I’ve used WooCommerce Square plugin for quit some time and have had success with the plugin syncing product description, name, images and prices. I can’t seem to get WooCommerce to update the stock information in Square or for sales from the same “Location” to update inventory in WooCommerce with a Square POS transaction occurs.
Is there a configuration setting that I’m missing in Square or WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is the source of truth and that can be verified by making a change to the description or price in WooCommerce and seeing the change in the Square item. Inventory numbers are not transferring.
Thank you for getting in touch. I’m glad to hear you’ve generally had a good experience with the WooCommerce Square plugin, and I appreciate your honest feedback and the detailed description of the issue you’ve observed.
To clarify how the WooCommerce–Square integration works: while product details can be synced from either platform, inventory quantity is controlled solely by Square.
In other words, if you manually change the stock quantity in WooCommerce, the next sync will overwrite it with the quantity from Square. Because of this, stock levels should not be manually adjusted in WooCommerce. Instead, inventory should be reduced automatically through normal checkouts or order creation in WooCommerce, which will then sync correctly with Square.
Any manual stock updates made in WooCommerce are not recognized and will always be overridden by Square during synchronization, unless the stock reduction occurs through the standard checkout or order process.
Please let me know if this addresses your concern, or if you have any other questions.
Thank you for your response. Although I have to admit I am confused. I’ve read through the WooCommerce Square Plugin documentation and I don’t see anywhere that it mentions the behavior you’re pointing out. It does not mention that if you want to keep inventory in sync Square MUST be the master of inventory where PO’s and inventory updates (receiving, damage, loss etc) are managed.
If there’s updated documentation that more clearly identifies the behavior could you share it?
Specifically, this document says that inventory editing should be done in the system chosen as master. In my case I’ve chosen WooCommerce as master. We run an ecommerce site where the vast majority of our inventory is available and the system is much more flexible compared to Square so it makes ZERO sense to force me to use Square for inventory management activities, especially when the volume of transactions are so heavily tilted toward ecommerce. Frankly it seems to diminish the benefits of using WooCommerce and WordPress. I suspect Square is heavily influencing the direction of this plugin trying to force people to use their system features so they can increase revenues at WooCommerce customer’s expense.
Sync Inventory: Enable this to keep your inventory counts in sync between WooCommerce and Square. Remember, inventory editing should be done in the platform you’ve chosen as your Sync setting.
I look forward to updated documentation.
P.S. If that documentation exits it should be prevalent and the linked documentation should be removed or updated. I’ve spent countless hours configuring a system and performing tests according to the documentation only to be left frustrated that the system doesn’t work as indicated.
Thank you for your response. I completely understand how this situation can be confusing and frustrating, especially if you initially suspected it was a bug and spent time troubleshooting.
I hope you’re doing well. Since we haven’t heard back, I’ll go ahead and mark this as resolved for now. If you’d like to reach out again or need help with anything else, we’re always happy to assist.
just following up on this thread, I am trying to change the source of the data from square to woocommerce but when I click on the box to change this in settings and save it on Woocommerce it defaults back to square. How do I keep the sync setting to woocommerce ?
I believe if I do this change then square remains the source for quantities but woocommerce becomes the source for all product information?
To help us better understand the issue, could you please check whether you see any errors in the browser console when trying to change the sync setting from Square to WooCommerce and save the changes?
Additionally, please navigate to WooCommerce → Status → Logs and check if any error messages are generated around the time you attempt to save the setting. If you do find any related errors, please share them with us.
Regarding the inventory sync behavior, inventory data is currently pulled from Square every hour to reflect point of sale (POS) transactions. While changes to product details such as the product name, price, category, description, and images can sync from WooCommerce to Square, Square will still update the stock levels every hour to account for POS transactions.
