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

[EJ_]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this @PostCommons

What would be the ideal behavior for your business specifically?

Our main concern was to make sure you never missed a sale if during your busy work day you weren't able to update your stock count after a return or new inventory received within that day. 

Would it be a more valuable feature to prevent overselling? 

[Arise]

I would love this option!

We sell shirts/jackets/etc with a traveling band. Being on the go constantly doesn't make it easy to have good storage/display options where I can readily see inventory quickly, so having something pop up detailing that "hey, it looks like this is out of stock" would be helpful if we're searching and searching for a Large lightbulb t-shirt that doesn't exsist, in the stack/rolling tote we roll it around in.

I do like the option of "looks like you're out, but do you want to proceed?" should there be any small discrepancies, and we have the shirt in hand.

But having the update on the app itself would rock!

[katieand]

Hi @Arise - Super helpful that you shared your use case. I'll be sure to pass on this feedback to our team who manages all the features associated with inventory. And how cool that you work with a traveling band. Happy travels ✌️

[AEndelman]

I am glad I found this thread - for my company, the reason why we haven't yet moved all of our point of sale retail to Square POS (a few hundred thousand dollars each year) is because there is no way to prevent or even warn our employees that they're about to oversell.

We do pop-up retail at events and inventory management is a perpetual thorn for us, because we often pre-sell items that are in use for demonstrations later in the event to be fulfilled later in the day.  So we can't trust the physical stack of goods in front of us and we DEFINITELY can't easily restock; we have to ship items if we oversell (often at high expense; some of our events are international).

At a minimum, for the iPhone and iPad apps we need a popup or warning that alerts the user if they've added more items to the cart than exist in inventory.  Could be a setting to toggle if other users don't have the same needs that we do.

[katieand]

Super helpful of you to share exactly why you need inventory tracking and that pop up to warn about overselling @AEndelman! I'll be sharing this feedback with our product team, and if we get any updates, we'll share on this thread. 

[vcochran]

Offering a "Renew" button, with an option for entering quantity of new inventory would be fast for those who need this feature.

For those of us selling one of a kind or limited numbers of each item, from multiple points, the overselling feature is horrible.
What's worse: the Inventory/Warning, as it's set up now, implies that this feature functions like the majority of other POS solutions, which leaves you blindsided on your first outing, as you (and your customers) discover you've sold items you don't have/won't have and you suddenly have to start issuing refunds. There's also no quick way to come up with alternatives, while you're in the midst of sales. Yuk.

[rodlovescanada]

I own two drive-in movie theaters and one indoor movie theater.  We are located in three cities.  We sell many items ranging from theatre seats for a number of showtimes to food items (packaged candy and prepared food items containing multiple ingredients).  I need Square inventory to track every item and ingredient I sell.  My sales staff (cashiers) needs to be notified when the quantity of the inventory (or ingredients) reaches the alert level.  On-screen notification is REQUIRED -- not just an email to the purchasing manager.  The next important step in the process is to notify the cashier if the inventory is = 0 of an item (or any ingredient) and give the cashier the option to continue with the sale or not.

I cannot imagine any business that would not NEED this functionality.  My businesses cannot create inventory out of thin air on a busy Saturday or Sunday night.   But, we do need to know when inventory is running low or SOLD OUT so we can manage our customers expectations by suggesting other alternatives to our customers instead of taking their order and then having to tell them moments later that we don't have any more Peanut M&Ms in stock....

Many others have cited similar business scenarios.  How many Square customers need to ask for this functionality before it is implemented?  

[EJ_]

@rodlovescanada Inventory alerts on-screen would definitely help with this. Unfortunately I don't have any news around this feature, but I'll try to get some new information and share if possible. 

[photoneffect]

Another vote for being able to toggle on/off the ability to "hide out of stock items".  I get the use case for why you wouldn't want to miss a sale because of a miscount, but that's not my situation.  I sell one-off items and not being able to hide the out of stock items keeps me from going to Square.

[oldedixie]

I’m guessing there has been no progress in this particular area? I’m posting 2 years after the start of this discussion. I help run a food truck and having a reliable inventory management feature is vital when we are slammed with business. The cashier needs to know when we are low or out of stock on a particular item. As it stands now, sometimes they will have sold more items than what we have and by the time the person working the ticket station has had time to figure out we are sold out of something, it results in us having to stop operations to issue multiple refunds. As other users have said, this is a crucial feature that many businesses need. Especially ones with a fast paced environment such as ours. Multiple users have made a very viable suggestion in displaying a pop-up indicating it appears something is sold out or a pop up stating the last item has just been sold. This way, it would give our cashier the option to momentarily pause and ask the kitchen if that is indeed the case. From there, the cashier could remove the item from the interface so as not to sell anymore or they could update the inventory count if inventory was off. It would not need to be implemented to where sales of that item would be blocked going forward. The pop-up would merely be a warning that something may be sold out giving an individual the option to take the appropriate action. As inventory management stands now, it’s completely useless to us. Email notifications for low or out of stock items are not viable in a fast paced environment. There needs to be immediate action on the user interface. We love using Square for our food truck, but this is a feature that is surely lacking.