Live Q&A: Ask us anything about Items and Inventory!

[Tom]

On Friday September, 25th we hosted a Square Items and Inventory Live Q&A!

With lots of adjustments in how things are sold during COVID-19, we heard some great questions and feature requests relating to managing items and inventory.

Thank you to @elaine_p from Square’s Catalog team, who answered questions about items and inventory. While we're not able share release timelines, we can give a sense of what’s coming soon in our roadmap and discuss what you need for your business.

[MichelleA]

We are also need this for our bookstore. We use Art of Books for inventory management of items that we sell online through a 3rd party venue but would like to be able to put all of our inventory into our own online store.

[elaine_p]

Hi @CuriousCapyShop , 

The ability to add your own custom attributes (fields) using the online dashboard is coming soon and is already live in our APIs. Even if you’re not a developer, the overview in the documentation gives a good high level view of the types of things we plan to support. 

For uploading pictures on the template, I’m taking this to mean uploading an image url in our items import file - just let me know if I have that wrong. We don’t have that on our short term roadmap, but I can see how it would make it more practical to add cover pictures for books and appreciate the feedback. 

[Thomasmakayla]

Being able to add image URLs to the csv files would be extremely helpfull. Having to upload pictures, especially when there are multiple pictures is very time consuming for lots of items. 

[JoeTend]

We're looking for a more streamlined way to manage our Square Online (weebly) inventory. In the Online dashboard, is there a way to filter the view so only "Available", "Unavailable", or "Hidden" items show? Or, is there a way to pull a report that shows these designations per SKU? Similarly, is there a way to pull a report that shows both Price and Sale Price in the Online inventory? If not, having an option would be hugely beneficial.

(And just to give one more Salute to an earlier question - is there a way to show something as on Sale (Sale Price) in both Online (Weebly) AND the POS without changing the regular price in the POS?)

[asw]

Hi @JoeTend,

We’re currently working on adding filters to the Square Online Item Library, which will allow you to filter items by helpful settings such as item visibility (“Available,” “Hidden,” and “Unavailable”), stock, location, and category. This will help with finding the items you’re looking for, but at this time we don’t have downloadable reports for items from within Square Online. We are separately working on improving reports in Square Dashboard to better support Square Online -- thank you for your feedback about SKUs and prices!

As for sale prices on both Square Online and POS, we can’t currently sync the sale price between online and in-store, but it is something we will be working to address in the future. For now the best workaround is to continue to update the item’s regular price if you sell it both online and in-store, or to leave the regular price as is and manually apply a discount at the POS for a sale item.

[theurbanflower]

When we decide to pull something off the shelf for samples how do we remove out of our system without scanning it then doing a 100% discount so it shows in the system it was removed out of inventory, the other way is to recount inventory under items but then we have no way of keeping track of that in end of month inventory count to see what was used for samples...

[elaine_p]

Hi @theurbanflower , 

One way to track it would be to use the inventory adjustment called “Loss.” It behaves like adjustments for Theft and Damage in that it reduces the value of your inventory and increases your cost of goods sold if you are tracking those values using Square for Retail Plus. As a subscriber to Square for Retail Plus, you could go to Items > Inventory Management >  History to filter by the adjustment type to see how many you had in a particular time period by Team Member. 

If you do not subscribe to Square for Retail Plus, you can click into the item on the dashboard  and click “view stock history.” Then you can filter by location and adjustment type.

[theurbanflower]

When a customer orders an item and pays it shows us a message when order comes thru, my question is when its all packaged up and ready to enter tracking number how come we cannot use Squares Bar code scanner to scan the bar code to quickly add the tracking number instead of typing 19 numbers one at a time? Is there an easier way?

[elaine_p]

@theurbanflower - We hear you, that would be helpful! It does not exist today so we don’t have an easier way yet.

[JoeTend]

We are constantly adding new SKUs to our catalog and I've been receiving an error quite often saying that I'm making changes to an outdated version of the item. It asks me to refresh the page. If I do that, I am sent back to the catalog home screen, losing all the information I just added to the catalog. I am unable to save the changes before refreshing. This didn't start happening until we launched our Weebly store, and I'm wondering if this is a result of some interface behind the scenes that I don't see (and don't need to see. Ha!)? Today I simply opened the record for a SKU in Square, typed in a Variation Name, clicked Save and the error appeared - i had no other iterations of that item open (not in Weebly, not in another window, etc.). Sometimes I have to click save after every minor adjustment just to get through it without wasting the work. Would love your thoughts on this or to know if it's a known issue.

[elaine_p]

Hi @JoeTend , 

You are right, there was in issue with the sync between Square and Square Online. We are rolling out a change and hope this addresses the problem. If it doesn’t, please let us know! The details you provided were helpful - if you can provide the date it happened and the item name, that will help us pinpoint it.

[TheConductor]

I have found where I can associate a package tracking number with an online order within the dashboard, but the tracking number isn't shared with the customer in the automatic "Your order has shipped" email. Is there a way of making it so they also receive a package tracking link as part of that email?

[elaine_p]

Good suggestion @TheConductor , thank you. It’s not a part of the email today, but we’d like it to be.

[amitramani]

I have been using Square for accepting credit cards for a while now.

I am looking to move my POS from Quickbooks POS to Square POS. I also have a Woocomerce based website that I would like to integrate with Square POS.

1. Does Square automatically import orders from Woocommerce?

2. Does Square update inventories based on orders from Woocommerce?

3. How do I handle the multiple profiles created for each customer by Square? i.e. everytime, a customer uses a different credit card/email, a new customer profile is created. Is there a way to automatically merge these profiles?

4. Does Square allow a "Sale" price field?

[Tom]

Thanks for checking in here, @amitramani! For your first two questions, @Woo_Phil — any chance you have more insight on ability to automatically import orders and update inventories based on WooCommerce orders?

Either way, I'll be taking a deeper look with our API team and let you know what I find out. 🙏

[Woo_Phil]

1. No, it's not possible to import entire orders to Square. While Square does have an Order's API not, they did not originally, so it's been excluded from the scope of this plugin. Additionally WooCommerce can capture far more information and feature on an order that Square allows, so it's not something that is practical for many users.

2. Yes. The official Square for WooCommerce plugin offers a two-way sync. Meaning that sales that happen on WooCommerce will update the inventory in Square and sales that that happen in Square, will update the inventory on your WooCommerce site.

[elaine_p]

Thanks @Woo_Phil for the answers to one and two. @amitramani , here's what I've got for questions three and four: 

3. To check for duplicates and resolve them, you can follow steps listed in this article under the Duplicates section. 

• In the Square Dashboard, click on the “Customers” tile
• In the All Customers group, if multiple records have the same email address or phone number, you’ll see an alert about duplicate entries
• Click “Duplicate Suggestion” to review
• You can choose to merge them one by one or to merge all of them. 

4. Square does not have a “Sale” price field, but Square Online does. Here’s another thread that has a screenshot.

[SteveYosh]

What about discounts for the online store...like Buy One Get One? I don't understand why it would be available for the POS but not the Online side.

[elaine_p]

Hi @SteveYosh , 

We’re working on bringing automatic discounts to the online store. This thread is a good one to follow for updates.   

[Goldneye]

My online store:  1) the ability for multiple Ship From locations.  I dropship some inventory and would like to "assign" products to that different warehouse 2) location to add UPC# -not in the SKU field 3) modifiers & variations in indicate White, Small is out of stock, currently I need to enter Pink Small, Pink Medium, Pink Large, White Small, White Medium, White Large, Yellow Small, Yellow Medium, Yellow Large which is not a professional look, in my opinion.

[elaine_p]

Thanks for the feedback @Goldneye . Our online store team does have the first one on the roadmap. Hear you on UPC. I'd love a few more details on your third piece of feedback - is the idea that we would have a way for you to automatically create a product matrix of options? Or is the feedback more about how it displays?