stock" left. Essentially I want the option to have inventory work like it does for an online store at the physical register. Is this a possibility?

Thanks, Josh

[JM7]

I am referring to,

when I am checking out customers and scanning barcodes at times some barcodes are not on the system so a notification pops up on the screen but it does not make a sound. So I would be halfway through checking out the customer and then notice that the other items I scanned did not pop up due to the notification

so can you add a sound to notifications of a missing barcode on checkout

[JM7]

Not a sold out function,

what I’m saying is 

let’s say I have a new item in the store and I forget to enter it on the Pos,

so at checkout I go to scan the item and on the screen it pops up that the item is not in the library.

so what I am asking for is for that pop up to make a sound, because right now all it does is show up on the screen 

[rhoagland]

It's really frustrating that there's been zero progress with what seems like a simple feature. We've had multiple instances of customers purchasing online when there's zero stock available--or buying two when we only have one available. I understand allowing sales of inventory marked as out of stock in the app itself, but allowing it online isn't acceptable. It upsets our customers, frustrates our staff, and makes for an overall poor experience that could easily be avoided. 

[robbymartian]

If they open-sourced their API, I would create a PR for this change. Literally the single issue preventing me from launching my 100%-square-powered online store. Argh.

[mrabe1234]

Buuuuump! Just kinda wanting this feature to happen. In an ideal world it would look like this: I would have a toggle inside the PERMISSIONS section where I could tick a box that would allow that person to "oversell" items that are out of stock. I would ALSO like a box to tick to force the employee to use a manager override password in order to "oversell" an item. So three options in total: not allowed to "oversell", allowed to "oversell" with approval, and just plainly allowed to "oversell".

Can we please have this?? It would be aaaamaaaaazing!

❤️

[sdavid14]

I vote for this... in today's world of online ordering / curbside pickup, at the same time people ordering in-person - we are running into oversold situations creating a poor customer experience.  Our cashiers don't have time to do an inventory lookup before selling an item in-person!!  We really just need a 'warning' or something at checkout letting you know that the item is out of stock, and giving the option to override or not.

[eclecticsgaller]

We are not new to Square, but new to using it daily in the store, with Register. We are a consignment handmade art gallery where nearly all items are unique one-offs. We do NOT ever order repeats of the same stock.

The inventory tracking feature is great however if an item has sold, it can be resold in Square, even though we don't have it.  This has prevented us from truly using the other inventory item features and we understand that many users want to be able to reorder and have the item remain in inventory.  HOWEVER, we would like to see a FEATURE REQUEST FULFILLED where an out of stock item is prevented from being sold again. It is so in the online store, why can't it also work in the Square inventory. Maybe have a setting to turn this On or Off depending on business need?

I have see other users ask for this for a couple years, but it still hasn't happened. An out of stock alert would also be in order.....lots of us would like that as well!

 I would like to thank you for responding, not just listening.

[JustinC]

Thanks for adding to this feature request. I understand the importance of disallowing items from being sold even when they're out of stock, but unfortunately there isn't a shareable timeline for its availability. 

Merging you to a thread where we're tracking this request so we can easily find you when an update is announced. 

@eclecticsgaller

[bearlyclothedco]

I exclusively use the Online Store for my sales, and I'm a small business with many one-of-a-kind options. It's mind blowing to me that there are oversells every time I open the store to accept orders. Due to the lag in update on the item detail end, I can't even mark them as unavailable fast enough! For someone who does business like this on a monthly basis and always sells out items quickly, I'm starting to wonder if this is the right platform for me because it's incredibly stressful and annoying to refund (and disappoint) my customers constantly. Is there any update on this feature yet? I so loved Square up until this point, but this is a lot! 

[CTACTC]

Another vote for this "feature." Square is not a viable option for us going forward if this is not added in the near future. We sell one-of-a-kind, high-end paintings, online and in-person. We can not risk selling the same piece to two different buyers.

[Lbcreamery]

Update for us - We changed to Square for Retail which allows us to see inventory numbers on the register screen. It still does not prevent selling something that is out of stock - but now with a few clunky procedural changes at the register at least my team can know what the stock level is on an item.

So we had to pay a bit more and alter our procedures at the register in order to accomplish something that should be a no brainer for any POS system.

[pbprintz]

I just spent over 16 hours setting up an online store, only to find out it allows people to still

buy things that have gone out of stock. WHAT A WASTE OF MY TIME!!! This is the worst thing I’ve encountered in a web interface. 

[Lbcreamery]

pbprintz

If you turn on inventory tracking on the item (have to do it on each item) - and enter the amounts in stock. This will help with the online store sales.

turn on tracking

Then in the weebly online store - under settings/General

enable these

enable the indicators. This prevents people online buying more than we have in stock - but we can still oversell at the register because there is no protection there.

[pbprintz]

It's changing my stock to 0 when something is sold, but leaving it on the website available for purchase. I was on the phone with them for hours today and they don't even know why. 

[robbymartian]

You’re not alone, the same thing is happening for many of us as well. Thanks for posting though, helpful to know that their customer service is confused as much as we are.

[rhoagland]

The first post in this thread is from 2016...Has there been any progress on a solution or work around?

[pbprintz]

I figured out my problem on my own. 

The website is only allowing a shipping profile from my old business, The Sweetest Soaps (TSS), but a pickup profile from my new business, PB Printz. So even though I have only 1 of each item, there was 1 in TSS for shipping and 1 in PB for pickup so they weren't showing as "sold out" when sold. 

I figured it out this morning when I took all of the stock out of "All Locations" and then nothing was available for shipping anymore. I had to move it all back over to TSS and re-name TSS to PBPrintz and then update the inventory tracking there and take out all the inventory from PB Printz. PB Printz doesn't have a "ship from" location option at all.

Total cluster-eff. Why I am being forced to use TSS as the primary and only shipping location is blowing my mind. It's fine now. Luckily, I am not a dummy.... but anyone stupid never would have figured that out, and apparently the help people couldn't either. 

[saumaya]

Thank you for the feedback! I am a PM on the Square Point of Sale application and wanted to share an update. We are in the process of redesigning our cart building experience including surfacing 'sold out' information directly in the cart. We hope to launch this feature in the next couple of months or so. We will update this thread when it is ready for beta testing. 

[robbymartian]

@saumaya thank you so much for the update! I've long awaited the day where the API(s) prevents the sale of sold out/out of stock items (automatically or by opting in) so I can launch my store with confidence. If that's not something your update(s) include, please forward this thread along to the appropriate colleague--it would be a tremendous win for myself and everyone here and greatly appreciated! 

[saumaya]

Thank you for mentioning this request - CCing my colleague @elaine_p  who is the PM for Inventory. 

[elaine_p]

We are planning to add an attribute to our APIs to indicate an item is sold out that can be used whether you track inventory or do not. @robbymartian - we do have stock count in our existing inventory APIs if you wanted to use stock count = 0 to trigger display of a Sold Out tag in your store. This is how our eCommerce product is using it.