After thoroughly researching the most effective way to manage our inventory we decided on Square for Retail. We chatted online and spoke with customer service on exactly what steps we should take to be able to skew all inventory and have that transfer to our online store when we were ready. We were advised to use options to create different varients of items, and were told all of the varients would sync and be available online. That is not true , and wasnt discovered until after we had spent over a month meticulously adding our inventory. If there are more then 2 options added to a varient you are pretty much screwed with your online store. Because they use a drop down menu for all options of an item, you must pick an option in each option field. For instance, we have a disc gold shop and one mold of a disc often comes in different plastics, weights, colors and stamps. Online, if you pick one option it will give you the other options the first is available in. But it locks, so to speak, so you can not switch the first option to another option choice if the second option choice does not come with the first option choices other two options . so basically it looks like we only have the first options in inventory.
After three phone calls and over 3 hours on the phone with support, I was pretty much in tears and sick to my stomach. The first solution offered was that when making varients, i had to check all varients of every option for an item and zero the varients we did not have . And to do that, I had to basically go back over everything we had worked on for a month and redo. Even the support team I had spoke with said that would be incredibly time consuming and labor intensive, not to mention it would add inventory options we would never have which would be a mess when it comes to re-ordering. The second option was to put a disclaimer banner on website or every item page stating if the customer gets stuck they should refresh the page and pick a different first option. Not only is that not optimal for the shopper, it looks terrible in my eyes and makes the purchasing process more complicated then it needs to be.
I was told the engineers were working on this and I really hope they come up with a solution on the back end. I will give it some time but I cant use the two solutions given for the long run.
In the mean time, please make your staff aware of this issue . I was told multiple times originally by support that this would all sync into our online store and everything would be available online if we entered our inventory this way. If i had been informed of this from the get go i never would have went this route. I am extremely dissapointed.
Lastly, even though two of the people I spoke to could not come up with a good solution i was so impressed by how hard they tried to find one and how much time they spent trying different things to fix this. I can not commend Marco and Tyler enough. they went above and beyond trying to help. I spoke with someone in between them and they were terrible they were not good .
