Has Square Online Started to Merge/Sync Categories with Square POS?

[lennys26]

In the past week or 2 I have noticed that my categories in the Retail system are now all duplicated, although frustratingly the items within the duplicates are slightly different.

One of the two 'versions' says that it is "Hidden from all sites", and one has a symbol that when hovered over a pop-up appears referencing "...categories transferred from Square Online..."

• Does anyone (Square?) know what is going on?
• Is Square finally implementing a category sync between the platforms? Did I miss the notification?
• Can I erase one of these duplicates? Do users need to do or be aware of anything?

[lennys26]

Definitely not fun @FranV . 

After a bit of a search in the forums, I can find multiple threads with users complaining of these issues from several months back when apparently the ‘update’ started being rolled out in certain markets. With similar/same problems continuing months and markets down the line, it is disappointing that Square Support still seems clueless on how to assist customers with it - and worse that they respond as if no change was made and/or that they have never heard of the problem. 

Luckily my store relies primarily on the brick and morter sales and not online, so I have been more free to take the nuclear approaches of wiping out categories and reloading inventories. I also am at a stage now where I remove and replublish the site every several weeks because many things become out of sync. Most of the time I do not know what is bad and only notice them by accident. 

[lennys26]

Oh, and just to add that while I state that things get “out of sync” I not only refer to differences between the Square configs and the Online configs, but also that what is seen as being configured  (in either or both sites) is NOT what is actually happening.  This is where the unpublished and republish seems to help. 

[DinaLRosenberg]

 We too now have the issue of categories being duplicated. Do we go ahead and erase the "newer" ones without the photos? We have the same "hidden from sites" categories and the categories we've always used.

In the meantime.. overselling of inventory persists DAILY... 

[lennys26]

@DinaLRosenberg - From what I can tell (as a user) these 'Hidden From All Sites" categories are not really doing anything and, from my experience, can be deleted. I had no issues with deleting them other than the historical reporting which is now all screwed up.

The engineer in me cant quite tell why they were created or what backend tinkering could have caused them to be needed, but it seems safe to delete them. And with no real assistance from Square, doing what seems correct is your only bet.

[L3002]

Following this topic because I, like many others, have noticed that some of my active categories are no longer showing when you hover over Shop All in Navigation. They are there, however, if one clicks on the Shop All. The problem is, users need 3 or less steps to get somewhere on the site. If they hover over Shop All and don't see the category they're looking for, they may move to another site. I've reached out to support several times both chat and phone. Last conversation with support was that they believed everything was set up correctly, and they were going to report this as a bug. Great! My best selling category is no longer showing up. And, we know how long bugs take to work out, if at all. Incidentally, I had made no changes at all (had no reason to), so believe this was something that happened during the migration. The two categories that do show up when hover over Shop All have a globe beside them. The category that does not show up when hover over Shop All does not have the globe. I was told this meant nothing. I really would like to find a fix for this.