Inventory Sync Glitches

[DinaLRosenberg]

We've been having on and off glitches for the past few weeks with our inventories "sticking". Meaning, we'll enter in a new item or we'll count inventory and adjust.. only to find later that the numbers are gone, or the inventory photos are gone, etc.

We've had a couple of inventory counts change after adjustment leading to inventory being oversold. That will be a problem now that Square will charge fees for returns/refunds starting April. 

I've been keeping a log of all these issues and sharing them with my service Rep. I am asking other retailers to PlEASE keep track and share this with your reps... if we all share our data perhaps Square can see the bigger picture and get to the bottom of what's happening.

[purplebutterfly]

I've been living a sync nightmare for about 6 weeks and no sign they are any closer to fixing it. If I create items in Square Dashboard, they either never sync over to Square Online or they appear several days later. When items do sync over, they show no inventory. I also have issues with items appearing with random settings for fulfillment. And, I have items in Square Online that mysteriously switch from Visible to Unavailable. I've been told by "Customer Success" reps to create items in Square Online first and then re-work them in Square Dashboard to add taxes, category, unit costs, vendor. This generally seems to work if in a clunky, inefficient way.

[DinaLRosenberg]

I find it to be the opposite for us.... meaning we need to create item in Square Dashboard and then adjust in square online... End of December most of our online descriptions were completely erased by Square when the items had a description in Online but not in Dashboard. WE are still... three months later... fixing these issues.

We are still experiencing sync issues like you as well- the lag between dashboard and online is insane. Sometimes fast sometimes hours.

Yesterday we loaded in inventory and printed labels..... and it all disappeared... had to load it again. Insanity.

[purplebutterfly]

I had a hard time believing this is some isolated behavior on only a few sites. But when I call in to Square (and I've called a dozen times), they make it sound as if it's not a widespread problem. Clearly, they just don't care about fixing it.

[kathrynhughes]

I just got off the phone with square support and had another one of thoise frustrating calls with them. We too have a problem with syncing and for us, it is the image not going over from the dashboard to the online store. Our problems are nowhere as terrible as yours are but we're all in the same boat -- victims of very polite reps who unfortunately dont really know what they are talking about. 

My favorite response is that it takes 24 hours -- basically everything takes 24 hours -- such a great way to quickly get rid of the caller -- and when you tell them you did it weeks ago, you're on hold again for another 10 minutes. They love to turn you over to some other organization and tell you a problem is googles fault ot you have to talk to SEO people. But in the case of the dashboard talking to the online store, we're talking about one part of their system talking to another part of their system.  They have to claim responsibility for their systems. This isnt rocket sciene. It's pretty basic stuff here!

Very clearly no one at square understands what its like to run a business and to depend upon the efficiency and quality of the tools were working with. I asked the rep I spoke to today to escalate this matter and she promised she would although she couldnt give me a time frame so I asked if it would be a month or a year and she couldnt commit. this would be pretty funny if we weren't all so dependent upon then!!

[purplebutterfly]

I agree that it's clear that few people working at Square have any clue what it's like to try to run a business on their platform. Their product managers seem only looking to add things that make them more money. Nothing to make life easier for customers dealing with their clunky platform. And "customer success" support reps are mostly clueless about how the system even works or doesn't. At times I think the emails I get from "support" reps sound as if they are written by bots. I'm moving on. 

[DinaLRosenberg]

There definitely seems to be a push to create new technology instead of making what exists work amazing... it also feels like square is trying to guess how we need to use the technology instead of making it accommodating and intuitive. I mean- how long have we been asking for barbell tags? 2+ years?

often I feel like I'm being gaslit- like what we're experiencing isn't happening which is why it's critical for requests and issues to be logged as often as possible

[Twiggy]

I’m trying to add some imagery to help you. And it won’t let me 

it goes with this text 

Hey, 

As a rule it’s best to add the image of an item using the browser 

Add the section and create the item in that section - there is a slight delay between POS items and online items images as the system folders are separate.  You can then add modifiers and add images of the modifiers.  This way the item will be in your online items list and in your square dashboard items - stock will be set as zero and unavailable.  If you don’t do the stock levels or tracking at this point you will not see the item - you’ll have to make it available later. I hope this has been of some help.  there is a definite delay with images syncing.

[Twiggy]

It does help creating items this way if you have the time 

[Twiggy]

We always add our images at this point as the POS images don’t always cross over as well due the shape. All the imagery on our site is 4:3  - POS / retail is square - the square app centralises the item in the image,  so it’s really clear.

I hope this helps  

[DinaLRosenberg]

So we've made it a habit of adding inventory in Items (Square Retail) and then heading over online to add photos, optimize the description, etc.. Most of our items require additional photos ... but it is easy to set tax rates and categories in RETAIL before heading to the online to optimize it for e-commerce.

When we enter items we enter them as hidden- so we have to head over to Online to turn them on anyway. Working backwards for us makes it a lot more cumbersome.. I'm not sure why it would be faster one way over the other?