How does product sync work?

How does product sync work?

With our integration, products sync from WooCommerce > Epos Now.

We took a deep dive into seeing if it was technically feasible to have the sync working in the other direction but came to the conclusion that it was not feasible if we wanted to ensure we had a robust integration that satisfied most of our customers requirements. The main consideration was getting multiple attributes to work with variable products. Most POS systems including Epos Now have limited functionality for this as it is not a required feature to sell in store, but is incredibly important to sell online to facilitate variable products as well as search/filtering.

In order for the integration to work correctly, it is important to establish a good baseline during the setup. The input required from your side depends on whether you have products in only WooCommerce or Epos Now or on both platform. More information on this is available in this KB article.

Creating products

Once product sync is ON for your account, any products you create on WooCommerce will be created on Epos Now automatically by our integration.

This product will be created in a category called WooCommerce on Epos Now (we can change this to another category if you wish) and you can then move it from there into any Epos Now category using the Epos Now back office or their Bulk Import app.

In order to prevent duplicates, we can run a few checks before we create a product. As part of your setup, you would let us know which matching criteria to use (e.g. check if the WooCommerce SKU matches the SKU set on Epos Now for any product). If we find a match, we will automatically link to that product and update it. If no match is found, then we create the product on Epos Now.

More details on the product sync setup options available can be found in this KB article.

Updating products

When we receive a product update from WooCommerce, we first check if we already have a linked Epos Now product. You can see all the existing product links in our product linker. If we have a linked product, then we will update the fields that are marked to sync on update.

Details on which fields sync can be found in the Data Mapping section in this KB article. We can pick and choose which fields should sync so if for example you do not want the price to be updated on Epos Now, we can switch off the sync for the price field.

Deleting products

We do not hard delete any products on Epos Now. When we receive a notification from WooCommerce that a product has been deleted, we can setup the integration to either archive the product on Epos Now, or to do nothing.

Backups

We take a daily backup of your Epos Now products just in case things need to be reverted. We will do this for the duration of the early access period with no additional charge.

Product Names

On Epos Now, product names can have a maximum of 40 characters. Product descriptions can have 128 characters. This means that customers usually end up abbreviating product names on Epos Now.

We have added an extra product field in WooCommerce for you to be able to specify the product name and description that should be used on Epos Now. If this is not filled in, we will then use the product name that WooCommerce gives us.

Alternatively, you may choose to update the products names for Epos Now through the Epos Now back office directly, in which case we would recommend we switch off the sync for the product name on update, so that we do not overwrite your changes on Epos Now.

Prices

On WooCommerce, you can specify a regular price and a sale price. We have a setting that allows you to choose whether we should use the sale price or not.

If this setting is enabled, then we will check if a sale price is defined for the product, and if so, we will use it. Otherwise we will use the regular price.

If this setting is disabled, we will always use the regular price even if the sale price is defined.

You can of course choose not to sync the price at all, in which case you can make price changes on Epos Now directly. This is useful for customers who use different prices online and in-store

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