Manage item availability

United States
Canada
Europe

When an item goes out of stock, the item can be removed from the ordering process until the item is available for ordering again. Preventing unavailable items from being ordered improves ordering accuracy because customers can only order what is in stock and available.

Merchants can manage an item's availability automatically or manually.

  • Auto-managing item availability–To use the auto-manage feature, merchants need to enable the Track stock feature on their Inventory Setup dashboard. If Track stock is not enabled, the merchant can only control an item's availability manually.

  • Automatically decrease stock count–When stock tracking is enabled, merchants can then enable automatic stock count updates.

    As orders are placed for POS and online orders, the stock count is decremented for the ordered items. Items are disabled automatically when the stock count reaches zero. When the stock is updated again to greater than zero, the item becomes available for ordering again.

  • Manually managing item availability–Merchants can use the Inventory app on their dashboard as well as the Register, Dining, and Inventory apps on their device to manually manage the availability of items.

Webhook notifications and developer action

When an item becomes unavailable, Clover sends a webhook notification stating that the item has been UPDATED. The webhook message contains the merchantId, webhook topic, and the item's UUID.
The developer then needs to send a request to get information about the item's status.

Getting an item's stock count, availability, and auto-manage status

To determine an item's stock count, whether or not an item is available for ordering, and if the item is being auto-managed, send a GET request to /v3/merchants/{merchant_id}/items/{item_id}.

curl --request GET \
--url 'https://sandbox.dev.clover.com/v3/merchants/{merchant_id}/items/{item_id}
--header 'content-type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer {access_token}'

The response displays "available": false if the item is not available for ordering. If the item is available, the response shows"available": true.

If the merchant has set up auto-managing, the response shows "autoManage": true. Otherwise, the response shows "autoManage": false. By default, autoManage is set to false.

The sample response below shows that the item "20 Wings" is being auto-managed ("autoManage": true). Because the stock count is zero ("stockCount": 0), the item ("20 Wings") is not available for ordering ("available": false).

{
  "id": "0ZHZ8Y66S63EP", 
  "hidden": false, 
  "available": false, 
  "autoManage": true,
  "name": "20 Wings", 
  "alternateName": "", 
  "code": "", 
  "sku": "", 
  "price": 1295, 
  "priceType": "FIXED", 
  "defaultTaxRates": false, 
  "unitName": "", 
  "cost": 0, 
  "isRevenue": true, 
  "stockCount": 0, 
  "modifiedTime": 1495477636000
}

Manually making an item unavailable

If an item is being managed manually, it is not dependent on stock count, and it must be manually removed from ordering when it is unavailable. Send a POST request to /v3/merchants/{merchant_id}/items/{item_id} and set "available:" to false.
The merchant can also manually change an item's availability on the merchant dashboard Inventory > Items page, making the item unavailable or available as needed.

Updating an item's stock quantity

To update the stock of an item, send a POST request to /v3/merchants/{mId}/item_stocks/{itemId}. Include the required quantity value. For more information, see Managing items and item groups.
On the merchant dashboard, the merchant can manually add to or remove from an item's stock count on the item's Item tracking page, and changing the item to unavailable or available.