We’ve managed to oversell on a core beer by a few cans and I don’t think it’s one that can be prevented but thought I’d throw it up for discussion. We’re canning more today, so no big deal, but it did get me thinking as to how we can avoid it as we are sometimes OoS for a couple of weeks.
For this core beer, we offer singles, 6 and 12 packs on our webshop (SquareSpace). These are mapped to the individual can plus two multipacks of the correct size in Breww. We only had 8 cans in stock, so the 12 pack was showing as out of stock. Both the 6 pack and singles were in stock. Customer X came along wanting 12 cans, so put the 6 pack plus 6 singles (since that was reflecting the 8) into their basket and checked out. When the order comes over, it can’t be fulfilled and stock goes to -4 on the single. Breww has done nothing wrong as it was correctly showing we had one 6 pack OR 8 singles in stock. Squarespace has also done nothing wrong, as it thought it had stock. AFAIK there’s no way of telling Squarespace that it can’t allow both of these things to be sold on the same order but in theory doing the multipack bundling over there rather than in Breww (if this is possible, I’ve not looked, plus there may be other downsides) could’ve prevented it.
I dunno exactly how Squarespace works, but in other apps variant pack sizes would need to be given distinct SKUs and mapped to Breww products, so this might not help. You might keep a buffer (6 cans?) at another site (from which you don’t fulfil Squarespace orders - configure the integration not to use it). Would that work?
Hi Andy,
Thanks for raising this in the community! Unfortunately, this circumstance is one of those few that is a little unavoidable. It comes down to the stock figure we send to Squarespace and Squarespace’s understanding of that stock figure. Using the theoretical maximum stock figure is great as it allows Breww to tell Squarespace how many of a product you could sell based on the component stock, as Breww understands that if you had a pack of 24 cans in stock, you could convert that into 24 single cans, two twelve packs, or four six-packs for example.
The flaw in this is that Squarespace, for example, does not have the same concept. So when a customer adds, in your case, the 6-pack to their basket, Squarespace does not understand that the 6-pack stock is in any way related to the single-can stock. The platform believes each SKU’s stock level is independent and will not reduce the number of single cans available based on the 6-pack added to the basket.
You could instead have Breww upload the available stock figure, but in your example, this would have meant that eight single cans were available to purchase but that no six-packs were in stock, as there were none already assembled in Breww. The available stock figure simply uploads the stock level of that product based on the number assembled in Breww and not committed to orders, but I would imagine this is helpful only in a few instances like this and is generally less valuable than using the theoretical max figure.
I hope this makes sense, and if you have any questions at all, please let me know.
1 Like
I was worried about overselling when we set up our Woocommerce store too, so the way we avoided it was to set a global threshold for the store to show all items as OOS when QTY drops below 5. i.e. we technically do have a small amount of stock left, but I’d rather show OOS for a day or two online than have orders that can’t be fulfilled and deal with having to emailing customers and apologiese etc.
You know, it would be nice if this kind of buffer could be configured in Breww. I.e reports stock minus some number to the integration.