Sync from Woocommerce Square causes duplicates. Reassign sales data?

[kcbenson]

My client has an existing retail store with a few hundred items in Square and has created a Woocommerce store with about a hundred products. We entered SKUs for common product/items, and then synced from Woo to Square. The sync created nearly perfect duplicates for every product. Some products are simple products, some are variable. All are duplicated. Luckily, I had exported a spreadsheet of all their Square items before the sync and was able to import that back in over the dupes.

So from the reading I've done, I think I'm going to be told that my first mistake was creating the same products/items in both places before the sync. I think I'm going to be told that the initial sync from Woo to Square will create one item in Square for every product in Woo (or vice versa), even if this means duplicate SKUs.

So I'm going to have to delete products and sync from Square to Woo, or delete items and sync from Woo to Square. At this point, though, I don't want to delete my products from Woo because there's a lot of data entry (much more detail in Woo than in Square), and the matching items in Square have sales data I don't want to lose so I don't want to delete them either.

What I'm thinking about is reassigning sales data. Do the sync again and move the sales data from each old Square item to each newly created Square item, then delete the old Square item. Is this possible?

[Helen]

Really sorry to hear that you're experiencing this @kcbenson!

I'm looping in @Woo_Phil, a WooCommerce specialist, to take a closer look and help you with the next steps.

[kcbenson]

I'm having some success with syncing products/items one-by-one. I marked all items in Square with a name change so that I could tell if they synced. I went back to Woo and turned off sync individually for all products. Then I turned it on for one product and forced a sync. It worked. My product in Woo synced to my item in Square and changed the name to the Woo name. The Square item kept its sales and stock history.

I've synced about 30 products this way. They had the SKUs lined up, but there were other problems. On Woo I might have one product with four variations, but on Square it would be four separate items. Even though the SKUs were right, the sync didn't move Square's items into variations. Another time both platforms were arranged into variations, but one of the variations was spelled differently, so it duplicated. It's turning out to be database cleanup.

I'm pretty sure Woo_Phil is going to tell me I can't reassign sales data from one item to another.

[kcbenson]

I'm coming to the end. What I've learned is that if you have to sync existing Woo products to existing Square items, you have to have more than just the SKUs perfectly aligned.

1) You must have only one category chosen in Woocommerce, and it has to be the same category chosen in Square. This seems pretty obvious, obvious enough that I didn't go looking for it before I tried the first sync. But a number of products were set for multiple categories. I don't know how the sync chooses, but it will choose only one of the categories, always the wrong one.

2) If your product is a variable product in Woo, it must also be a variable product in Square. This also seems obvious, but about a quarter of my products were variable in Woo but were separate products in Square (with SKUs matching the Woo variations). I had to break these variable products into separate products in Woo before the sync as I would have lost sales data if I created Square variations and deleted the separate items.

3) If your product is a variable product in Woo, the variations must be named exactly the same across platforms. Again, this seems obvious, but it took me awhile to notice that it was "Pomegranatopia" in Woo and "Pomegrantopia" in Square. Because of this little discrepancy, an entire product of 16 variations duplicated itself into Square. Watch out for double spaces in variation names, watch out for leading or trailing spaces in variation names, watch out for curly quotes vs straight quotes ("Women's Large" is different from "Women’s Large").

The best deal is if you can sync new Woo products to Square without the product already existing in Square.

[Woo_Phil]

Hey @kcbenson,

You are correct with your summary that you would need to either sync your Square products to Woo and delete the extra unwanted items, or sync from WooCommerce to Square and enable the "do not sync" option on any products you don't want sent to your Square account. You can find that option on the "General" tab of your products. You can also set this when using the Bulk Edit options from the Products tab:

http://cld.wthms.co/rELNat

Manually recreating the products is not the same as the matching process that is done when you perform a manual sync. Doing this will result in duplicate products being created, as you had happen.

>"What I'm thinking about is reassigning sales data. Do the sync again and move the sales data from each old Square item to each newly created Square item, then delete the old Square item. Is this possible?"

I'm not sure exactly what you are doing when you refer to reassigning sales data. Do you simply mean replacing the manually created items from orders with the automatically created items? If so, then yes, you could do that and then delete the manually created items. An easier alternative would be to simply delete the manually created WooCommerce items though. Their sales stats will still show in your reports as those items will still be tied to orders. The downside to this would be that when you run WooCommerce reports for this year, you'll see these items listed twice. You will see the stats for the old manually created items, then you will see the new automatically imported items tracked separately. This will not negatively impact your stats as the values will still be correct. It's just that you will these items broken down into old & newly created items.

If you are using a third-party tracking system for your sales stats, then you would could transfer over the stats to the newly imported items as you mentioned. Once that's done, you can delete the manually created items.

[kcbenson]

Now I'm really confused. What I have is two stores: one online and one brick-and-mortar. Both have products. Both have prior sales. The two stores should be synced. Deleting manually created products means losing data. So I was trying to figure out how to have the sync work without it actually creating any new products.

For the most part, I've actually succeeded with that, by aligning categories and variations and variation structures, exactly.

My idea of moving the sales data was, obviously, so foreign as to be unimaginable. Because the sync was producing duplicates (and I didn't understand why at that point), I thought my only choice was to live with the duplicates and get rid of the originals. But I didn't want to lose sales and inventory data. So I thought maybe data could be transferred from the original item to the duplicate, possibly upon deletion. I still haven't tried deleting an item in Square, so I still don't know what happens to its sales data. Does it just disappear, or does Square offer you a place to keep it (transfer it to a different item) when you delete an item? This is something I don't see a good way to test.

[Woo_Phil]

Hey @kcbenson,

>Because the sync was producing duplicates (and I didn't understand why at that point), I thought my only choice was to live with the duplicates and get rid of the originals.

As I mentioned above, manually recreating products will work when using the manual forced sync option. This is because there is more information that is used to pair up items than what you see on the surface.

>So I thought maybe data could be transferred from the original item to the duplicate, possibly upon deletion.

You aren't able to transfer sales data between items in WooCommerce, but as I mentioned previous this data will remain in your WooCommerce reports. If you delete a product, it will still show in your WooCommerce reports.

I'm not sure if it's possible to transfer sales data between products in Square, but their team may be able to comment on that 🙂

[kcbenson]

BTW, everything is working smoothly at this point except that one of the categories keeps disappearing and substituting an older, apparently deleted, category. A few weeks ago, the client deleted the Square category "EST Foods" and made a new category "Gluten Free Treats". We have a number of products in Woocommerce that use the Gluten Free Treats category, and I got them to sync using that category, but the next morning all the Gluten Free treats Items now show in the (restored?) EST Foods category in Square, and Gluten Free Treats is gone.

If I force a manual sync from WooCommerce to Square, EST Foods disappears, Gluten Free Treats is restored, and all the Gluten Free Treats items show up in the Gluten Free Treats category. At least for a few hours, and then it reverts back to EST Foods.

This is not a big problem, but I would like to fix it eventually. Have you ever seen this before?

My first thought (haven't done anything yet because of the holiday) is to make a new category in Woocommerce (like "GF Treats" or something), switch all the Gluten Free Treats to it, force a manual sync, delete Gluten Free Treats, sync again, change the name of the new category back to Gluten Free Treats, sync again.

[UsernameHere]

@Woo_Phil & @kcbenson I found this thread as the #1 search result in Google when querying my identical problem as described here...

We've been experiencing the same, seemingly inexplicable, severe problem in 2-way product inventory syncing between WooCommerce and Square PO- to the point it's kept us from launching our website until we can figure this out:

1. We have a physical store and a WooCommerce store (not launched or published)
2. We inputted all (~300) of our store's inventory items into WooCommerce one-by-one over the last few months preparing for our grand opening
3. We selected WooCommerce as our 'master record of inventory' (since Square has limitations and not as many variable options) and connected WooCommerce and Square via the official Square Woo WordPress plugin
4. In the very beginning for maybe ~100 products, the items inputted into WooCommerce seemed just fine, but then upon clicking "update" on the Square Tab within WooCommerce settings on WordPress Dashboard a few weeks ago, everything went haywire with about 30-40 duplicate items showing up randomly after the manual sync
5. We've looped in our web designer, Square support, WooCommerce engineers, multiple support tickers, and I've even filmed screen recordings and provided screenshots ....... all with no resolution

Now, we have a fully developed awesome website we're literally just sitting on because no one can provide a resolution. PLEASE HELP!

[sayra]

Hey @UsernameHere, 

We'd be happy to ask around for you. What did our Support team tell you regarding this?

[UsernameHere]

Thanks for asking, it's been hard going and honestly we're at an impasse it seems now after weeks of getting nowhere. Square says "it's a WooCommerce problem," and WooCommerce is saying "Reach out to Square's engineering team," which means we don't make any progress.

Now we're unable to launch our website, and we're continuing to see duplicate items made and have no answers... 😞

[UsernameHere]

Bump...

[eastwestpress]

Bumping this thread, was there any resolution to this? I am experiencing an identical issue as @UsernameHere and could use some help.