Shopventory + Woocommerce + Brick & Mortar

[smallakin]

Hello!  I recently switched back to Square as an effort to end my inventory woes and have the online inventory in my woocommerce site sync with my brick & mortar inventory.  I was promised that the Square inventory would sync when I sold things in store to my WC site, but it doesn't work.  It is spotty at best and actually seems to sometimes alter products but not update inventory.  

I've read a bunch of threads on here about inventory and have seen shopventory pop up several times.  I haven't seen anyone mention it with e-commerce though.  Has anyone used Shopventory with both their Square app in store & Square / WooCommerce online and had it work?  We're already swamped with 'custom' orders after black friday due to over-selling of products online that were sold in store, so I need a solution.

[greenapothecary]

I'd love to have an answer of using Shopventory to update both square and woocommerce when products are added, changed or sold.

[Tom]

Hey @greenapothecary and @smallakin, thanks for bringing this up.

Our information is somewhat limited on this, though I'd suggest having a look at this section of our Support Center as a starting place: Shopventory and Square. In addition, I'm looping in @Woo_Phil in case WooCommerce has any additional insight on using Shopventory for inventory purposes.

Hope this helps get you in the right direction.

[Woo_Phil]

Hi @greenapothecary,

We do not have any integrations directly with Shopventory, so I would not be able to comment on the functionality of their system.

If they have an integration that allows you to sync your WooCommerce store to their platform, it's possible this could work but I can't say for certain without knowing their system or syncing with WooCommerce.

[thewanderloft]

It's frustrating that it doesn't remove it from inventory until the invoice is paid (I give my customers 24 hours to pay).  Also frustrating that it doesn't alert you if you try to invoice something that is sold out per inventory count. Any ideas on how to handle this? 

[EJ_]

@Woo_Phil might be able to help with your question @thewanderloft

But feel free to reach out to the WooCommerce team directly if you need some help or workarounds. 

[Woo_Phil]

Hi @thewanderloft,

>It's frustrating that it doesn't remove it from inventory until the invoice is paid 

Actually, our plugin does. It will send an inventory update to your Square account when the order is placed, even if the order is on hold. So if you are using an offline payment method, such as Bank Transfers, this will still work. If you are using any third-party plugins for processing payments on your orders, they may be causing a conflict that prevents this normal behavior.

>Also frustrating that it doesn't alert you if you try to invoice something that is sold out per inventory count.

That is outside the functionality of this plugin. The selling of items (and limitations of that) is controlled by WooCommerce itself. While WooCommerce will prevent customers from purchasing sold out items (unless you've turned on the backorders options), it does not do so for administrators. This is intentional to allow site owners flexibility when they need to manually make orders for customers when an item may not be in stock but they are allowing an exception. In order to change this you would have to make custom code changes to WooCommerce itself, not the Square plugin. If you wanted to explore that option, I'd recommend checking WooExperts or Codeable.

[smallakin]

Hi @Woo_Phil. I think @thewanderloft was referring to the inventory not being removed until an invoice is paid in Square, not thru WooCommerce, which currently isn't an option.  This is a problem for me as well as I give my wholesale customers Net 30 terms but I ship the inventory right away.  

I believe this is a feature that was added to the 'needed' list in the invoicing chat group I attended but haven't heard any update on it yet.