[The title of this thread has been edited from the original: Managing multiple pickup locations with one inventory pool]
Hi, I own a vegetable farm and have used Square POS for 5 years. In response to COVID-19, I recently set up an online store to allow customers to pre-order products for pickup at one of three locations (two farmers' markets and my farm). However, Square's inventory system requires me to manage inventory separately for each location. I only have one pool of inventory that I need all my customers to order from because I don't have time to shuffle it between locations as items sell out for the week.
As a workaround, I disabled all but one location and modified that location's address and pickup instructions to urge customers to enter their pickup location in "Note to Seller." This solution is far from ideal, however, since "Note to Seller" isn't a required or standardized field, and the emails customers receive don't show the specific pickup time frame and address for their location.
I realize it may not be possible to quickly change Square's inventory management to allow managing a single pool of inventory across multiple locations. A simpler solution would be to offer the option of a required drop-down "pickup location" menu within the online store, which would allow me to easily sort orders by pickup location and send the correct location's info to customers.
I have spoken to multiple other farms and farmers' market businesses who would like to stay with Square but are experiencing the same issue because they have multiple markets but one pool of inventory.
