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

[Joe]

Thanks for the response, @davefackler - obviously our internal protocols and pathways for development are different than your software background, and we have found extreme success for thousands of Sellers by following these protocols. Like Ashlie mentioned in my absence, our engineers only have a certain amount of bandwidth and cannot simply will a feature into existence - as frustrating as that may be. I will continue to pass along your feedback.

We understand that our Sellers need to do what is best for their business, and we will always encourage you to do so. Best of luck going forward and finding a solution for your business! We will continue to update this thread with relevant information as we know it. 

[davefackler]

@Joe and @AshleyK,

While I can appreciate your responses, you, as the voice of the product team and Square as a whole, are doing us, your customers, a disservice by not being more transparent around this issue.  As has been mentioned several times already, this feature request has years of history at this point.  For you to continue to say that the software engineering team just can't get it done because they are too busy or that it is not a large enough priority rings as "we don't really care about this" - as has been theorized by others time and time again.  If this feature request *is* important to you (as it is to several of us - again, your customers), then you should be able and willing to tell us where it falls in line with your current development efforts.  Is it on the backlog for a sprint or iteration in the next future?  If not, what else is more important and how are you prioritizing things?  If this feature request *is not* important to you, then explain why it isn't.

Two other thoughts I'll leave here:

1. Respect earns respect.  If you want me (in particular) and others that come here looking for answers, support, and a way to provide feedback and input to making the Square product line better to be respectful, then do the same.  To me, being respectful includes being honest and transparent when it comes to issues like this where dozens of (if not more) people have complained about and asked about a feature request or update.  If you aren't going to do that, then don't expect us all to be nice when our frustrations run over.

2. As my grandpa used to say "praise in public, chastise in private".  If either of you or anyone else at Square feels the need to bring up the community guidelines based on my or anyone else's post, a simple text, email, or even phone call to that person would likely be better received and a much better experience for a *customer* of yours who is likely already frustrated.

[robbymartian]

Some insight into where this feature falls in the roadmap or recommendations on another mechanism/venue we can use stress the importance of this feature to decision makers would be tremendously helpful. In my opinion, the product manger(s) would love to see this thread. They would quickly realize that this feature is extremely valuable to most customers and ultimately save them from having to invent something from scratch. There has to be a disconnect between the insights provided by this forum and the process(es) used to prioritize new features for the API. 

[Whatafood]

@Joe Just to be clear I’m trying to understand the company position in this issue. What you are saying is that we could complaint as much as we can because square has lots of other customers and some of them are happy. Square will not take any of our request in consideration even though we pay for use square services. Because it has international practices that is working for now.

And if it is not the case how can square justify to do not prioritize the most requested feature in the last 4 years at least.

[pbprintz]

I just spent over 16 hours setting up an online store, only to find out it allows people to still

buy things that have gone out of stock. WHAT A WASTE OF MY TIME!!! This is the worst thing I’ve encountered in a web interface. 

[Lbcreamery]

pbprintz

If you turn on inventory tracking on the item (have to do it on each item) - and enter the amounts in stock. This will help with the online store sales.

turn on tracking

Then in the weebly online store - under settings/General

enable these

enable the indicators. This prevents people online buying more than we have in stock - but we can still oversell at the register because there is no protection there.

[pbprintz]

It's changing my stock to 0 when something is sold, but leaving it on the website available for purchase. I was on the phone with them for hours today and they don't even know why. 

[robbymartian]

You’re not alone, the same thing is happening for many of us as well. Thanks for posting though, helpful to know that their customer service is confused as much as we are.

[rhoagland]

The first post in this thread is from 2016...Has there been any progress on a solution or work around?

[pbprintz]

I figured out my problem on my own. 

The website is only allowing a shipping profile from my old business, The Sweetest Soaps (TSS), but a pickup profile from my new business, PB Printz. So even though I have only 1 of each item, there was 1 in TSS for shipping and 1 in PB for pickup so they weren't showing as "sold out" when sold. 

I figured it out this morning when I took all of the stock out of "All Locations" and then nothing was available for shipping anymore. I had to move it all back over to TSS and re-name TSS to PBPrintz and then update the inventory tracking there and take out all the inventory from PB Printz. PB Printz doesn't have a "ship from" location option at all.

Total cluster-eff. Why I am being forced to use TSS as the primary and only shipping location is blowing my mind. It's fine now. Luckily, I am not a dummy.... but anyone stupid never would have figured that out, and apparently the help people couldn't either.