What's new

We build the next feature from what you tell us. If a supplier of yours is not listed, or something would make your shop easier to run, we want to hear it.

Tell us what to build. Email [email protected] with the supplier you buy from, the features you want, or the part of stock keeping that wastes your week. A real person reads every message, and the person who reads it is the person who builds the plugin.

StockBoss 1.1.0

The first release built from a real shop’s daily use. A founding customer ran StockBoss against their own supplier account, and this release is what their fortnight of feedback turned into.

Building products got richer:

• Choose the photographs. Suppliers photograph a garment several ways. The build panel shows each kind as a tile with a real picture, and you tick the ones you want. The first becomes the product photo, the rest go into the gallery.
• What arrives with a build. A fold-out on the build panel lists everything the build carries: weights, costs, photos, barcodes. It counts from the supplier’s own data, so “none in this supplier’s data” is said before you build, not discovered after.
• Review before a bulk build. Build all from the tray now opens a review sheet first: every product, its colours and sizes, and the settings the batch shares. Building starts when you confirm.
• Barcodes. Where the supplier publishes them, they land in WooCommerce’s own GTIN field.
• Build says Update. On a style already in your shop, the button says Update it in my shop, so there is no guessing which will happen.

The range now watches itself. Once a day StockBoss re-reads each supplier’s catalogue. New products and colours appear as a quiet line on the Catalogue screen. A product you stock that the supplier no longer lists gets a row on Needs you, and nothing is ever removed over it. See browse the range.

Printed products got a proper trim. On one product you can now hide the printer’s values you do not sell, set defaults, fix a choice and hide its question, and offer only the run sizes you want. Each pick also narrows the next dropdown to what can still be made. Number lists sort as numbers, and the shopper-facing wording never names your printer. An AddOnBoss upload field on the page now feeds the print artwork by itself. See sell printed products.

Finding your way around. Suppliers is its own row in the menu, so the supplier screens are one click from anywhere. Option sets built by StockBoss are named “SKU - Product name”. The set library search matches the SKU, so a set is findable by the code you actually know.

StockBoss is out

StockBoss is out. Sold from bossmage.com, never WordPress.org, with fourteen days free on every plan and no card asked for.

What the first release does:

• Keeps stock right. Reads a wholesaler on a schedule and writes only what changed. Your own settings are snapshotted before the first write and handed back in full if you stop using a supplier.
• Refuses a bad file. A feed that shrinks by half, an error page dressed as data, or a half finished download is refused. The refusal is announced rather than passing quietly. See why it refuses.
• Mirror, or hold back what you sold. A fresh feed cannot put sold stock back on sale unless you want it to. See keeping stock right.
• Builds the products. Browse the range, pick colours and sizes, and get products with the right SKUs, size order, photographs, weights and today’s stock. See building products.
• Sells what a printer makes. Live price tables from a trade printer’s own ladder, with your markup on top. Orders queue, and nothing is sent until you have looked at it. See sell printed products and sending orders.
• Says when it stops. Run history on the board, and an email when a supplier goes quiet and again when it recovers.

A licence gates the actions, never your data: everything already in your shop stays visible and editable if a licence lapses. What stops is fetching, building and sending.

Proven against a real supplier

Run end to end against a live trade account and a real WooCommerce store, not only against tests.

• PenCarrie by token. Their whole range, live stock, and products built from it. Sixty variations with all sixty photographs in about four seconds.
• The catalogue browser, filled from a real 54 MB product export at the memory limit an ordinary shop actually has.
• Refusing a bad file. A short file, an error page carrying a healthy reply code, a login page, an empty feed, a product list with no quantities.
• Building products in all three shapes, including building the same style again without creating a second product or losing a price you set.
• Handing the shop back. Stop using a supplier, proven on a real store. The awkward cases are covered: a product not managing stock, a null quantity, and a product you had taken back by hand.
• Reading a file server, proven against a real FTP server rather than a mock.

Built and tested, not yet seen a live account

These are written from what the supplier publishes and tested against their documented behaviour, including the awkward parts. They should work. If you are a customer of one, we would like to hear how it goes.

• Ralawise. Their sign in rather than a token, and one request per range, because they have no list-everything call. Their documented habit of answering with an informational message and a healthy reply code is handled.
• BTC Activewear. Their FTP file, refreshed every five minutes, with the column positions already known so there is nothing to map.
• Prestige Leisure. Their FTP file, refreshed hourly.

Ordering from your supplier

The other half of the job: when a customer buys, somebody has to order from the wholesaler. That is built for Tradeprint, and it ships in this release.

An order that can be sent waits on a Supplier orders screen until you press send. Nothing goes on its own. There is no bulk send and no automatic trigger, because a thing that spends your money should not do it while you sleep. Before anything is sent it is rebuilt from the order, checked against the supplier, stopped if the trade cost has moved since the order came in, and locked so two presses cannot buy it twice. There is a test mode where nothing is made and nothing is charged.

Sending orders to a supplier covers the screen, and sell printed products covers what a shopper is quoted in the first place.

Next

A browsable range for file suppliers. Most supplier codes are three parts, so a range can be folded out of a plain stock file. That works for PenCarrie and Ralawise today, and widening it to spreadsheet and feed suppliers is the next piece of catalogue work.

More suppliers by name. Named profiles are convenience rather than capability, since any supplier who publishes a file already works. They save you a setup step, they are cheap to add, and we add them from what people actually buy from, so tell us who you use.

Not planned

Becoming your inventory system. StockBoss keeps WooCommerce in step with a wholesaler. If you need purchase orders, warehouse locations and multi-channel stock, that is a different kind of product and you should buy one.

Writing anything other than stock. It will not change your prices, your descriptions or your photographs on a product you already had. That boundary is deliberate and is not going to move.

Telling us something

The roadmap moves with what shops actually ask for, and at this stage it moves a lot. [email protected], and the two most useful things you can send are which wholesaler you buy from and how you get their stock into your site today.