StockBoss

You sell things you do not hold. The stock figure on your website belongs to a wholesaler two hundred miles away, and it changes all day. StockBoss reads their numbers and keeps WooCommerce in step, and it will build the products for you in the first place.

Where to start

• Install and connect a supplier if you are new. About ten minutes, most of which is finding your supplier’s file.
• Ways to connect a supplier if you want to know whether yours will work before you start. The short answer is almost certainly yes.
• Build products from the range if your stock is already connected and you want the catalogue too.

What it is for

A garment decorator, a promotional products shop, anyone reselling from a wholesaler’s warehouse. You buy blanks, you decorate them, and the count that decides whether you can take an order is somebody else’s.

Today that is usually a person downloading a file every morning and running an importer. It works, and it fails the same three ways every time. It does not happen on the days somebody is busy. It silently applies a bad file. And nobody notices when it has stopped.

What it does

Keeps stock right. Reads your supplier’s file on a schedule and writes what changed. It never writes over your own settings. What you had is snapshotted once before the first write, and handed back in full if you ever stop.

Refuses a bad file rather than trusting one. A supplier’s endpoint having a bad morning and handing back half a file is the failure that actually happens. Applied without thinking that reads as “everything is out of stock” and a shop closes itself overnight. StockBoss refuses it and tells you why. See Why it refuses a file.

Builds the products. Browse your supplier’s range and pick the colours and sizes you sell. You get a WooCommerce product with the right SKUs, the right size order, the photographs, the weights and today’s stock.

Says when it stops. Every run is written down and shown. An email goes out when a supplier stops updating, or when nothing is asking it at all, and again when either is fixed.

Does my supplier work?

Almost certainly, and they do not have to agree to anything or know you are doing it. Most of the ways in need nothing from your supplier: they need a file, and you already have one because you are their customer.

PenCarrie, Ralawise, BTC Activewear and Prestige Leisure have profiles of their own. Everyone else connects by their file, which works just as well.

The one case that does not work is a supplier who publishes nothing. If the only way to see their stock is to log into a portal and look at a screen, there is nothing to read. Nobody can automate that, us included.

Not sure what you have?

Send us the file your supplier gives you and we will tell you whether it works, usually the same day. You do not need an account to ask: [email protected].

What it is not

It is not a second stock system. Everything it writes is ordinary WooCommerce stock, so your themes, your reports and every other plugin see exactly what they always saw.

It does not touch your prices, names or photographs on a product you already had. Connecting a product writes two pieces of information and nothing else. See Connect products you already have.

It is not your inventory system. If you need purchase orders, warehouse locations and multi-channel stock, that is a different kind of product.

Ordering from your supplier

Placing the trade order with your wholesaler has always been yours to do. With Tradeprint connected it happens from your admin instead: every order waits on a screen until you press send, and nothing goes on its own. See Sending orders to a supplier.