Linking Retail and Wholesale Inventory Count

[JesseD]

We sell products in our store (retail) and wholesale through other retailers. We create separate line items with a wholesale designation with a different price for our retail sales so that we don't have to manually do a discount every time: Is there a way to "link" these items so that it reduces a single inventory value?

In other words, I don't want to create different inventory values for the same item for wholesale sales but do want wholesale sales to reduce the overall inventory value for a single item. Is there a way to do this in variations, possibly? Open to all suggestions! Thanks.

[keicollective]

Are you doing your sales through the Square POS or Square Online? or a mix of both maybe? 
They just handle discounts differently, so wanted to know what you're mainly working with so I can maybe help think of a solution! 

[JesseD]

We do both, but mainly wondering about POS. I did find the “variation” option, but that doesn’t really solve the issue as the variation has its own inventory count. Plus, that creates another selection item for our servers (clicking primary or variation) and I don’t even want them to see both options so that they don’t accidentally click wholesale in a retail transaction .

Basically I’d like two different items (retail and wholesale) that link to the same inventory amount so that it is reduced through either a retail or wholesale transaction. 

Thanks! 

[keicollective]

You could setup an automatic discount for the POS. So you would have one item, with one inventory count, and when someone orders enough to reach your wholesale minimum order quantity the discount would automatically apply to discount the item to your wholesale rate. 

It would be similar to how folks do a quantity discount - We sell stickers for $3 each or 2 for $5. An automatic discount applies if they add 2 stickers to their cart, it discounts their cart by $1. 

If your wholesale rate is 50%, you can set items to discount based on your MOQ. So if your MOQ is 10 of an item, and the customer adds 10 or more to their cart, it would automatically apply a 50% discount to the item in their cart. 
If for some reason a retail customer came in and added enough of an item to hit the wholesale discount, it's really easy to remove a discount (I think it's 3 clicks total?) in the POS app. Also easy to add a discount if for some reason you were allowing a wholesaler to order less than your MOQ. 

*Keep in mind all that works for the POS side of things, not the Square Online portion. 

[JesseD]

I appreciate the input, but that still doesn't quite make it as easy as it seems (to me) that it should be. For one, it's not just about a discount- wholesale transactions don't incur sales tax whereas retail does, which creates something else to remember for whomever is processing. 

If someone were selling apples and they had red delicious and granny smith, two separate line items, and wanted to link these both to one inventory item, "apples", how could this be done? This is essentially what we are trying to accomplish and it should be way easier. Or if someone had multiple stores and one warehouse that held inventory, and line items were "New York TVs" and "Chicago TVs" but wanted sales from both locations to lower one single inventory value, "TVs". 

[SANDABOY]

Any solutions to this?

[Candlestore]

@JesseD ;

I know this is an old post but I just thought of an idea for this as I just see it got bumped again.

Since you sell wholesale, do you have a minimum for the units you sell?  Like I have a dollar minimum for wholesale orders, and this does not work for me.  But some of my wholesale sellers make me buy 144 of a single item....now this would work for my idea.

Square has Sell by units  more on that here  https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7237-stock-conversion-sell-by 

My idea would be set up the sell by units and add a W to the SKU for Wholesale.  You would need to be able to print your own barcodes to be able to scan the new SKU tho. 

So if you made wholesale orders of 60 of Item A, you could scan W876567568 which would be assigned 60 units of item A and subtract the inventory nicely in square for you.  This works since each Unit can have its only Barcode associated with a Unit count value.

Now if you have wholesale customers just stop in for 1 or 2 items at wholesale.... not sure if this would be possible.  

What I have been doing which is not ideal.... Is my inventory is in QBs.... End of day I import my sales to QBS, Import my sales from my online channels to QuickBooks and also manually import wholesale orders to quickbooks which adjust the inventory.  When that is done I upload my new inventory levels back to Square and my online channels.  It is a pain in the rear but the only way I know to get everything to play nicely.