Fixing Low Stock Alerts and Out-of-Stock Item Visibility

[2ndCity]

Quantity and out of stock issues

Is anyone having issues with the website not showing the out of stock icon on the items. Also, we are having an issue with if we started out with a quantity of five and someone buys two, it is still allowing customers to add five to the cart and once they start to checkout, they get a message saying the order exceeds the quantity of three available.  I have the quantity tracking on and haven't changed anything from how I have normally done it. The square inventory page shows the correct amount. I'm not sure what to do. Any help would be appreciated. I asked this question back in August and after the initial response from Square and me answering their questions, I never heard back. 

Also, is anyone having problems with sold out items being marked unavailable, but they don't come off the website. I have to go into inventory, select all the sold out items and uncheck the checkmark that says it will be sold online in order for some of the items to not show up on the site anymore once they are out of stock. 

[Laurie_]

Hi @2ndCity! 👋

Thanks for reaching back out to us, and I’m really sorry you didn’t receive a follow-up response on your original thread! We’ve been playing a bit of catch-up following the recent Community glow-up, so a few threads have unfortunately slipped through the cracks. It looks like yours was on the list to receive a reply, but for convenience, I’ll respond here and link this post to your original thread in case other Sellers are following along.

Alright, let’s tackle these in the most practical order.

First, let’s double-check a few areas in your account to make sure the low stock indicator is correctly enabled for your Square Online items. Coincidentally, another Seller recently mentioned that our online guide for creating inventory alerts may be missing an important step, which I'm currently looking into. So, while that investigation is ongoing, in addition to enabling low stock alerts through your Item Library (as outlined in the guide linked above), I’d also like you to review your Square Online settings.

To do this, go to your Square Dashboard > Online > Online Store > Items > Item Preferences. If you have multiple sites, navigate instead to Online > Online Store > Shared Settings > Item Preferences.

Once there, make sure your item statuses are correctly enabled for your site.

While you’re on this page, let’s also address the issue you mentioned with out-of-stock items still appearing for sale online. Below Item Statuses, you’ll see Stock Settings. Select Edit, then toggle off the option to display out-of-stock items on your site. Don’t forget to select Save to apply those changes to your live site.

Lastly, regarding the popup message that appears when a customer exceeds the available quantity of an item, this is the expected behaviour. Customers shouldn’t be able to proceed through the full checkout process if they’ve added more items than are available. If you’re seeing that they can still check out despite the alert, that would be a separate issue we’d want to investigate further. But as it stands, customers will receive that message and will need to adjust their carts before continuing to payment.

I hope my response helps to clear up most of your questions! If you do have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach back out.

In the meantime, go ahead and follow the other thread I linked above for any updates or changes to the process for creating inventory alerts. I'll continue to post updates there as I received them. 👍

[2ndCity]

As far as the pop up messages for exceeding inventory, that is where my issue lies. I don't understand why it is not adjusting the inventory as items sell so a customer can't add more than what is available. In all the years we have been working with Square, this was never an issue until my first post back in August, so this is not something that has always happened. Typically, before my August post, if I had an item with a quantity of three and one was purchased, the inventory online changed to two and they could no longer add three to the cart. I am getting multiple complaints, especially from our repeat customers who are angry that they are having to adjust the quantity of multiple items in their carts or customers who want to order a specific number of items only to find out the quantity is not available once they add it to their cart.  This can be quite bothersome when they have to do this for multiple items. 

For the out-of-stock items, I have had it set on both to take the out of stock off right away and to keep them on. Typically, we prefer to keep them on for a full day even when out of stock so our customers can see what items made it to the website so far but have been purchased already as it makes it easier for them so they don't have to wait for a response back from us and they can have their answers right away. Again, something we have been doing for a while with no issues. Now however, when it's time to mark many of these items unavailable, they are still on the site, even days later. In order to get them off the website, I have to go to the item and uncheck the box for our website under the Where it's sold section. This also was never an issue before. If I marked an item as unavailable, it would, for the most part come off right away. On occasion it took about ten minutes, but it did come off.