How to allow future orders on square website beyond today’s inventory?

[lulietbakery]

Hi everyone,

I run a local brick-and-mortar bakery where we sell cupcakes. We bake fresh every day, and most days we sell out by closing time. Our cupcakes are listed on our Square Online store with a 45-minute lead time for same-day pickup.

Here’s the challenge:

• For same-day pickup, I want orders to be limited by current inventory (e.g., if I only have 4 chocolate cupcakes left, customers can only buy 4).

• For future date orders (like 2+ days out), I want customers to be able to order any quantity—even if today’s stock is low—since I can bake to fulfill those future orders.

Right now, the system blocks the order if today’s inventory is below the requested amount, even if the pickup date is in the future. This means I’m losing sales when someone wants 24 cupcakes next Friday but today’s inventory is only 4.

Question:
Is there a way to set up Square so that same-day pickup respects real-time inventory, but future orders aren’t restricted by today’s stock?

Thanks in advance for any advice, workarounds, or feature recommendations!

[HC_Charlie · Accepted solution]

Hello @lulietbakery thanks for your post. I'm not sure if this is the most efficient solution, but my thought is to use your current inventory items as you do now...which is to set your item quantities for what you have on-hand to sell that day. That way you won't over sell.

But for future orders, I'd create separate inventory items that are set to "sell when out of stock" so it won't affect your current day inventory. In doing this you'd have to name the new items something like "advance order-vanilla cupcakes" and you'd have to be super clear on your ordering pages. Not sure if this would work best to create a separate CATERING page that you could list these advance order items, or just list them with regular items and have your customers pick their delivery date at checkout.

I know this has potential to get super messy...maybe another Community Seller has a different solution for advanced food order items. I hope you'll be able to find a workable solution.

[Sammie_C]

Thank you for jumping in on this, @HC_Charlie! That is a great workaround.

@lulietbakery, I checked in with our Account Services team in case they have any other workarounds and unfortunately they do not. They said that @HC_Charlies's workaround would be the best option at this time.

In the meantime though, they did suggest adding this idea as a Feature Request on our Ideate platform, if you would be interested. It is a great place to post new ideas and improvements to Square products and services in a public forum.

Please let me know if you end up having any other questions or concerns!

[VanKalkerFarms]

HC has the best idea that I currently know of for future sales.  We use a similar concept for holiday preorders at our bakeries.  We use the date in the item description to identify what date the preorder is for.  Not ideal, but it has worked for many years.  We do not do live ordering on current inventory.

[VanKalkerFarms]

https://www.risenrollpreorder.com/

I just thought of it, though this isn't helpful currently as we do not have any preorders up right now.