How to Enable and Manage Product Stock in Payment Fields

Stock management is essential in business. It helps you keep track of your stock in real-time, prevent excess stock and product shortages, reduce human effort, and ultimately improve your business. Managing stock, however, can be very tricky and complicated without proper tools. Instead of reducing cost and possibly maximizing your overall sales, you risk falling short and eventually losing more.

At Jotform, we continually improve our Form Builder. Previously, Stock management was done with widgets, which meant you had to set up the product items outside our Product List field or Payment Integrations. But the wait is over. Stock management within our Form Builder is now possible. 

How do you enable stock control? Let’s start!

Enabling Stock Control

1. Edit the product where you want to enable its stock control.
2. Go to the Stock tab.
3. Toggle Enable Stock Control to Yes.

Setting up the Stock Control Options

When enabled, you have two options, as shown above:

• Available Stock
• Enable Low Stock Alert

The Available Stock box is the total quantity of products in your inventory. You have to set the quantity to the actual number of stock for the product. If you put zero in this box, you will see a Sold Out badge in the product item, which means you have sold out of the product. The product item is also disabled, and your customers can’t select it on the form.

When you toggle the Enable Low Stock Alert to Yes, you must input a value greater than zero to the Low Stock Value box.

The system checks the available quantity from the Low Stock Value box. If the Available Stock is equal to or below this field’s value, Jotform will send a low stock alert email to your primary email address. 

Jotform will only send the above email once. Clicking the Update Your Stock button will open the Form Builder.

Jotform, on the other hand, sends out the Out Of Stock email to your primary email if you sold out your product.

Clicking Update Your Stock will also open the Form Builder. Even if you toggle the Enable Low Stock Alert to No, the system will still send you the above Out of Stock email.

Setting up Stock on Product Items with Options

For products with Options, enabling the stock control will display the Available Stock panel for all Options. In the below example, we have the Colors as the Options.

The Quantity column of the items from the added Options is zero by default. That means you have sold out the Option, and leaving it empty means you have an unlimited stock for the Option. You must enter the available quantity for each item if you wish to control their stock. 

Stock Control Badges

When the Stock Control is enabled, the Form Builder will display the following badges to let you know if your product stock needs checking.

• Sold Out – This badge is displayed if all product options have a zero stock amount.
• Check Stock – This badge is displayed if your product item has Options and if one of the Options has a zero stock amount.
• Low Stock – This badge is displayed if you toggle the Enable Low Stock Alert to Yes, and if the Low Stock Value is equal to or less than the Available Stock value.

If you have hundreds of products on your form, these badges will make it easier to manage stock.

Related Guides:

• How to Add Options to Payment Forms
• How to Add Product Categories to Payment Fields

More About Managing Stocks

• The form automatically reduces the number of Available Stock based on the quantity of the product or product options sold. For example, your initial stock is 30. If you sold five, the form would reduce the available stock to 25.
• The Quantity option will only display a range based on the available stock. For example, you have ten as the available quantity. If you sold five, you would only see up to five in the Quantity dropdown.
• The form constantly checks the stock values of all products based on a user’s action, such as if they select or deselect a product. This state informs your customers if the Option is still available. For example, you have this Color as the Option, and one of the Colors has run out of stock. Your users will get the following error in the form if they try to submit the form.

• If a product is sold out to another customer while previewing the form, selecting the product will automatically display the Just Sold Out badge. The product is then disabled when you refresh the form or deselect it.

Notes

When you use the Authorization Only feature, the form will only reduce the stock of the product after each successful submission. If you do not complete the transaction using Jotform’s “Charge Customer Now” button/link or gateway’s Complete Transaction functionality, you will need to increase the available quantity manually.

The payment gateways listed below complete the transaction on their side and return the transaction result to Jotform. The transaction result is either Successful or Failed. The form will only reduce the Stock Quantity of the product when Jotform receives a successful transaction result. Therefore, there may be rare cases (if multiple transactions start at similar times and the payment gateway returns payment information with a latency) where stock quantities decrease below zero for off-form payments. 

• PayPal Business (For alternative payment methods)
• Mollie (For alternative payment methods and credit card payments with 3D secure)
• PayPal Personal
• PayPal Invoicing
• PayU
• PayU Money
• PayU Turkey
• Worldpay UK
• GoCardless
• Sofort
• 2checkout
• Skrill
• ClickBank
• Onebip
• Paymentwall