Allow customers to buy zero inventory / 'sold out' items

Hi all, I'd like to be able to allow customers to purchase items despite not having them in stock.

We make 'made to order' jewellery with a small physical shop and a Squarespace store. We keep many items in stock, but other items we assemble when an order comes in (we let customers know that there may be a 2 week turnaround).

Up till now, we've used the 'unlimited stock' option for items on Squarespace, but this means we can't keep track of the stock which we do have ready to go.

Recently we invested in the Square point of sale system. One of the reasons for doing so is because Square allows to track inventory but doesn't prevent us from making a sale for an item we don't have in stock.

We had hoped to use inventory management software to connect Square and Squarespace, but having attempted this with a few integrations, Squarespace marks the zero inventory items as 'sold out' and takes them off sale.

Does anyone know if there's any way to allow Squarespace to sell zero inventory items, or to override the feature?

Thanks in advance for any help!

19 hours ago, Proudfoot said:

Does anyone know if there's any way to allow Squarespace to sell zero inventory items, or to override the feature?

The short answer is no, you cannot override this feature.

If you are using inventory tracking (in other words, you aren't using the 'unlimited stock' feature) then Squarespace will not allow customers to purchase an item when it reaches a stock level of zero.

I provided a longer answer in 2019 with some workarounds (see below) that you may find helpful:

If you decide to try the 'arbitrary stock level' workaround, then it may be possible to add some code that displays a "this product will be made to order and has a 2 week turnaround" message when the true stock level reaches zero. However, the community would need to view some of these products on the site to assist with this.

Has this post helped you? Let everyone know by clicking an icon below  ⬇️