eliminated sales velocity??

Why, in the name of God's great green earth, would you eliminate a KEY reporting metric from one of your inventory reports WITHOUT TELLING YOUR CUSTOMERS OR PROVIDING ANY ALTERNATIVE. The new inventory sell-thru report is absolutely useless. It was barely useful before, but at least included sales velocity data, so we could see at a quick glance roughly how much of a product/item we sold per day/week/month, and estimated when we'd run out. Now? Gone. And AI support's only suggestion is that I create a custom report, export the data, and perform calculations myself. Are you kidding me right now? What on EARTH could you possibly be thinking? This is insult to the injury of the rollout from a couple months ago that completely changed the way items were added/created and which resulted in MORE work for the end user. Terrible. Terrible terrible terrible.

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I've never really used reporting (perhaps I should) but I tagged an Admin to take a look at this

Dina
Co-Owner Amityville Apothecary
www.shopamityvilleapothecary.com
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thank you!

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Admin

Thank you for flagging this to us @DinaLRosenberg!

 

@yesplasticfree I'm going to share this with our Reporting team to clarify with them. Once I have an update, I'll be sure to follow up on this thread. 

Tra | she/her
Community Program Manager, Square
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great thanks!

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Admin

Thanks again for sharing this feedback @yesplasticfree!

 

Our team confirmed that the data should still be there but they are under new heading. Just on what you mentioned:

Items sold per day/week/month: you should still be able to check for "units sold" and should have the ability to filter by the time period that works best for you, instead of being limited by the default. 

Sell out date: this is replaced with Days of Stock Remaining, which should have the same information (today + days of stock remaining = sell out date)

 

Completely understand this is a big change and the new groupings might not work for you. If possible, could you share a bit more on how you use the sales velocity metric in a way that is different from the units sold metric? If you have more specific feedback on how the information is organised in the report, I can share that with our team as well. 

Tra | she/her
Community Program Manager, Square
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Hi Tra. Thanks for looking into this. Unfortunately, this answer isn't quite what I was looking for — and I want to explain why, because I think the distinction matters.

 

Units sold is a count. Sales velocity is a rate. They're related, but they're not the same thing, and the difference is exactly what makes velocity useful. To get the figure I'm missing, I'd have to do what the AI support bot already suggested: pull the individual data elements from the new report and calculate velocity myself. That's not a solution — that's just moving the work onto the user.

 

For context on who we are and how we used the sales velocity metric: We're a low-waste bulk refillery (we sell home and personal care products in bulk, by the ounce). Being able to see at a glance how many ounces of hand soap we sold per day on average was genuinely useful — and even more useful when we could drill down by variation and see, for example, that over the last six months, the grapefruit scent sold nearly twice as fast as the clementine scent (18oz/day vs. 9oz/day). Or: if it seemed like one product was moving faster than usual — unscented dish soap, say — we could pull up the sell-through report and compare ounces per day over the last week vs. the last 90 days vs. the last six months, and determine whether that acceleration was an anomaly or a real trend. That's what informed whether we placed a reorder immediately or waited a couple of weeks.

Same logic applies to bar soap: how fast do we typically go through the sage fir scent? Did it move faster in the winter quarter than it does now? If so, maybe we hold off on reordering that scent until the fall.

That kind of decision used to take seconds. Now it requires manual calculation — if I can get the report to work at all. Which brings me to my second issue: the report itself is very difficult to use.

Here's a real example from a couple days ago. I tried to look up a bar soap brand we carry called "Just Soap":

  • I navigated to Reports > Inventory > Inventory Sell-Thru. The page took over 30 seconds to load. (Worth noting: slow load times have become a pattern across the entire dashboard since the last few updates — every page takes noticeably longer than it used to.)
  • When it finally loaded, I looked for a way to filter or search by item name. I couldn't readily find it, and instead saw only an unlabeled field with the prompt "ask about or update anything," which doesn't tell me much.
  • I typed "Just Soap" and waited another 30 seconds, and the report returned every item in my database with the word "soap" in the name.
  • I tried putting "Just Soap" in quotation marks, thinking maybe the syntax would help. Same result.
  • I tried again to dig deeper to find a better filter/search, which I did find, but the lag getting there made further troubleshooting impractical, so I gave up.
  • I came back to try again today, and the report wouldn't load at all. Instead I got this error: "Couldn't load this section. Something went wrong while loading this section. Details: 'sales_velocity' not found for path 'SellThrough.sales_velocity'." (Screenshot attached.)

I'll also mention: I've tried repeatedly to submit feedback through the in-dashboard link next to the beta notice. Pretty much every time I click "Leave Feedback," nothing happens — no confirmation, no error message, nothing. So there doesn't appear to be a functional path for users to actually report problems with this report, which makes threads like this one all the more important.inventory sellthru error - 6.1.26.jpg

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Hey @yesplasticfree, I really appreciate this detailed breakdown. Let me shared this with the folks I've been chatting to as well — and also let them know about the issue you're encountering with submitting feedback through the Dashboard link — so they can look into this more. 

 

Will definitely follow up as soon as I hear back! 

Tra | she/her
Community Program Manager, Square
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Hey Tra @tranguyen -- circling back bc I was able to get into the report yesterday (tho it is still loading agonizingly slowly) and I see a sales velocity metric in there. Hooray! Unfortunately, it no longer seems to account for the unit type that is being sold -- which is to say, it reports whole items as fractions (like, a fraction of a toothbrush, or a fraction of a tube of deodorant).

 

Previously, sales velocity would display by the unit by which it was sold -- so, 10 toothbrushes per week or 4 deodorant tubes per day, or 18.5oz of hand soap per day, for example -- which was infinitely more helpful than what is showing now.

 

Not sure how much more development is being done on that report, but having the correct unit for sales velocity is a crucial element. 

 

Thanks!

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