Syncing Product Data

We now know how to fulfill orders and manage sales for our store. The next important step is to list our products where our potential customers will see them.

When you run an e-commerce business, it’s tempting to list your products on as many marketplaces as possible so that you can earn as much revenue as possible. A great example of this going wrong is when you have a WooCommerce store where you list a kite for $10, and then you have an eBay store where you sell the same kite for the same price. If you update one price and forget to update the other, you can run into the following problems:

• You could miss out on additional income
• Customers could find out they paid a higher price and demand a refund (or, even worse, they refund on one system and rebuy the exact item on your other site)
• You could oversell a product and not have enough stock to fulfill orders

In general, it’s a bad idea to store data in two or more places...

Exporting out of WooCommerce

If you need to import data into another system, the first step is knowing how to correctly export that data out of WooCommerce. You can use WooCommerce as your singular source of truth, update all data in WooCommerce, and then export the data out of it into other systems.

If you need to copy data to another system, you should set up a direct integration, such as WooCommerce and Square integration (which we will set up in the next chapter), which automatically syncs products and product data between both systems.

However, if you don’t have a direct integration, then you’ll need to export data manually under WooCommerce | Products | Export, as follows:

Figure 6.1: Exporting products from the Products screen

And you can import this data into different systems. We’ll cover the ins and outs of a comma-separated value (CSV) file shortly.

Alternatively, you could use a tool such as Zapier (https://zapier...

Importing products via CSV

One of my first WooCommerce projects was for a large furniture company that had its own proprietary database, where it kept all of its product information. This database was where it added new products, updated prices, added photos, and placed products into categories.

The company wanted its website to reflect what was in the database. So, we had two options:

• Integrate with WooCommerce so that every database change is mirrored on the website
• Export products into a CSV file and import it into WooCommerce

Functionally speaking, both approaches achieve the same results. However, having to maintain integration with an unfamiliar proprietary database sounds like a lot of work and a potential headache. Conversely, exporting products into a CSV file is easy, and it’s equally easy to import that CSV into WooCommerce.

We’re now going to look at how you can import a CSV file into your WooCommerce store.

Importing a CSV

From...

Integrating with an ERP

As your store grows, it’s natural to slowly piece together different pieces of technology to solve the day-to-day challenges of running a business. You’ll likely have different systems for the following:

• Accounting
• Taxes
• Shipping
• Inventory

This is fine for small stores, but as you grow, it becomes a lot to remember. For example, you might sell 10 bicycles a month and have 11 bikes left. A customer buys a bike, and WooCommerce sends you a low-stock notification. You ask your vendor for a quote/invoice and wait to hear back. You pay the invoice and log it in your accounting system. You receive the bicycles, and you have to mark the order as received. Then, you log the bicycles in WooCommerce so that new users can buy them.

This is a delicate process and breaks the single-source-of-truth principle we talked about earlier because, at certain points, you have to remember to log the same event in multiple systems.

Luckily...

Summary

If you only have one store, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about syncing data between multiple systems. But as your business grows, you’ll likely need to share data between systems.

In this chapter, we learned how to export and import CSV files from and into your WooCommerce site. That means you can connect any system to WooCommerce, and that is incredibly powerful. By importing and exporting the right data, you can test any piece of software and see whether it works for you and your business.

We also learned how to use an ERP system that can keep all of our data in one place. With an ERP in place, you don’t need to sync data with CSV files, and preventing human error should help your business run more efficiently. This is not to mention that many ERPs have advanced e-commerce functionality, such as forecasting demand and managing the purchase order process. Now, we’re ready to share data with other systems.

In the next chapter, we...