How to stop a sale of an item on the POS if the inventory is zero?

[ToughRod]

We have been having an issue for a while this Square POS.  We add the inventory count to an item.  If that item sells out, the POS still allows sales of that item.  This has become an issue several times lately. Our inventory is in the cooler and if we have 2+ employees running and taking orders on a busy day (plus online sales), we over sell items and have to refund the sale or make other accommodations which take time and also anger the customer.  There needs to be a fix for this. Is there a work around other than making all the sales online (including employee taking the customer credit card and going to our square site and ordering it that way).

[mattd · Accepted solution]

Hi @ToughRod,

At the current time, this is a feature request to have a pop-up notification as discussed in this thread. The sale of out of stock options is by design, in case inventory is not kept up properly. You can, however, have an email sent to you when an item is out of stock by going to "your Item Library, select an item to edit, and click 'none' next to Low Stock Alert to edit the stock level you would like for it to alert you." Once you receive that notification you can disable it from your Square Dashboard.

[AnnWFoxPoint]

How do I disable it?

[JustinC]

You looking to disable the low stock alert? @AnnWFoxPoint

[AnnWFoxPoint]

I’m selling original art POS. I have an inventory of 1 for each item except photography. When I sell a painting I would like it to no longer be available to sell in SquareUp.  I understand that SquareUp won’t currently do this. I think I’m going to try creating a false location called “Sold” and transfer items which have sold to it.  

[AshleyK]

@AnnWFoxPoint you can always change the title of your item adding " - SOLD" to the end of the name. That's a lot less work than creating a new location and transferring them. 🙂

However; if you're talking about selling physical items in Point of Sale, you technically should not be able to over sell it unless you miss count your inventory to begin with. Once the item hits 0 you should have no other physical items to sell, if that makes sense. If you're thinking about this for the online store - once the inventory hits 0 that item will display as "Sold Out." 🙂

[AnnWFoxPoint]

Thanks, that's could help.  But what I'm really trying to do is clear out sold items from the list of items that I need to sort through to find the one I want to sell right now.  This app is very well designed - but not, I think, for sales of art where I want to identify each individual unit individually.

[bhartsy]

"The sale of out of stock options is by design, in case inventory is not kept up properly."   You must be kidding!!  That is utter nonsense.  This is nothing more than sloppy programming by your developers.  There is no logical reason to allow a 0 inventory item to be sold on the Square POS.  The fact that you said that this is "by design" makes me question the integrity of this support platform & the support monitors.   If you truly believe this functionality is desireable, take a moment and actually read the comments by many businesses who are puzzled by this flawed inventory management tool and the impact that it has on their business and operations.  It's quite clear that the system should NOT allow the sale of an item with 0 inventory.   Please fix this.  It's hindering many businesses who have single-item inventories.  

[srm463]

Is this STILL  the final answer in 2022?? I need my staff to stop selling items that we don't actually have.

[fredandfred]

The problem with the email notification is that it's done nightly not right away. At least that's what I've experienced. 

[DishPlz]

I'm using a Weebly site for my online store.

I have an item that was in stock at two locations, but had a stock of 0 at a third location. The customer was able to select the third location during checkout, with no notification that the item might not be in stock. The customer successfully placed an order for this out-of-stock item. There was no notification to me as a seller that I did not have stock to fulfill this order. I was able to move the order through all of the status stages without any issues. The stock for that item at the selected location did not increment to -1.

I would expect that a stock of 0 at a given location would prevent a customer from selecting that location during checkout, but this did not seem to be the case. Is this a bug? Am I misunderstanding how the stock management feature works?

[isabelle]

Hey @DishPlz-

Thanks for posting in the Seller Community.

There isn't a way to prevent the sale of an item with zero stock. Take a look at @mattd's best answer in this thread for more information. Thank you for surfacing this. 

[DishPlz]

Thanks for your reply Isabelle. It would be great to be able to set limits on how much product I can sell, either through inventory management or some other means. I share the same problems as OP, customers are confused/annoyed and additional work has to be done to clean up afterwards.

[HFS]

I would love to see a seller option where we can toggle on/off the ability to oversell what we have in inventory. In our case, we have a very popular item that is handmade so we get it in small batches, it promptly sells out in a matter of minutes, and thus a low-stock alert wouldn't be useful to us in knowing when to remove that item from the store. 

[NCH]

we have the same issue. Customers are able to order an item to be shipped even though our inventory is at zero. The whole reason we chose Square for Retail was because of the inventory management and sync. What point is there to sync it if a customer can still place an order for an item that is out of stock??  With slow shipping from our vendors due to COVID, our stock does not replenish quickly.  We rely on our inventory to manage itself as it is supposed to since it syncs. Please fix this bug. We should not have to manually remove an item until stock is replenished. Also, there is no shortcut to just hide a variation of an item without making the item and ALL variations hidden.  

[Chelsea3]

 Please Square. Fix this. It makes things really unorganized and have to overly communicated with employees when we are low on stock on certain items. Customers get upset when we think we have the item but don't. It really helps control inventory rather than always overselling. 

[PrepareToday247]

I will chime in with my request as well.  We have a rotating stock of what we sell at our weekly produce stand.  Each week there are different things, but all items are repeated multiple times during the season.  I need the item list to include all of our products, but want the checkout screen to only show those we have in stock that day. 

One of the benefits I thought we'd have is inventory management and the ability to speed up checkout.  If we have to wade through all 100 products in our catalog when we only have 20 offered on any particular day, this will actually slow us down.

[CBeadle]

So if I have an item with two variations and one is still in stock and the other is at 0 in stock the one at 0 can still be purchased on my website? I tested it earlier and in fact the item can be purchased in as many as they want it seems. I'm actually freaking out. As my website is live and I have many items that I've spent hours on creating with several items and many of those are one of a kind with stock levels at 1. So does this mean potentially two different customers could purchase it even though in reality there is only 1? 

[mksavage]

We're having an issue with this as well. We have a certain number of donuts available at the beginning of each day, but people can purchase them both online and in person. So, as people are placing orders online, we are also selling donuts in person and we often end up overselling, because the in-person POS system allows to sell items past a zero inventory level. Please fix this! I agree with @HFS that a toggle option would be super helpful for choosing which items can be "oversold". It's an incredibly poor experience for our customer when we have to call them and tell them that we don't have enough donuts for the online order they place din advance because we oversold in person. 

[GContinuum]

we need this feature or at-least a simple pop up warning message that could warn POS end user to alert them that the item or option is not available to be sold as the stock amount is zero.

Example we like see

• Customer walks in ask for Item A option 5
• Employee bring it up in Square POS and a warning message pops up "Warning selected Item or Option Stock is Zero!! Would you like to proceed? YES/NO"
• Employee tells customer "the system says we are out of stock but let me double check"
• If item is found proceed with sale & adjust inventory,  If not apologize to customer and help with pre-order or other options
• small business look professional

What we have now in Square POS

• Customer walks in ask for Item A option 5
• Employee bring it up in Square POS and a warning message pops up "Warning selected Item or Option Stock is Zero!! Would you like to proceed? YES/NO"
• Employee charges customer for Item A Option 5
• Employee then finds out that Item A Option 5 is out of stock
• Customer either has a meltdown or has a few choice words with employee
• Time is loss processing a refund to an angry customer,  while other customers wait or leave which would cause loss of revenue and possibility lead to bad reviews online
• Small business then looks unprofessional

It's not a big ask we had 4 systems running in our store and with some hefty investment into Square Registers & Terminals we want to switch everything to Square for easier management. Sure our little investment of 6 planed registers & 4 terminals may seem like nothing to a $9 billion dollar company like Square, But to use small guys that's alot of money.  We had a system for e-commerce, two POS's and a system for conventions.  We scrapped 2 or the 4 in favor of square systems now we would like finish and have one system.  But even our free DOS POS has this inventory feature when stock is zero...  DOS!  Also our opensource LInux POS system has this feature, two free systems that make no money have features that a $9 billion dollar company doesn't' have in its POS.  I mean call me crazy but it might be nice to add this feature even its only a warning message at time of selection for sale.  From what I understand and reading on square community is only the Square e-commerce platform prevents sale at zero item stock and only iOS apple tablets show "out of stock" when zero is the stock amount.  But the Square Terminal, Square Register and Square POS on Android Tablets does not do any of this right now.

Now we plan on using the square system to cover everything we had so we don't have to bounce from system to system and have multiple inventories.  Just like square to understand not all small businesses are food truck or small restaurants. There's a few different small vendors out there and for those businesses we need options like this to help us.

[eHotPot]

Another person here with this same issue. Please come up with a reasonable solution.