Importing Epos Now products into WooCommerce
Our product sync works by syncing products from WooCommerce > Epos Now. We do not sync products in the opposite direction.
If you need to sync product data from Epos Now > WooCommerce, you can do this by exporting the products from Epos Now and then importing them into WooCommerce. There are a few things to be careful with and we will outline them here as well as our recommended process.
Export products from Epos Now
To export products from Epos Now, we recommend using the Bulk Import app from the Epos Now app store.
EposNow have an export feature built into their product listing page (EposNow back office > Manage > Products > Product List), but this sometimes strips out the leading zeros from barcodes, so if you use barcodes, then we recommend using the Bulk Import app.
- Open the Bulk Import app
- Select the product update template and select All Suppliers from the dropdown list
- This will download a CSV file with all the EposNow products
Editing the CSV file
If you need to edit the CSV file, we do not recommend opening the file directly in Excel. Excel will strip out any leading zeros from Barcodes and other fields.
To open the file safely in Excel:
- Open Excel
- Open a new workbook
- Select Data > Get External Data > From Text
- Select the data type as delimited (newer versions of Excel will detect this automatically)
- Tick the box for My data has headers (newer versions of Excel will detect this automatically)
- Select the delimiter as Comma
- On newer versions of Excel, you will need to click on the transform data button
- Select the columns which have leading zeros (e.g. barcode) and set the Column data format as Text.
- On newer versions of Excel, this screen will look slightly different to the screenshot below, but all you need to do is select the column and set the format as text (shown as an ABC icon)
- Click on Finish/Import and you will now have proper data in Excel. We recommend saving this as an XLSX file so that you easily edit again without going through this same process again for this same download.
- If you download a new CSV from Epos Now, then you will have to go through this process again.
- You can now edit the file as needed and save it as an XLSX file
Importing the data into WooCommerce
At the time of writing, the built in WooCommerce importer has some limitations:
- You must set a positive stock level for each product in the import, otherwise WooCommerce sets the manage stock property to false which means you cannot set a zero stock level.
- If manage stock is not set, then WooCommerce ignores all stock updates that we send.
- More information on the columns required for the default Woo import are here.
- The export from EposNow only contains the product data, not the stock levels so if you used the built in importer, it would set the manage stock to false for all products.
Our recommended plugin to import into WooCommerce is WP All Import. This is a premium plugin but is very configurable and you can be very selective about the data that should be imported. It also does not require you to change the column order or column names in the Excel file.
We recommend following this guide from WP All Import on importing WooCommerce products.
These are some of our suggestions for setting up WP All Import
- Create separate import profiles for creating and updating products
- You can still use the same import file, but this way you can specify what should and shouldn’t be updated
- On the create profile
- Set this profile to create new products only
- Map the fields from the EposNow Export to the relevant WooCommerce fields
- We recommend importing the EposNow fields into the WooCommerce meta fields available on our plugin. A full list of the meta fields available can be seen in this KB article.
- Tick manage stock
- On the update profile:
- Set this profile to update products only
- Set how WP All Import will identify a product. In this example, we would use the EposNow SKU field to match to the Woo SKU field, update this to reflect your matching criteria.
- Set the fields that should be updated
- This will ensure that all other fields remain untouched
You can now use the same file to run the create profile which will create any new products, and the update profile which will update existing products.
NOTE: We recommend that you take a backup of your WooCommerce database before running the imports just in case you need to roll back.
Related Articles
Linking multiple WooCommerce products to a single Epos Now product
In certain cases, it is useful to be able to link a single Epos Now product to multiple WooCommerce products. One example is with measured products. Let’s say you sell flour in-store per kilo. On your website, you will probably sell it in ...Epos Now products beta
Epos Now have a feature called products beta which makes it easier to manage products in the Epos Now back office. As this feature is still in beta, there are some bugs that may appear from time to time. We have found that sometimes when products ...Product names and descriptions on Epos Now
Our integration is able to sync your WooCommerce product name to Epos Now. This is optional and can be switched OFF if you do not want to overwrite your product names on Epos Now. When the product name is being synced, there are a few restrictions to ...Master and child products in EposNow
In Epos Now, a master and child products can be used where a product that is sold is made up of one or more other products. Child products are the products you sell to your customers, and master products are the products that you buy in and that hold ...WooCommerce Meta Fields
We store some data in meta fields on WooCommerce. This KB article will list out these meta fields which can be useful in importing/exporting data from Woo Products The custom fields for products are listed here. You can see where to find them in the ...