How to prevent customers from adding more than one of limited stock items in Square Online.

[tessa]

The title of this thread has been edited from the original: a change that affects sellers offering one of a kind items.

Hello everyone, just wanted to let square users know that a change was made recently that affects you if you sell one of a kind items, ie those you only have one in stock available for purchase. 

You can set quantity to one but it won't matter. Your ustomers will be able to add more than one anyway and won't know they're not going to be able to purchase more than one until they reach check out. The platform let's them know at that time they're attempting to purchase more than is in stock and they need to adjust their cart. This doesn't always work and they may be forced to delete the items and start over. 

Customers will shop elsewhere, unfortunately, after being disappointed or misled like this. 

This is a basic feature and they've removed it for these types of businesses.

They do not plan to change it back either. You have to put in a feature request (we all know how that goes.)

There were two other threads on this you can read and see the "workaround" (one I started,) but in a nutshell, you'll either need to utilize variants or put a note in your item's descriptions telling your customers there is only one available. 

I personally will be going somewhere else. Here is their response to me from the other thread. 

"I checked in with our Account Services team on this and they said that this would be considered a Feature Request at this time, as we have the option to limit the quantity per order at checkout.

I am sorry to hear that this change has affected your businesses negatively, and please feel free to send over any other feedback you may have and I would be happy to send it over to our corresponding feedback teams in the meantime."

Yeah, I have some feedback for you alright. In the end I'm grateful I've only used the free plan testing it to get a terminal later for my official shop.

Any suggestions on something else to try are welcome. 

👇 First thread containing the workaround you'll need to do. 

https://community.squareup.com/t5/Online-Store/Customers-can-add-unlimited-quantities-of-a-limited-s...

[Katie_SQ]

Thanks for your post, @tessa! 

I've signed in to my Square Dashboard and headed to Items & Services > Item Library > Edit Item.

For my item "Iced Coffee":

- I've set the Inventory to 1.
- I've set the Quantity limit to 1. This setting limits the number of times customers can add this item to their cart in a single order.





With this configuration, it's not possible to add more than one Iced Coffee item to my cart. If I try and press the plus button to add more, it doesn't work. A "Max 1 item per order" message is visible below the quantity picker.
This is because I set the quantity limit to 1.

Here's how it looks on my published site:

Are you able to confirm whether this setting would solve the issue you've described in your posts? While it does require you to adjust this setting for each item individually, the quantity limit workaround seems to address the issue you've raised.


Let me know if this works for you! 

[hilary-rose]

This is disappointing for those of us trying to sell one-of-a-kind, handmade items. The workaround mentioned by katie_sq is only available with upgraded plans, so not possible for those of us just getting started without the capital to upgrade currently. I will have to keep looking for somewhere more artist-friendly to host my online store.

[Shadance89]

I did the 30 free trial for the $49 plan and there isn't a way to bulk edit anything so you have to go into each item individually. I have over 300 items on my site. I have no time to do this... Square is not user friendly and to be honest, with all the things they have changed over the past years, it is for the worst and not better. Now I am wondering if let's say I set the item limit like the workaround that is mentioned.. what if I have 3 items available of one item but a customer adds two to their cart. Would the next customer wanting to buy that remaining 1 item of that kind get notified on the item page like it used it (the plus sign would be greyed out and they wouldn't be able to add more than one) or will it show up as 3 items still but then when they go to checkout it says only 1 remaining? This is a mess.