How to delete sold items from inventory

[mikesclub]

Most of my inventory is one of a kind. Once an item is sold, that item will never be restocked. I need to periodically delete sold items from my inventory.

The problem is, I have thousands of unique items, and it would be impossible to delete them one-by-one. Here’s how I think I have to do it, and I’d appreciate any suggestions or better ideas:

First, I think I have to export my entire inventory. 

This leads to my first question: on the Excel spreadsheet, how do I identify a sold item? What specifically tells me an item has been sold? Bonus question: how do I know WHEN it was sold?

Once I’ve identified the sold items, I think I should sort the sheet by whatever tells me the items were sold, and then bulk delete those rows. 

Then upload the spreadsheet, replacing the entire inventory. 

Is this the right (and the best) way to remove sold items from my inventory? 

[mattd]

Hi @mikesclub,

To start, if an item is sold out, customers will see Item Sold Out when they attempt to complete their purchase. Customers will not be able to purchase sold out items on your online store. This is the design of the system to show the sold out items.

To hide the sold-out items, you are correct in your initial manual thought to do this. You would export your inventory from your Item Library in your Square Dashboard to an Excel or csv. Locate the items with 0 inventory, there is an inventory count in the file (if your items are all unique, there should be 1 for in-stock and 0 for sold). Delete the sold items and replace the existing item library when importing the updated library.

If you are constantly doing this, I would suggest leveraging the Square API and a script on your computer to automate this process. This is an automatable task, as it is consistent. You can find more this in the Inventory API, utilizing the current quantities aspect.

[tfnpendants]

I've seen a few threads that address sellers with one of a kind items and inventory numbers.  Can there be a fix to the system so that it automatically marks items as sold and won't leave the item available for someone else to purchase?  I can foresee lots of disappointed customers if they are all trying to order the same unique piece.

Caroline

[nika]

Hello @tfnpendants! Just confirming what mattd says above- your customers will see that an item is sold out when they go to make a purchase of an item that has been bought already.

Or are you talking about when someone has an item in their cart- you want that item to be shown as Sold Out?

[PerroneTech]

I was forwarded here by a support tech. I would like to add to this, it would be nice to have an option that at least autohides inventory was sold.

I sell refurbished laptops on my website. Once it's sold whether online or in person, I would like it to autohide. It doesn't have to delete, just autohide and not being seen.

I would like the item to stay, I may get another someday and I can just modify the old listing and adjust inventory.

[Valentina]

Thanks for adding your voice here, @PerroneTech!

For now, you'll want to edit your item to make it Unavailable, or delete the item altogether:

We'll be sure to update this thread if in the future we introduce a feature that allows you to enable the automatic hiding or deleting of items from your Square Online website once they've been sold.

[Sawtooth]

I’ve been scouring this message board for a solution to the one of a kind inventory issue. It seems like a relatively simple fix, I’m hopeful square will add this feature soon. An option that you can turn on or off for unique items, rather than having to manually hide or delete sold items.  Remove that item from the point of sale screen and online.  So many artisans use square it seems likely that a lot of users would benefit from this.