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

[Joe]

Hi there, @CTACTC - thanks for bumping this request up and adding your voice in support here. We've noted it and passed your feedback along to our Product Teams. We will continue to update this thread with relevant updates as we have them.

Thanks for your patience! 

[Whatafood]

For how long? Do you see that this trend is more than 3 years long? It’s not rocket science... It is a very standard and simple feature.

And I believe it is the most requested on this forum. I'm trying new solutions soon I won't use square anymore. Square is a good start but I don't want to work with a company that do not hear your users.

[Joe]

@Whatafood - We field thousands of feature requests each week here on the Seller Community, and bringing these features to fruition often takes an ample amount of time and effort from our engineers. We want to ensure that our releases are not just surface level products, but the best all-around resources to help you grow your business.

These requests also span an array of different aspects of our products; some are more major, while some are periphery features. Our Product Teams do have a road-map for future additions to our offering, but the nature of our work includes trial, error, and set-backs. So sharing a timeline would be far from accurate and more than likely cause more confusion and angst. 

We understand that it might be difficult waiting for something to be built out, but our engineers are working on various different requests brought up by our sellers, and working with Apple, Google, and our other partners in order to approve these changes and be able to push them out in future updates.

[Lbcreamery]

Update for us - We changed to Square for Retail which allows us to see inventory numbers on the register screen. It still does not prevent selling something that is out of stock - but now with a few clunky procedural changes at the register at least my team can know what the stock level is on an item.

So we had to pay a bit more and alter our procedures at the register in order to accomplish something that should be a no brainer for any POS system.

[davefackler]

I'm sorry @Joe , but that answer is a load of crap.  I come from a software development background and have been involved in various large scale development efforts over the last 30 years.  While I understand your sentiment, not working to implement what is likely the #1 request as a major priority is just bad customer engagement and bad software engineering practice.  Try again or show us a list of all major and minor requests that are being worked on so that we can let you know where this item ranks (because obviously you are not taking customer feedback into account when ranking them and determining what to work on).

[Whatafood]

Let’s start to give the feedback in the Apple Store. Maybe with their stars going down they start to listen to their users.

[kellygreenmen]

Amen, @davefackler! I first ran into this problem 3 years ago this month while helping with a small community festival which is when I found this thread and saw that this very basic feature was missing. Bear in mind, this thread was already a year old at that point. 

The following year I thought surely this has been fixed, only to log in and see that nope, it wasn't. I then posted a couple of comments on this thread to which a couple of community managers suggested silly workarounds or buying additional products / services that wouldn't actually correct the problem. 

That was in August of 2018 - almost exactly two years ago. 

They are not fixing this problem. They don't want to. For whatever reason, the product team has decided that this simple feature isn't worth implementing. 

I'm sorry I gave Square my money, I wish I could get it back, and will never give them another penny, nor will I EVER recommend anyone else ever set up a POS with Square again. 

[AshleyK]

@davefackler

I understand that this is extremely frustrating for you to not get the feature request you want. While me and my team, Joe included, work hard to pass seller feedback along, unfortunately we do not have magic wands, no matter how much frustration you choose to put into your posts. 

I hate stepping in mid-conversation like this and I know you are here because you genuinely are looking for help, but please be mindful and respectful here on the community in line with our Community Etiquette Guidelines. Any violation of these guidelines will result in a warning and removal of those posts. 

Thank you for your time. 

[Lbcreamery]

There was nothing in the OP that warranted a warning of censorship.

From what we understand moderators here have the power to send our requests up to development. I would advise Square to make development spend some time on these boards so they can see what you have to field.

We are expressing frustration because the product we pay handsomely for is failing us at a crucial juncture that can be easily controlled. Everyday we are in front of customers who we have to let down because of overselling a product. We receive one-star Yelp reviews for inventory situations that should never be happening. For us we had to hack another version of Square software and pay more per month for Square for Retail - in order to solve the issue at the register. But that lacks features we used on Square Register (like order searching) that we need. So now, we have two square tablets in each shop running each software. We had to buy more iPads, pay more money for service, take on new and clumsy procedures to answer a relatively simple issue.

[kellygreenmen]

Completely agreed. Well said, @Lbcreamery