Keeping your online store updated is of utmost importance. While you can manually update data fields yourself, doing so can produce errors and potential inconsistencies.
Most online shop owners have a spreadsheet, separate from their WooCommerce store, containing their current inventory. With a plugin like WP All Import, you can now sync your spreadsheet with your WooCommerce store in a matter of minutes.
Additionally, you can have it run on a schedule so that you can forget about updating quantities manually yourself. The plugin will do all the work for you.
In this post, I’ll be taking you step-by-step through the entire process of syncing and updating your WooCommerce product prices and stock values.
Let’s get started.
Uploading Your File
To start off, create a new import by going to All Import > New Import in the WordPress sidebar. You can import data to your WooCommerce Products three different ways:
- Upload a file: This lets you manually upload a file from your computer.
- Download from URL: This lets the plugin gain access to your file which would be saved on Dropbox or Google Sheets/Google Drive.
- Use existing file: This allows the plugin to access a file on the server.
In this tutorial, we’re going to be using the Download from URL option. Simply copy and paste the file URL and click Download. The benefit of this option is that you can schedule the plugin to automatically import data on a regular basis.
The aim here is to sync and update existing files on our WooCommerce website. For this reason, we’re going to select Import data from this file into Existing Items and select WooCommerce Products from the dropdown menu.
Note: You can also create new products with the Existing Items option if you choose to map all product data in the next few steps. However, we’re going to stick to simply updating prices and stock amounts in this tutorial.
Continue to Step 3.
Mapping Prices and Stock Amounts From the Import File to Products
Next, go to the General tab under WooCommerce Add-on and drag and drop the price elements from the right-hand side of your screen to your price fields. In this case, I’ve selected the regular price element and sale element.
WP All Import gives you the possibility of also adjusting prices by percentage or a set amount, schedule sale price dates, and more.
Under Inventory, drag and drop the stock element/s into the stock fields. You can set the manage stock option per product using an XPath or choose yes/no. WP All Import can automatically set the stock status based on the quantity found in your imported spreadsheet. To do this, under Stock status, select Set automatically.
Continue to the final step of the import.
Finding Existing Products and Updating the Prices and Stock Amounts
At this point, we need to let the plugin know which product fields we want to update. WP All Import does a great job of updating existing products based on the Product Title, Content, a Custom Field, or the Product (Post) ID.
WP All Import can also create new products if it doesn’t find a match in your database. In this tutorial, we’ll only be updating existing products, so I left Create new products from records newly present in your file disabled.
You can import and update all WooCommerce data or specify particular fields to be updated. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re only going to be updating the prices and stock values. Therefore, I selected Choose which data to update.
Now you can select the particular data fields that require updating. Prices and stock values fall under custom fields. WooCommerce saves this data under the following custom fields:
- _regular_price
- _sale_price
- _price
- _manage_stock
- _stock
Automatically Sync Prices and Stock Values on a Schedule
The plugin now gives you multiple options that all you to schedule the import. Since we selected the Download from URL option at the start of this tutorial, WP All Import can now access it at any time, based on our preferences, and run an import.
In this way, you can rest assured that as your inventory is updated, WP All Import can keep track of any changes and update your online store.
You can set WP All Import to automatically sync your WooCommerce Products prices and stock on a weekly or monthly basis. In this case, I’ve set my import to run every day of the week, at 6 particular times, daily.
Running the Import and Checking the Products
All you have to do now is run the import and let the plugin update your prices and stock values. Once the import is finished, you can view the Manage Imports page to get an overview of how many products were updated.
Finally, head over to the Products tab to view your updated products.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a way of syncing your online shop inventory to your WooCommerce product prices and stock values, then look no further. WP All Import is an easy-to-use plugin that gets the job done.
The step-by-step interface is intuitive and easy enough for any level of WordPress user. One of the most useful features, in this plugin, is the ability to schedule regular imports to keep your WooCommerce products up to date.
Of course, the process described in this tutorial can be applied to any data field, from product title and content to attributes, images, and more.
Have you tried WP All Import to sync your WooCommerce data? Let us know in the comments section below.
