Item marked sold-out avaiable for order. When? Why Not?

[mamac]

I'm re-opening this wound, I mean thread about allowing a customer to order an item that has been marked sold-out. I am a "crafter" (a term that is slightly dismissive) and I make a large catalog of items in a studio of two people. So my items sell-out. But I have an instagram following of dozens and dozens, and quite a few customers see me IRL as the kids say and they want to purchase on this site. But they can't if the item is sold out. Your fullfillment process thingy is clearly made for restaurant people.

This issue has been brought up for YEARS now. I'm betting that other platforms have figured this out. And seriously, I'm thinking of doing some side-glances to the more attractive of them. Cuz, Square people, I know you ain't gonna miss me, but your service to the retail community kinda sucks.

[ryanwanner]

Hello @mamac !

Yes, inventory control can be problematic at times, but it's easily manageable once we figure out the whys.

Your first mentioned that people were able to purchase items that were marked as sold out. The only reason that this is a possibility is that the customer placed the item in their cart before the item was marked as sold out on your side. Square Online's carts stay active on the customer side even after a close and restart of the browser as long as the cookies stay intact. I've seen this happen with multiple other online providers I use (including Amazon) so I'm pretty sure that's industry standard. Easier for the indecisive ones to come back to complete the purchase! To that end, however, I 100% agree that there needs to be code put in place that double-checks inventory numbers before allowing the sale to complete. That is lacking on this site and something I've brought up a few times.

As for the items not being available for sale even though the inventory counts say they should be, 99% of the time that's because of a fulfillment mismatch. Yes, the online store was revamped to favor the foodservice biz during the pandemic, but retail options are still very much available for your store. The biggest things to check:

-all items are being created with the correct fulfillment types

-those fulfillment types match what the site expects to see (if an item is marked for shipping but the site isn't configured for shipping it'll show as out of stock)

-your item type matches what's expected for the site (if your item type was accidentally set for Food & Beverage and your site is set to the Shop All template that can trigger the OOS error)

There are some other tricks that can be applied to your site to better manage the inventory, but since I'm in the foodservice biz I'm not the best to get you those answers. Let me tag a few retail Champions who may be able to give you more insight: @JTPets , @JUYBoutique20 , @BofBArtStudio , and others: any ideas?