Shipping for Square Online site with multiple business locations

[amjessey]

Hello everyone,

Who has multiple business locations?

We're in the process of building our Square Online website and whilst configuring our fulfilment options, which have so far generally been going well, we have discovered one significant barrier. That is, currently, it's not possible for Square Online to sell inventory, where shipping is the fulfilment method, from multiple business locations simultaneously. 

In our business, we have two locations each holding its own inventory. This means various items' inventory is held at one location but not the other, and for other items, it's vice versa. This means that the online customer who wants their shopping cart items shipped to them are limited to buying inventory held at one location only. This is because Square Online incorrectly marks items which are in stock (at the business location currently not selected in Fulfilment > Shipping) as 'Out of Stock' for the customer. For us, this is an unusual and unwanted limitation considering that running an ecommerce site often means for the seller (as it does for us) operating one website that serves nationwide customers, fulfilling orders from stock across multiple locations (stock warehouses).

Are the limitations as described above accurate and if it is, then what is the short-term workaround and will Square change Square Online so it allows the selling of inventory, where shipping is the fulfilment method, from multiple business locations simultaneously?

N.B. This doesn't affect Local Delivery or Pickup. 

Thank you 

[Emma_]

Hi @amjessey, thanks for raising this. This is because Square Online website can be associated with one location only at a time. At the moment we do not have the option to select multiple locations for the same website and sync with inventory for each location. I can see how important it is to sync with multiple business location inventories for this type of business. I will make sure to share your feedback with our Product team. 

You can create a second website and link it to the other location. This is not an ideal solution but it can help sell your second location inventory online. Here is more information about managing multiple Square Online websites. 

[bullockdl]

@Emma_  I have a simular situation.  Can you tell me if this capability is now available?

[Breffni]

Hi @bullockdl, we don't have any new information on this yet, unfortunately, but we'll be sure to update you and this thread with any future updates. 

[amjessey]

Update:

We have a need for Shipping, Local Delivery and Pick-up from our bricks-and-mortar store across two locations. We hold some stock of items but we also work on a back-order basis where we order stock from our supplier after our customer places an order with us. We sell clothes.

1) We require concurrent selling of inventory from multiple business locations where shipping is the fulfilment method. Currently, this is not possible because available stock from one location only can be shown to the online customer when shipping is the chosen fulfilment method.

2) We need to sell certain items that go out of stock (items we back-order from our supplier). The workaround of turning off stock tracking does not work as we need to show the current stock of all variations of that item (some variations might still be in stock whereas other variations aren't). Each item (in-stock and not-in-stock, i.e. back-order) has its own lead time so we need to inform the customer how long he will wait before the item is ready for fulfilment.

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Questions-How-To/Feature-Request-continue-selling-out-of-stock-it...

Thanks