Visible & Hidden are only online options

[DinaLRosenberg]

it seems that the unavailable option has been taken away from square online- leaving only visible and hidden.

The issue seems that everything that was previously marked unavailable has been made visible. I am looking at items I know I made unavailable and now they are all hidden.

This is incredibly frustrating- there are times when items "sell out" but show maybe 1 or 2 items in inventory. Instead of fixing the inventory amount we (especially if we're in the middle of a transaction on the selling floor as we are both online & retail) we mark the item unavailable. Now all those items (there are 100s) are marked live to the website.

WHY??!! Why would this be done without asking the actually users how we use the function and why not inform us this would be happening? 

I'm now looking at having to spend the next countless hours going back through 1000s of inventory items and resetting the website. This is so freaken frustrating!!!!

[dan-sq]

@TeamBSTS Very much understood! Release notes should be emailed as well, yes. They should include what is going to be released the following week.

[festivitea]

This isn't just a problem with items previously marked "unavailable", but items that were also "hidden" can be found using keyword searches on any search engine.  This could destroy businesses!  Anyone can find products (via a Google keyword search) that we are no longer selling, and if there is a positive number for the quantity, that item can be purchased.  I tested this to confirm.

[DinaLRosenberg]

Yikes. this has been such a heavy lift for us- non stop digging in our items to "clean" it up and check quantities.. of course not something I wanted to be forced to do- but here we are.

[festivitea]

@DinaLRosenberg check your inventory again.  I spent hours yesterday deleting old inventory items and deselecting "My Site" from others.  The items I deleted are back AND "My Site" is selected again for items I deselected. 

Also found an item with a title like 'ASMR Item Test'  (can't remember exactly) with a price of "$1,000" - which I deleted right away today.  Will you look for an item with a name and price like that in your inventory?  Is Square working on solving this problem and inserting test data into our inventories??  

This is maddening!!!

[dokidoki]

You guys, it's happening again!! They removed a feature without telling us all of a sudden and it broke all my links!! The toggle "Discoverable via direct link only" is completely gone. I use this feature to sell limited events to specific customer groups. They have all been removed from my website instead and I can no longer share them via a direct link. It's either no website at all or it's visible to everyone. Are you kidding me!? I thought we made progress on this! 

@dan-sq @katie 

[tranguyen]

Hey @dokidoki, just stepping in here for @dan-sq & @katie.

I can definitely see how this looked like a removed feature and I'm so sorry for the confusion. This is part of the new bundle roll out which will be available to all sellers by July 9. Here's our Community announcement with more details. You should have also received an email notification with more information on what's coming and in-dashboard notification linking to Square Release Notes. If you haven't seen anything coming through, please let me know so I can check with our team to ensure email communication as being sent correctly. 

About the update: the "Direct link only" is replaced with the "Hidden" status. With "Hidden", the expected behaviour will remain the same meaning that items won't appear in your site navigation or search, and customers will only find them if you share the direct link with them. Important to note that when an item is set to "Hidden", it is also excluded from Google/SEO indexing. 

The path to locate the item URL remains the same. You should be able to do this by following these steps:

1. Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Online.
2. Click Website > Edit site.
3. Click the Page dropdown menu and open your item page.
4. Select the gear icon in the editing panel to View page settings.
5. On the General tab, copy the page URL. The entire URL includes the text before, in, and after the text box. The text box portion is your customizable permalink.

As a recap, there are now three different states you can set your item when it comes to online & POS channels:

• Hidden = not searchable on your site, won't appear in navigation or indexed, but still purchasable via direct link 
• Visible = item marked as "Not Hidden" work complete as expected i.e. can be search or browse on your site, and are indexed by search engines
• Item is not assigned to any sale channel = if you have deselect all sale channel for an item (Online + POS), it will remove it from being visible or purchasable, whether that is on the site, via a direct link, or through the POS app. 

Something to note if you have deselect all sale channel for an item: that item still exists in the Item Library. However, if you have filters applied in your library, the item may not be immediately visible:

• If they're filtering by a specific channel or location, deselected items won't appear in that filtered view.
  If they clear all filters (or use the default "All items" view), the item will show up normally.

If you believe items have been removed from your library and no longer visible even when viewing the default "All items" view, I'm happy to look into this further. To do so, please share an example or two of specific items that is no longer visible at all.

[dan-sq]

@dokidoki @festivitea To add on to what @tranguyen said above, the changes being rolled out here were made after collecting feedback from this community post and a few other sources. The most notable change is re-homing and renaming the "hidden" setting back into the Channels editing pop-up in the item editing sheet. 

I want emphasize that this is a visual and experience change only. No data is being edited or was edited as a part of this rollout. If the Direct link only setting was off, the same setting (renamed back to Hidden) stayed off. Nothing about visibility or discoverability on your online store would have changed. Of course, if you're seeing anything incorrect, please reach out regardless!

[festivitea]

Hey there,  They've finally made some progress on giving us a tool to work around this huge problem they created.  There is a sub-window that pops up at the bottom of the "Item Library" window, where we can change the "sales channel" for multiple inventory items at once?  (Since the "Actions" button at the top of that window wasn't working.)  You can select multiple items and use the "Actions" button at the BOTTOM of the window to  "Update sales channels".

[festivitea]

• @dokidoki this is UNACCEPTABLE!!  I can't leave Square fast enough.  @dan-sq @katie 

[festivitea]

Hey Dina,  They've finally made some progress on giving us a tool to work around this huge problem they created.  There is a sub-window that pops up at the bottom of the "Item Library" window, where we can change the "sales channel" for multiple inventory items at once?  (Since the "Actions" button at the top of that window wasn't working.)  You can select multiple items and use the "Actions" button at the BOTTOM of the window to  "Update sales channels".