Connect products you already have

Stock is no use until StockBoss knows which of your products is which of your supplier’s codes. If you already have the products, this is that step. If you do not, skip it and build them from the range instead, where the connection is made for you and is always right.

Connecting changes nothing

Worth saying first, because it is the reason people hesitate.

Connecting a product writes two pieces of information and nothing else. Your product’s name, price, description, photographs, categories and SKU are untouched, on every product, every time.

Even the stock number is snapshotted before anything is written, so switching a supplier off gives you back precisely the figures you had.

How matching works

StockBoss proposes matches by comparing your products’ SKUs to the supplier’s codes, and it is deliberately generous about it. Different capitalisation, different spacing, dashes where the supplier uses spaces, and partial matches all get proposed.

You confirm. Nothing is connected because a computer thought it looked close.

The rule underneath is worth knowing because it explains why the two halves behave differently: generous when proposing, strict when writing. A proposal is checked by a person, so it can afford to guess. A write decides alone, so it will not fold punctuation to make a match.

The ones it cannot work out

Some products will not match, usually because your SKU is your own numbering rather than the supplier’s. There is no clever way around that, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so.

Those land in Needs you, and each one can also be answered from that product’s own edit screen while you are in there anyway. An unconnected product is not broken: it simply keeps its own numbers, exactly as it did the day before.

Products made of several codes

Sometimes one thing in your shop is more than one code at your supplier. A pack you sell as one item, or a product you fill from two equivalent lines.

A connection can carry several codes, and StockBoss adds them up. Each is floored at nothing first, so a line the supplier is oversold on cannot eat another line’s stock.

If some of those codes are missing from today’s file, the total is understated and says so. If all of them are missing, the product is left alone rather than set to none.

What happens when a customer buys

A sale drops the WooCommerce figure straight away, as it always does. What the next run writes back is yours to choose, per supplier, under Your stock numbers on their connect screen.

Show their figure, the default, writes the supplier’s current number back over yours. Their number is the truth about what is in their warehouse, and your sale has not changed it. Right for a shop that orders from the wholesaler as it sells.

Take off what you have already sold remembers your sales and subtracts them, so a fresh update never puts sold stock back on sale. For shops that take orders first and buy from the wholesaler in batches.

Keeping stock right covers choosing between them.

What a missing code means

This is the rule that keeps shops open: a code that is not in today’s file means “leave it alone”, never “sell none of it”.

Suppliers drop lines from a file for all sorts of reasons, most of them uninteresting. A shop that reads absence as zero closes itself a little more every day.

Genuinely discontinued is a different fact, and it is found a different way. The overnight range re-read compares the supplier’s catalogue with what you stock. When something you sell has really left their range, Needs you gets a row saying so, and the decision stays yours.

Duplicated products

WooCommerce’s own Duplicate button copies a product’s custom fields, connection included. StockBoss checks which product it actually found a connection on, rather than trusting the copied value. A duplicate cannot write its stock onto the original it was copied from.