WooCommerce Releases Square Integration to Sync Online and Offline Purchases and Inventory

WooCommerce, which powers more than 37% of all online stores, announced today that the plugin now integrates with the millions of offline stores that use Square for payment processing. The new Square for WooCommerce extension tracks and syncs payments and inventory for products sold via online and offline stores.

Before agreeing to work with Square on building an integration for WooCommerce inventory management, the Woo team verified customer demand via its ideas board where the feature received more than 900 votes. Prior to today’s extension release, those who managed stores in online and offline environments had to perform manual updates to ensure accuracy of the current inventory. Manually tracking inventory between stores is a tedious, never-ending task, especially for larger operations. This is why Square integration was the most-requested feature in WooCommerce history.

After store owners connect a Square account to WooCommerce, they can perform a manual sync from WooCommerce to Square or back the other way. This will sync SKU’s, categories, details, and images for products that have been set up on either platform.

The ability to accept payments with WooCommerce using Square means store owners need only update products once and push changes to either store when ready to sell online or offline.

“WooCommerce and Square have a close working relationship around this integration, where we’re working together to on-board new merchants, receive their feedback, and adjust the integration to make sure the initial version is the best it can be,” said Matt Cohen, product lead for WooCommerce.

When asked if Automattic gets a percentage of Square’s fee based on the volume of sales it drives through its payment system, Cohen said that the companies have an agreement in place to promote the extension on WooCommerce.com and in Square’s catalog. He would not elaborate on the terms of the agreement. However, with WooCommerce powering more than a third of all online stores, it would be surprising if Automattic did not secure a custom volume rate.

Square customers who want to automatically connect their online and offline stores can find the new Square for WooCommerce extension on WooCommerce.com. Current Square customers can use their existing account details to configure their stores to accept payments with Square and start syncing inventory.