Another vendor here with the same issue. Please rethink your reasoning for having this feature the way you do. As stated by @mattd, "The sale of out of stock options is by design, in case inventory is not kept up properly. " This should not be Square's responsibility to "oversee" and correct for. If a retailer messes up their inventory , that's on them. Square should provide features to prevent this, sure, but not force the feature, and only one option at that.
There was a recommendation above my post by @HFS that honestly, best fits this situation. Make the option a toggle. Square cannot meet the needs of every unique vendor, so don't force settings according to what Square thinks works, when in fact it doesn't. By making features toggles, sure that's more things for vendors to set, but it allows for the customization needed to handle all the variations.
Sticking to the issue at hand, when the response for why a feature is set the way it is set, is to (and I'm paraphrasing) catch you in case you can't keep track of your inventory." It's clear Square isn't adding features based on the needs of retailer's. As a retailer, regularly counting my inventory and making sure my counts are correct is MY responsibility. If my POS says I should have X of an item, it's my job to make sure I have X or figure out why I don't. If the POS thinks I have 0 available. There's none to sell and the POS shouldn't sell this item. If I do in fact have this item, as a retailer it is MY responsibility to go in and adjust the inventory count in the POS so that item can be sold. @GContinuum makes great point on this. There are countless other POS systems that already do this. Why does Square think it needs to do this differently. This isn't a function that needs to be reinvented or re-thought about. It's a core function and most retailers would expect the POS to not sell an item if the count is 0.
@NCH and @mksavage also reiterate why this feature in it's current setup, doesn't make sense. You've set the feature to solve a problem, from the wrong direction, and thus actually created a new set up problems while not actually fixing the original problem (see the rest of @mattd's message). "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." The issue is not being made aware that inventory is low. It is great that an alert is made available, but to the point, even this is a toggle that can be turned on/off. The issue is Square allowing an item to be sold via the POS beyond 0. Whether the retailer is aware of their low inventory or not is irrelevant.
We like using Square. Being able to sell at a POS and simultaneously in multiple differently markets/events with a synced inventory is great! and one of the main reason we switched over. However, there are several little features like this, that to a retailer don't make sense and cause unnecessary headaches. To my case specifically. On a given day, I could be selling in 4 different locations (storefront and 3 markets). I make my product in small batches and divide between the 4 locations. My employees are selling my product through the app on their phone. Mistakes happen and my employees often tap the wrong item to see without realizing it. We go over paying attention and being careful quite regularly. Despite this, though, they are selecting the wrong option and select options that ran out over the course of the day. Simply having a low inventory alert does me no good in these situation as I only had a few items on hand to begin with. Once the item is gone, it's gone. Until I make more. Just last week I had a item be sold beyond 0 to -5. I could not understand what happened as I recounted my inventory at the end of the week and this happened at the beginning. That frustration of trying to figure out why my counts were off and the time spent trying to figure it all out could have been mitigated entirely if Square simply wouldn't have allowed the item to be sold beyond 0 in the first place. Plus there's the added bonus that now my employees are forced to stop and pay attention to what they're doing when the item the chose isn't being added to the cart (You cannot expect all employees to read and pay attention to that little red message under the item that sales it's sold old, but yet they still can tap the item and sell it. Good effort, but you missed the point entirely.). And please, if you do in fact make this a toggle. It's needs to also have the option to allow employees to override it or not. Some retailers may have a business where it's okay for employees to override the toggle, others, like mine, do not. By default, only an manager with the right permission set could override the toggle, but the permission could be given to others. This is what most retailers would expect. "I need a manager override" is a saying for a reason.
