thread Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce in Archived Discussions (Read Only)

Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

JayGodbold — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 17:22:08 GMT

Having an absolube nightmare with trying to upload my inventory from Square to WooCommerce. It has previsouly added products which we will have to delete as it has double up on some but the issue that I've got at the moment is that I have added stock levels into Square and then tried to force a manual upload within Wordpress but stock levels are not being uploaded. 😞

Please please please help!

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

EJ_ — Wed, 14 Jun 2017 21:17:40 GMT

Hi @JayGodbold

Sorry to hear about the trouble.

There's not much we can help troubleshoot with in regards to the app integration with WooCommerce, as they build and support the integration itself on their end.

Square allows for them to pull the data and information from your Square account.

Reach out to WooCommerce Support directly and they should be able to get you squared away.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Nurtural — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 22:06:38 GMT

Just wrestling with implementing Inventory management. I've got a Wordpress/Woocommerce store and decided to switch to Square for my payment processing (along with Paypal). Looked all around for documentation from either Square or Woocommerce for a best practices on this subject but it doesn't exist.

So. Here's my take.

A. My online store has been up and running and I'm happy with my items having just cleaned it up substantially to make it more streamlined. I only have one product but many variations. So, after much back and forth I decided it made the most sense to buy the Square plugin so that woocommerce-square play nice. Inside my woocommerce settings dashboard I have the integrations tab where I access the setting for my square - you have to connect them first. And then I chose to manually sync WC-->Square. It took a little while but in the end I got all my items to show in Square. (By the way - right now a sync, if it works for you, will overwrite whatever else you have in your Square - so that would be one way to utilize locations if you offer things in person that you do not have online or vice versa).

B. It became apparent that the numbers weren't following to Square so I think I shall have to turn on the inventory option for each item. Then I will enter all my inventory numbers and force a manual sync Square-->WC

If anyone else is managing inventory in the wordpress/woocommerce environment I would love to hear how you do it!

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

candlesoffmain — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 17:02:54 GMT

I was able to snyc all of my published skus in WooCommerce to Square effectively. All inventory updates from WooCommerce TO Square are working properly. However, if an item is sold in my store using Square (iPad) OR if we make a 're-count' of inventory in Square, that data is not consistently being pushed back to WooCommerce. It looks like about half or so (as an estimate) of my changes to inventory in Square are being synced back to WooCommerce properly. It seems strange that WooCommerce can effectively push inventory changes to Square, but that Square cannot consistently make changes back to WooCommerce. Please let me know how you can help or have figured out a work around?

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

topiaboutique — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 19:06:39 GMT

We have had a heck of a time integrating woocommerce and square. For us, we started with square and added the woocommerce site later. We have tried different things to make the integration seamless, but there are still quirks that make the inventory process tedious:

We tried syncing Square --> WC. Failed the first few times. On the fourth try, we were able to get the products to sync over.
We rely on csv files a lot for some of our manual processes, so having the ability to download a csv file of all of our existing inventory was crucial. Upon printing a csv after the integration, we noticed that when inventory was input into Square, it would not cross over to WC. At all. This forced us to start inputting our inventory into WC, which then crossed over into Square. We can now do variable products with differing skus, manage stock on those skus and pull csvs from WC, and the changes are immediately available in Square.
There's a problem with communicating stock levels. When we make a sale in our brick and mortar, the stock levels are correctly adjusted in WC. However, when stock levels are depleted through WC, Square does not pick up on the change. Thus Square has become useless for inventory management purposes.
WC does not have an option to download csv files of products! A huge oversight as far as I'm concerned. We bought a premium plugin that allows us to export AND import inventory csv files. It returns a lot more data than we need, and it would be nice to specify the fields to export in more detail. But it works.
The import function does not work, however. When performing a mass inventory import via csv, WC produces the product correctly. We cannot, however, get products entered this way to go over to Square. I have had my best geeks on the case, and we cannot figure out why this is happening.
My BIGGEST issue with the system is that sales tax does not transfer over. Once I input the inventory into WC, I have to manually toggle sales tax for each item through the Point of Sale. We again can't figure out how to make this work.
So our workflow looks like this: enter inventory data for each individual product one at a time in WC; move to POS and toggle tax for every product; pull a csv from WC when we need an inventory report.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

JayGodbold — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 08:53:27 GMT

Having a complete nightmare still with the reason of me buying the integration (stock inventory through the sites) still not working. 😞

Might have to look somewhere else as an all in one package.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

MountainDevil — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 23:48:08 GMT

Hi, How did you get all of your items to sync into square. I am trying to sync items and I have variable products (diffent sizes) and only 2 of the 5 variatiosn will sync.. Any advie??

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

smallakin — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:40:22 GMT

Hey Jay -

Wondering if you ever found a solution or if you just moved on to another platform. I switched everything over to Square because I was promised inventory integration with my website (and the salesperson knew I was on WooCommerce) and I have just about given up. Now I'm in the busiest time of the year and overselling items online. About to tear my hair out. So... hoping you found a solution? Otherwise I'm thinking shopify...

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Helen — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 22:18:03 GMT

@Woo_Phil Would you be able to take a look at the posts above from @smallakin and @JayGodbold? Any troubleshooting steps or insight would be much appreciated!

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

JayGodbold — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 10:16:39 GMT

My honest opinion STILL is don’t bother. Square say it’s Woocommerce and Woocommerce saying it’s Square. Either way.. it doesn’t work for me as I have sub categories. Big shame.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Woo_Phil — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 20:47:12 GMT

Hey @JayGodbold and @smallakin

I would need a bit more information on what the problem is and what exactly is happening in order to offer some help.

If you have all of your products set up in Square and they have a SKU, you'll want to do an initial force manual sync. You can do this by going to the WooCommerce > Settings > Integration tab. Make sure that on that page you have the inventory sync option enabled, then use the manual sync button for Square to WooCommerce.

Once that sync completes, you should have all your items and inventory in WooCommerce.

If you had previously created some of these items in WooCommerce manually, I would recommend deleting them. In order for your items to pair up correctly, it's best if they are created by the plugin through the sync process.

If the items are being created during the sync, but inventory is not being passed:

First check to ensure you have the inventory sync option enabled. As I mentioned that is on the WooCommerce > Settings > Integrations tab.

Next, enable logging on the same tab as I mentioned in the previous step. Once that's enabled, try the manual Square to WooCommerce sync again. Once the sync completes, review your logs to errors. You can find the logs by going to the WooCommerce > System > Logs tab.

If neither of those steps help at all and you purchase your Square plugin directly from WooCommerce.com, then I would suggest opening a ticket with our team. Since I didn't have your site URL or email address, I wasn't able to check if you had already opened a ticket. If you had, if you let me know the ticket number I can look into it for you.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

smallakin — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:47:37 GMT

I have had my woocommerce site running for quite some time and don't want to delete items from there to create them from Square as that would delete all past sales data for things like 'bestsellers' as well as break clickable links directly to products from blogs, press releases, etc.

We instead did a manual sync to start setting up our inventory in Square POS from the website (with all skus and information filled out) as we were told that it would be fine to get the connection started either way. After doing that and updating inventory via the spreadsheet upload, the inventory successfully displayed in Square, but wasn't syncing to our website. That's when we found out that we were incorrectly guided to have the website and the store set up as 2 separate locations if we wanted them to share inventory. So we deleted the website location and switched the website to share the same location as the store as instructed.

At that point, we did a reverse manual sync from the square pos to the website to sync the inventory. Some of it worked, some of it didn't. It also created some random products that weren't active in POS and created duplicates of several products for some reason (even when the skus were correct in both places). So we had to delete products and correct the display of a lot of variations and after doing all that, eventually selected the "do not sync" on a few of our products because they continue to seem to make duplicates and mess things up.

It does seem like certain things are now syncing, but others are not. Is there any good way to test the connection to see if ALL products are syncing? We definitely oversold things on Black Friday because our website wasn't updating properly from in store sales. So we will probably have to do a full inventory re-count (which took 5 employees a full day to conduct) to make sure everything is working again and I don't want to spend the labor hours if it's not going to work moving forward and need to find a different solution.

And yes, I had a ticket open with customer support about this and I was told to contact my web developer to have them look into it because it wasn't Square's responsibility and after I asked if there was anything she could help me with or somewhere she could direct me for answers as I had already paid my web developer a decent chunk of change to switch over hosting and payments to move to Square, she stopped responding.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Woo_Phil — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 14:45:18 GMT

Hey @smallakin

"Some of it worked, some of it didn't. It also created some random products that weren't active in POS and created duplicates of several products for some reason (even when the skus were correct in both places). So we had to delete products and correct the display of a lot of variations and after doing all that, eventually selected the "do not sync" on a few of our products because they continue to seem to make duplicates and mess things up. "

That indicates to me that the items you manually created were not identical, which caused them to not be paired up during the initial sync. This is why we recommend users not manually re-create items and instead let the initial manual sync create the items.

As well, I would recommend avoiding doing manual syncs in both directions, especially if you have improperly manually recreated items as you described. Otherwise you can get duplicate items as well as mismatched inventory information (all of which you described).

From the sounds of it most of the problems you are experiencing are due to an improper initial pairing during the manual sync. If WooCommerce is the master source that you want to use for your products, then I recommend removing all your products from Square. Once your Square account is blank, perform a WooCommerce to Square manual sync. If there are items you don't want sent to Square, use the "Avoid Syncing" option that you referenced earlier.

Once that sync is complete you'll have your items in Square and you will know that they are all properly matched up. This will prevent issues with duplicate items or inventory not updating (due to the items not being paired up).

The most important thing is to let the plugin do all the work. Don't manually recreate items between the two platforms as they will not be connected.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

smallakin — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 17:32:06 GMT

I haven't manually re-created any items. I'm not actually sure what you mean there. All the items that are shared between the website and the store have been copied over from the web.

We did add some variations to items with additional SKUs in store that we don't offer online and some of those are what keep creating duplicates. However, you would think it would add a variation in WooCommerce if anything, instead of creating a 2nd item in Square. That is what is weird. It's not adding those variations in WooCommerce (which is good because we dont want those available online) but the web keeps re-syncing 'it's version' to our POS even though it is creating duplicate SKUs.

There are also some items we offer in store that we don't offer online and we want to keep it that way, so yes, we have manually entered those in Square.

Also, the reverse sync of our items was once again a recommendation of Square support staff, and now you are saying that you don't recommend that. So that is once again very frustrating as we have wasted SOOOO much time trying to get this right.

And ... deleting all of my products out of Square and re-syncing them is absolutely not an option right in the middle of holiday season. And also it would mess up sales data, plus we spent a handful of hours correcting the way variations read in both Square and WooCommerce after the first sync as it seemed to list them the way the product image was named instead of hte way we named the variation. i.e. Grey Brown became grey-brown-2

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

scb — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 05:23:16 GMT

I have had similiar issues. I am able to sync most of my inventory with square, but have issues with the simple products coming over. The ones that are variations are fine. I also am not seeing that my orders from my square stand are going back to my woocommerce account for my overall orders to all be in one collective place.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

snowgurl — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 23:50:20 GMT

So I've been trying for a day to get the INITIAL manual sync to work between Square >>WC. Every time I do it it just hangs/freezes and the progress bar never moves. I've done it 20+ times so far. I've hunted for help everywhere and checked a bunch of things but nothing has worked.

It IS creating categories, so there is communication. But no products. So I went into the logs and saw a bunch of messages. At first it said "receiving products" but then a quick cURL error with a "timed out."

02-02-2018 @ 16:43:33 - ====Start Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm====
Retrieving Square Categories
====End Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm (0.02)====


02-02-2018 @ 16:43:34 - ====Start Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm====
Getting All Square Inventory
====End Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm (0.02)====


02-02-2018 @ 16:43:35 - ====Start Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm====
Retrieving Products
====End Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm (0.02)====


02-02-2018 @ 16:43:35 - ====Start Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm====
(Retrieving Products) Try #1 - cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 1000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received
====End Log February 2, 2018 4:43pm (0.02)====

Just row after row of this.

So then I disabled the plugin and deleted it. I cleared out the categories that were set up. I logged out of WP and back in, reinstalled and setup the Square WC plugin, and now I'm trying to sync again. After about 2 hours the bar hasn't moved. I checked the log and it's line after line of "timed out" messages again.

And, yes, I have SKUs on all of my items in Square. Is there a special format they must be written in? I have letters, numbers and dashes. No spaces.

My next step is to create some dummy items in Square to see if I can make ones that will sync. Try changing variations, length of titles, etc. WC doesn't like SOMETHING that is in Square.

I'm not sure why this is so difficult. I follow the directions to the letter. Please help!!

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Woo_Phil — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 14:18:50 GMT

@snowgurl

Thanks for posting those logs, that helps a lot!

cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 1000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

That error is not caused by the plugin itself. It means that when the plugin is trying to get information from Square's servers it isn't getting any reply. More specifically it is only waiting 1 second for a reply then timing out. While 1 second would likely be fine in most cases, it's possible it's not for your hosting environment and you may need your host to help change that setting.

Other things that can cause this error:

- Something blocking the responses from Square. This can be your hosting companies firewall/security setup, or a plugin/theme on your site.

- DNS issues with you domain

- Issues with your sites SSL certificate

- Improper caching through either plugins on your site, or from your hosting company

As a first step, I would recommend the following. Try temporarily changing to the default "Twenty Seventeen" theme, or the Storefront theme. Then disable ALL plugins except for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Square. Once you've done that try a sync. If that helps, you'll know either your theme or a plugin on your site is causing a conflict with the communication.

If that doesn't help check to make sure there are no issues with your SSL certificate or DNS settings for your domain. Then ask your host to check if they are blocking any communication between your site and Square. If they take a look at the logs for your site, they should clearly see the outgoing requests from your site and be able to tell if they are blocking the response from Square's servers.

If none of this helps and you are using the official WooCommerce Square plugin, please open a ticket with our team by logging in at WooCommerce.com. If you are using a similar plugin from another third-party developer, you'll want to contact them directly.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

snowgurl — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 20:37:21 GMT

Hi! Thanks for the reply!

So I did everything you said and I'm getting the same errors in the log. So it's not a plugin, it seems.

I did just hear back from WC on the ticket I submitted. He told me exactly what you told me, minus the SSL/DNS stuff, so I guess I'll move on to that. What do you mean by "make sure there are no issues with your SSL certificate or DNS settings for your domain?" What would I look at to make sure they're working correctly? I'm using the SSL that Siteground offers, Let's Encrypt, and their DNS settings.

My WP site is hosted on Siteground. I've only had this site a few days so I have no idea how easy they are to deal with and contact. I will give it a try, though. Wish me luck. 😉

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

Woo_Phil — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 21:10:33 GMT

Hey @snowgurl, Sitegrounds team is usually pretty responsive and helpful.

As for what to look for, you'll likely want to use some testing tools as you likely won't know all of the DNS and SSL settings for your domain.

For your domain try running:

https://mxtoolbox.com/dnscheck.aspx

Then use the "Find Problems" button to see what comes up.

For your SSL certificate:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Can you please let me know your ticket number with our team? That way I can help dig into this with you, more in-depth.

Re: Square inventory not syncing with WooCommerce

snowgurl — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 22:20:21 GMT

Okay, LOTS to report.

You're right. Siteground was SUPER helpful and very quick to respond! Chatted with a guy for an hour. He checked the DNS and SLL and it is all working correctly. So then we tried to reproduce the errors, and we did. So we both thought that upping the timeout setting would help -- but it didn't.

I did notice that earlier today when it was trying to autosync I was getting messages like, "product #sldjfskdjfd syncing" and then the next line would be "variation for product #sjldfjsldkfj -- not syncing. Skipping" -- or something like that. And that repeated over and over. I wonder if WC is having trouble handling the variations in Square. I'd like to remove my variations and test it but I'd hate to do that and have it NOT work, and then have to reenter them all again! Can I make a separate location in Square and add a few items, and try to sync only that location? I could add products WITHOUT variations, and see if that works. Is that doable?

In the meantime, I also uninstalled WC and WC Square completely and reinstalled, tried to sync again, and got the same timeout errors. Thought starting over with a clean DB would help. Nope. 😉