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Square Stand Inventory Management When Sold Out

Square Stand Inventory Management When Sold Out

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

151 Replies
Square

Thank you for the feedback! I am a PM on the Square Point of Sale application and wanted to share an update. We are in the process of redesigning our cart building experience including surfacing 'sold out' information directly in the cart. We hope to launch this feature in the next couple of months or so. We will update this thread when it is ready for beta testing. 

 

@saumaya thank you so much for the update! I've long awaited the day where the API(s) prevents the sale of sold out/out of stock items (automatically or by opting in) so I can launch my store with confidence. If that's not something your update(s) include, please forward this thread along to the appropriate colleague--it would be a tremendous win for myself and everyone here and greatly appreciated! 

Square

Thank you for mentioning this request - CCing my colleague @elaine_p  who is the PM for Inventory. 

@saumaya Can you please add this feature not just for online stores but also at the POS. As you can see this is a long time requested feature.

Square

Yup - to clarify my response was in the context of the Point of Sale application!

Thanks for the update.  This, and the online store tax issue are significant issues for many.  Please add my voice to the growing crowd that are really tired of manually tracking inventory, in a system that is suppose to be able to track inventory automatically.  Somewhere in this thread someone attached to Square says that allowing overselling is "by design" so that if someone isn't tracking inventory it won't stop them fro selling available inventory.  If that is the case, then there should be an option to toggle on/off this oversell "feature". I can tell you from experience that if I'm tracking inventory - I'm doing it so I don't oversell it.  Please move this up the ladder to solve.

Alumni

We are planning to add an attribute to our APIs to indicate an item is sold out that can be used whether you track inventory or do not. @robbymartian - we do have stock count in our existing inventory APIs if you wanted to use stock count = 0 to trigger display of a Sold Out tag in your store. This is how our eCommerce product is using it.

@elaine_p at the time of writing my application, I was having to hit the batch-retreive-counts endpoint API prior to the orders endpoint to ensure the item wasn't sold out. This was due to a scenario where User A would add an in-stock item to their cart, User B purchases the last available item of the same type, and User A's order still succeed (unwantedly). The approach I described above technically works, but also allows for race conditions whereas an item could sell out between requests (unlikely, but possible). Ideally, API users could provide a boolean value in the POST body, something like "in_stock_only=true," to disallow the sale of out-of-stock items completely and let the server determine the availability. Does that make sense? Regardless, I think I speak for everyone on this thread when I say THANK YOU for taking the time to respond. 

Alumni

Got it! Thank you for the additional detail. 

@elaine_p , can you tell us what the status is on when a "sold out" or inventory count = "0" icon could be displayed on the POS at checkout in order to have an indicator that we're out of an item before taking an in person order.

 

We're currently only able to have customers place their orders via the website (even when they're standing right in front of us) because the online store is the only effective way of managing our inventory counts.