How to: Import a partial product list from Square to WooCommerce

Sep 6, 2017 | Articles, WooCommerce

When using the WooCommerce Square plugin, you are able to sync product and inventory between your Square account and your WooCommerce site. Often store owners will have an existing product catalog in their Square account and they would like to sync those items to their WooCommerce site. This can be done using the Manual Sync buttons on the WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > Square tab.

However, what if you only want to sync some items instead of everything? When syncing from WooCommerce to Square, you have an option on your products that allows you to exclude this product from syncing. When syncing from Square to WooCommerce though, this isn’t an option.  To selectively choose which items should not be imported into Square, you’ll need to do a bit of a work around.

The first step is going into your Square account and exporting your product list. This is done with the Export button in the top right-hand corner of the Items tab:

Export your products from Square

It’s vital that you make sure this export is a complete backup of your items list! Square does not have an un-delete or backup option that you can roll your account back to if anything goes wrong. So make sure the list is complete and the file is stored in a safe place.

• When you have your item list exported, delete any products that you do not want to be synced to your WooCommerce site
• If you want to do this in bulk, the fastest way is to export your item list again, then edit that file to remove the items you want to be skipped

Be careful not to edit the first export that we made, as that is your master list and we need that to remain in tact for later.

Once you’ve edited the second exported file, to remove the items you want, we will import the updated item list to your Square account. Importing is done on the same page as the export, just click on the “Import” button instead. Once you do so, you’ll be asked if you want to “Modify Item Library” or “Replace Item Library”. You want to choose “Replace Item Library“, then upload your modified file.

This option will delete all items in your Square account and replace them with whatever is in your uploaded file

This will erase all of the products in your Square account and then upload the items you still had in your modified file (which should be the ones that you want to be synced to WooCommerce).

When the upload is complete, you’ll have your list of products that can be synced to WooCommerce. You’ll now want to perform a manual sync in WooCommerce, using the “Square -> WC” button under the WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > Square tab.

Once the sync is complete, all the products in your Square account should be in WooCommerce as well.

Now it’s time to restore your Square account to the way it was.

• In Square head to the “Items” tab again and select the import option
• Import the original master file that we exported
• Choose the option “Replace Item Library”
• Click “Next” and follow the import prompts

Once completed your Square account will now have all of the items that we originally started with. Since Square does not automatically create newly added items in your WooCommerce site, the extra items will not be sent to WooCommerce. The items that were already imported though, will still be paired with your site and will sync normally.

Keep in mind that if you do another manual “Square -> WC” sync at any point in the future, all items in your Square account will be imported – not just the ones that already exist. Because of this, I recommend adding any new products in WooCommerce, not Square. Since WooCommerce automatically adds newly created items to your Square account – you won’t need to do a manual sync and thus you won’t import the extra items that are in your Square account.