Publish from Square to Woo

Hello smgdarien,

Thank you for contacting Woo support.

One strategy to achieve a more streamlined process is to use Square’s “Locations” feature.
By creating a unique business location within Square exclusively for your WooCommerce online store, you’ll be able to better manage which products you want to synchronize.

Here’s how you can do this:

1. In your Square Dashboard, create a new business location to represent your WooCommerce online store.
2. Assign the 14 new variable products (or any other products you wish to sync) to this specific business location.
3. Go to your WooCommerce settings for the Square integration and set this new business location as the one to sync with.

By doing so, only the products assigned to the business location linked to your WooCommerce store will be synchronized, thereby avoiding the unnecessary duplication of the entire product list.

Let me know if you have any questions. ??

Best regards.

This would require each store to purchase an additional license for Square’s Retail Plus plan, which isn’t a feasible option since Retail Plus is priced per location.

Additionally, setting up a separate location would necessitate maintaining two stock bases, despite all 14 products being sold at a single location. This arrangement would render inventory synchronization completely redundant.

I’m sure you understand how crucial this tool is, and why the proposed workaround is not viable. Having a sales channel toggle to easily enable or disable products across WooCommerce and Square is essential.

The “Import All” feature is suitable for very small stores with minimal product counts. However, the ability to select specific products to sync (and create) from Square to WooCommerce is critical. I would expect many store owners to find this useful.

For comparison, Shopify allows sales channels to be easily enabled or disabled per product.

From an API perspective, I see no limitation on either side that would prevent achieving this. It could even be handled purely within the WooCommerce plugin through the Square settings, syncing only products from specified categories.

For example, if I have a product called ‘Maxi Dress’ categorized under ‘Dresses’ and ‘Online’ in Square, Square for WooCommerce should only flag products with the ‘Online’ category to be uploaded to WooCommerce. Note that ideally, the category should be ‘Dresses’—this is just an example, and the setup could be organized differently. However, using WooCommerce, Square, or this plugin as an excuse for why this isn’t possible is not acceptable. This capability is entirely feasible and, frankly, should have been implemented from the start.

Hello smgdarien!

Thank you for your reply.

If you have “WooCommerce” selected at Sync Settings, you can access the “product level sync” setting. This allows for more control on the WooCommerce side when the information flow is WooCommerce → Square.

Currently, with “Square” selected at Sync Settings (Square → WooCommerce flow), WooCommerce’s control over products is limited. One solution is to sync all products from Square to WooCommerce.

You can then bulk edit products and set “No” at Sync with Square settings for products you don’t want to appear on WooCommerce. Afterward, change those products to Draft or Private to hide them from the website.

By following these steps, you can display only the products you want on the website and sync them with Square.

I hope this information is helpful!
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. ??

Best regards.

Adding an option in both APIs to specify which products WooCommerce imports (and which it doesn’t) is easily achievable.

Requiring all store owners to manage their products exclusively through WooCommerce is not a viable solution.

If a store has over 10,000 products in Square but only 1,000 are needed on WooCommerce, this creates a significant amount of unnecessary postmeta bloat and extra work for the client. Importing all 10,000 products and then changing the status of 9,000 products to draft or private could potentially break the store. A possible workaround would involve batch updates, for example, updating 100 products in bulk per session. However, this process would be extremely time-consuming, even with a great host. I personally host WooCommerce stores on an optimized stack with dedicated VPSs and a separate database. Even in this scenario, managing such a high volume of batch updates isn’t fast.

Furthermore, the proposed workarounds contradict WooCommerce’s best practices for maintaining a healthy and optimized store. Keeping 9,000 redundant products, complete with excessive metadata, especially in filtering tables, due to the plugin’s lack of essential segregation features is inadequate.

The responses so far have not been practical and are merely temporary fixes for what, in my opinion, are essential tools for effectively handling both online and in-person POS experiences. If the Square for WooCommerce integration is this limited and there are no plans to update it to address these issues, it essentially encourages all store owners to switch to Shopify. It’s unreasonable to ask a retailer to adjust their entire data flow simply because of this plugin’s limitations or lack of development.

I’ve considered another workaround when these temporary solutions prove infeasible, which is to create a feature request. After reviewing hundreds of feature requests, some with hundreds of upvotes over six years, it’s apparent that this plugin has been neglected with no attempts to improve it further. The only significant update was the addition of gift cards, a feature initially requested eight years ago. If I’m expected to wait eight years for a simple option to specify which products should be imported from Square to WooCommerce, you can understand why a developer with extensive experience in WordPress and WooCommerce, like myself, is frustrated and would rather switch to Shopify.

Hello smgdarien

Thank you for your detailed feedback and suggestions.

We truly value your expertise and the time you took to articulate the intricacies of your experience, as well as your needs as a store owner and developer.

We understand that the ability to selectively import products from Square to WooCommerce is crucial for efficiency and maintaining a streamlined product management process, especially when dealing with a large inventory.

While our current integration may not support this functionality to the extent necessary for your use case, I encourage you to submit a Feature Request. Your input is essential to our ongoing development and helps us prioritize updates that will provide the most value to our users.

Have a great day!

I trust a feature request has been submitted. We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – we’ll be here if and/or when you are ready to continue.