Square Stand Inventory Management When Sold Out

[LarsonJ]

I want to use square stand to sell lunch tickets in a trade show type environment at 4 different stations around the venue. I have 8 lunch options, and I would like to be able to stock all stations with more than enough physical tickets, and just have the inventory option display as sold out when the actual number of available lunches are sold out, and not allow any more sales to be processed. This way I don't have to worry about printing the exact number of tickets and some stations having extra tickets when others are sell out even if there is "stock" left. Essentially I want the option to have inventory work like it does for an online store at the physical register. Is this a possibility?

Thanks, Josh

[Helen]

@AEndelman @Whatafood I appreciate you sharing examples of how this could be improved. I don't have an update to share at this time, but I can see how this is not a good experience right now. We appreciate your patience in the meantime. 

[AEndelman]

@Helen Thanks Helen.  Do you have any information you can share about your team's dev cycle and what features are planned for upcoming builds?  Your appreciation is appreciated but "I don't have an update to share" doesn't give me a lot of confidence that our concerns are being heard by decision makers.

[StatementWoodcr]

Agreed.  I’m just starting and unfortunately I did not see this before I bought hardware or I would have found another pos.  The only solution I see is for physical items to use a bar scanner.  But even then not being able to look up accurate stock is inconvenient for the seller and the buyer.

[ValliHi]

Yes this NEEDS to be FIXED!!! You have all kinds of ways to turn on and off functions, yet you are making it Nearly Impossible and VERY challenging for all of us that sell VERY specific Items, when we NEED to know that we are out of Stock on an item.  And while we are on the topic of a toggle option, I'd like one that also lets the SELLER decide if Variable products stay visible online even when we are out of stock... because I'd like people to know that that product is an option, just out of stock temporarily.  Thank you, really do like most of Square but honestly if I found a similar product that had the ability in checkout to know it was sold out and better web functionality with inventory... I'd switch... unless you can fix those 2 items... which would be better!

[kellyj]

@ValliHi

Thanks for the post, we do appreciate it, and definitely do hear this request. We've said it before, and do mean it- it's not lip service that these posts are pushed on to our Product teams, and this feedback is prioritized. In some cases though, even though it's been requested, we're not able to roll out this change at this point.

There's a little information on how Feature Requests are prioritized and the lifecycle of how they work here.

There is a lot of work going into Inventory management at this time, I'll be sure to surface this again with the team.

[Eeniemeeniemine]

This is just crazy! I have my first market stall in 2 days and have just synced my Etsy store with Square to test everything is working ok and have only just come to realize that the inventory numbers mean absolutely nothing when managing your sales on the day. 

My business is custom making products but I only have select amount of materials for each product available, now I have no idea how I am going to manage this on the day?! I’m going to be possibly selling items to people that I have no materials to make the final product!

it seems super counter-intuitive to be more worried about maybe missing a once in a blue moon loss of a sale because you haven’t updated your stock yet, rather than the horrible situation of over selling stock you don’t have and being in a situation where that customer won’t use use your services again because you have let them down and they will be telling their friends not to buy from you. 

im really unhappy with this- it would be best if this was something that Square was a little more upfront about before you go ahead and invest in this product which is quite frankly sub-par.

disappointed. 

[Joe]

Hi @Eeniemeeniemine - thanks for taking the time to explain how the absence of this feature affects you. 

We hear you, and it looks like you are not the only one asking for this feature. We will be sure to update this thread in the future when there is an update to share.

[Mzboutique]

Here we go onto year 2020 and it’s still NOT fixed. I have a few more payments left on my POS and I’ll be looking at other avenues that have inventory management 

[robbymartian]

Hi Joe_,

I just wanted to +1 this feature request. Having the ability to block the creation of an order that features one or more out of stock items is a requirement for my business. Currently, we're making an extra request to the API to batch retrieve inventory counts prior to creating the order. In addition to slowing down the order processing for the end user, the delay introduces an opportunity for race conditions where the sale of an out of stock item might still occur. I understand the rationale to not prevent the sale of an item that is actually in stock on account of a stock adjustment error; however, I think that's probably an edge case. Based on the responses in this thread, I would posit that most users are accurately reporting their inventory and would much prefer the sale be blocked vs. the more lax, "sell it anyway" approach. At least in terms of the Square API, you could add a property to the request body of the Create order endpoint called "in_stock_only" (or something similar), that's type is Boolean and default is false. That would be an opt-in/backwards compatible approach that would probably satisfy most users. 

Regardless, thank you for taking the time to follow the thread and offer helpful and timely responses! 

[MikeM]

Has this feature been built yet? Or is there a workaround for this? We're overselling items and it's becoming an issue. Thx