Negative quantities from Third Party orders

[Alex_Frank]

Hi community of Toast lovers!

Has anyone else experienced quantities dipping negative from third party orders coming through for quantities higher than what you have on hand? For example, if we update a cookie quantity to 2 chocolate chip left and someone orders 6 through a third party app, the order is allowed to come through and we will have -4 on hand. Toast reps have told me to contact the third parties directly to change inventories which doesn't exactly scream "seamless integration" to me. They've said it could take up to 4-12 hours to update menus on third parties from Toast which is an insane acceptable range. They've also told me that they've never heard of this before but I've seen it at 2 different businesses before. Looking to get some help with this ASAP. Please, if you've experienced this, let's get Toast to more urgently fix! It creates more work for our team, disappointment for our guests, and just unnecessary frustration overall. 

[josh212]

When dealing with On Hand quantities for online ordering i reccomend a buffer amount added. 

Scenario: I begin my order on grubhub on my computer leave it in my cart go ask if anyone wants anything go checkout and the same time some goes to uber eats and selects it after me etc etc. Because unlike phone ordering where you can only take so many calls 10 ppl can hit submit at the same time. Just like unless you clear your page cache it doesnt always update same thing goes for every site. THe reason they say 4-12 house is that grubrub refreshes the menu nightly versus hourly but quatitites are always fairly fast.

If this is a constant isssue, which it sounds like it may be because of cookie variety if your a cookie shop, I reccomend having a second choice for every item just to streamline operations

[Alex_Frank]

Hi! Thanks for replying to my post! By "buffer amount" do you mean updating the quantity sooner rather than later? The other tricky thing to keep in mind is since future orders pull from the same inventory, and for a bakery future orders are huge, we need to keep items in stock as much as possible. But I hear you and understand how this may happen. If the issue was multiple orders coming in at the same time and selling us out and below the quantity, I could make sense of it and honestly probably wouldn't have posted. 

Heard on grubhub updating nightly. That also seems insane to me. We'll just change item's visibility as we sell out which seems to help with this issue but, again, that isn't the seamless integration we had hoped for. 

And we surely swap things out for guests and have ops behind those scenarios but ya know when you're craving oatmeal choc chip and you get an oatmeal raisin... we all know how that goes 😉 

[rcmck]

I think they mean to put a quantity in that is less than what you actually have to give some room for error, if you had 100, maybe put in 90, so if it does happen you are less likely to disappoint a customer. Future orders is definitely going to complicate this further. I run into the negative issue just in house, if a quantity isn't in soon enough, with several servers anyone of them could already have the item on a check and that won't be accounted for, and it will oversell. And when you add multiple online sources to mix it makes it even trickier. 

[Rob]

Thanks for reaching out about this and providing this insight!