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!!!!

[DinaLRosenberg]

Hi there- can we please have an update? I'm finding original bugs (see my response to Dan earlier in this thread)- I'm now seeing discrepancies in quantity listed online for sale versus what's shown in my inventory. 

I have over 1600 items.. I am unsure how to solve for the current mess that's happened.

[dan-sq]

@DinaLRosenberg This looks like a separate, but clearly very real issue. The team is investigating. The screenshot is very useful, thank you for sharing that. Can you share the time of the order, or its identifier, so we can take a look at that specific one? 

[DinaLRosenberg]

That particular item wasn't purchased. It's just something I caught. As I mentioned we have about 1600 items. It's taking DAYS to sort through this mess.

Just got two purchases over the weekend via our website for items we had "unavailable" that was pushed available and subsequently purchased.

Do we have an update as to why this happened? Was it something that was done on purpose? A Bug?

[dan-sq]

Hi @DinaLRosenberg , Could you provide the items were purchased over the weekend that became available? I was under the impression that we had fixed the data in your account (and others), but if I know which items these are, we can understand what we missed and correct those as well.

> Do we have an update as to why this happened? Was it something that was done on purpose? A Bug?

What was done on purpose was removing the "Unavailable" option in favor of deselecting the website channel. As that rolled out, there was a bug. Due to the state that some older items were in, which was effectively unavailable but stored differently, they became visible on websites. As I mentioned above, we believed we remediated that issue generally, but it's likely we didn't catch everything if you have gotten further orders.

[DinaLRosenberg]

All of our items that were pushed available are still available. Are you saying engineers went in and did something because we aren't seeing that change. Here is the order:

Additionally- I am not sure if you are aware but on the Square Terminal you are still able to mark an item "unavailable"- so if you do it on the terminal- how does it effect online? This is something you should research.

[dan-sq]

Responding up a bit in the thread since we have limits on thread depth.

> All of our items that were pushed available are still available. Are you saying engineers went in and did something because we aren't seeing that change.

Yes, we do expect that items should no longer be visible online that were marked as unavailable / are currently marked unassigned to a website channel.

> Additionally- I am not sure if you are aware but on the Square Terminal you are still able to mark an item "unavailable"- so if you do it on the terminal- how does it effect online? This is something you should research.

It's very important to us that any old clients out there, or any clients that we haven't rolled this update out to, are 100% compatible with the changes. This includes import/export spreadsheets that use "unavailable"/"hidden"/"visible." If you mark an item as "unavailable" from a Terminal or Register, it should reflect in your web Dashboard as unassigned to the web channel (checkbox deselected). If you're noticing anything problematic here, please do let us know.

> Here is the order:

As far as our system records go, the item in this order was marked as enabled online, with site visibility Visible, and had a stock count of 1; that status far predates the order. From that data, we don't see anything out of the ordinary for it to be listed online and purchasable. Please do continue to send anything awry that we may be able to correct on your behalf. Regarding the Moon Pendants, we did root-cause that to a different issue we're correcting.

[dokidoki]

@dan-sq are there any plans to make the "direct link" available to copy as an actual link to the item on the item page? If you see my screenshot attached, it would make sense that clicking on "Direct Link" would in fact give you a link to then share to customers. Right now there's no easy way to get that link. 

Also from what I understand, Square removed "unavailable" because its redundant as you can just turn off the online website sales channel, but now there's no way to filter items that are not online like we were able to before. are there plans to filter items by "not being assigned to the online sales channel" as that is how many of us filtered "unavailable" before it was removed. Right now you can filter by sales channel but it doesn't include a "not assigned to online sales channel" filter. 

 

  

[bearandbird]

This exactly is our problem too. There is no way to filter items that are not online like we were able to before. This is essential and if they want to remove something they think is redundant, there should be SOME way to achieve the same filtering result. We have done a lot of testing and currently there is NOT a way to do something that was easy to do less than a week ago!

[bearandbird]

As a legacy (since 2019) customer with a HUGE catalog database, how are we supposed to effectively and efficiently deal with this update? 

Our previous workflow was that when an item was low in stock, we would mark is as unavailable until we got a restock in.

We could easily filter items in the online store that were marked as unavailable. EASILY.

Thousands of our items are now stuck in the "unavailable" limbo.

These items are active in the online sales channel, but marked as unavailable.

We can see this easily in the column in the database export spreadsheet.

There is no way for us to bulk change unavailable to unlisted. We can't even filter for the items with this change!
Currently we would have to one by one go into each item to change the settings. This is not reasonable!

Across the platform is is not consistent how these items are labeled either. This is a huge problem.

Just put the 3 options back as it was last week!! Even if its redundant, it WORKED! Please help us!

We are small businesses trying our best to survive, we can't afford hours of unexpected extra work! PLEASE HELP US!

[DinaLRosenberg]

This is exactly how we used unavailable as well- it’s super frustrating that this was taken away without understanding how end users were using the function. 

[dan-sq]

> We could easily filter items in the online store that were marked as unavailable. EASILY.

@bearandbird It's definitely a miss that we interrupted this workflow for you. I'll check back into this thread to announce when we release this functionality soon. We've made progress implementing it and, when released, you will be able to filter for any items you don't have assigned to any channel, which will show up under the Channel assignment filter.

[bearandbird]

Thank you! We are all waiting and hoping!

[DinaLRosenberg]

@dan-sq here's another issue I found. I unchecked item from our website- it still was showing up. I didn't want to erase it from our database because I want to use it for a future event- so I removed it from the home page slider. 

[dan-sq]

@DinaLRosenberg Thank you for reporting this. We just did another pass on your catalog and have ensured that the data on your website is consistent with the Square catalog. That's what happened in this case - the website data was inconsistent with your data in Dashboard. The team does not expect this to continue to happen. Please tag me again if you do, though, and we will investigate more deeply as to why it would reoccur.

[DinaLRosenberg]

@dan-sq the free spirit is one we changed the inventory to zero a while back and marked unavailable. It showed up available- obviously- but with inventory. Sometimes I think Square republishes old versions of inventory counts because our inventory #s change all the time.

[dan-sq]

Hello all,

Thank you for your patience! We have started to roll out the restoration of being able to filter your item library by items that are not assigned to your online store. I have enabled that feature for everyone on this thread.

In the past, this was done by filtering by "Site visibility." Because we have switched to "channel assignment" as the way to make items available or unavailable, here is how you can do that now:

1. Open the filter blade by clicking on the filter button in the Item Library.

2. Select "Channel assignment."

3. Select the "Not assigned to" toggle.

4. Select the checkbox next to your website.

5. Click Apply.

See the visual aids below for assistance and please reach out if you notice anything awry.

cc @rtfulk @bearandbird @Twiggy @kjc2 @MudFire_Dex @DinaLRosenberg @JTPets @emilyz123 @dokidoki @TeamBSTS @Crazyjamlife @shannon10 

 

[JTPets]

How can Square better communicate these structural changes to us all in the future?

This isn't the first issue if this type where something major changes, the this seems to have a rather large blast radius

Thanks for the update!

[dan-sq]

Great question. I have two answers:

1. For new features and changes existing workflows, we will include bi-weekly messaging in our Release notes. Note that there may be smaller changes that aren't included here, but major changes like this one should be captured there in future.

2. More locally on the team responsible for moving site visibility to channel assignment: We missed the mark for in-product education with this rollout given the change in behavior. We've retro'ed that internally and intend to do better in the future by incorporating that in experience reviews before things go live.

[dokidoki]

Thank you so much, this fix solves everything for us and is a much better solution overall than what we previously had. 

[DinaLRosenberg]

We are still having major issues with our inventory. We've now seem to have lost items that we've had for some time that we didn't delete- of course, I can't even tell you what it was named because it's no longer in our system.  But thank you for your updates.

[TeamBSTS]

Thank you for the update, @dan-sq - that does everything I need it to do - appreciate the work that's gone into turning a solution around quickly.  Are release notes e-mailed out?  I'd love to say I had the time to check the page you linked regularly, but...