Squarespace Etsy integration that keeps one stock count

Etsy will not report a sale as it happens, so it gets polled: quantities at two-minute intervals, orders at five. Squarespace is halfway to live. It announces an order immediately, but a quantity you edit inside Squarespace is not announced either, so that gets looked for every couple of minutes as well. Between the two, most of what moves on this pair reaches us on a check rather than the instant it happens.

In practice that means one thing worth planning for. If the same item is close to selling out on both sides at once, there is a window of a couple of minutes in which each shop still believes it has one. Safety stock on your fastest lines closes it. On a catalogue that turns over slowly, you will never notice the timers are there at all.

Orders are the exception worth knowing about. A Squarespace sale reaches us as soon as it is placed, so that side is quick regardless of the stock timer. Etsy orders come in on the five-minute check. If you batch your picking anyway, neither figure changes how your day runs; the timers only matter when you are down to the last one or two.

Squarespace stores 60 characters of SKU and Etsy takes 32, so 32 is the ceiling for both ends of this connection. Overshoot it and Etsy receives a shortened code that matches nothing, with no error to tell you so. Sort the catalogue by SKU length and read the top of the list. Ten minutes now against a reconciliation later is the trade you are making, and it is not a close one.

Etsy’s second rule caps a listing at two option types. A product that varies by size, colour and material on your Squarespace site has to fold to two here, most often by merging two of them into a single compound option. Settle which pair survives before you connect, because reworking options on listings that are already selling is the costlier order to do it in.

Third, Etsy will not sync repeated codes. Where one SKU turns up on two listings in the same shop, the flag reads ‘Multiple same SKU’ and both drop out until each has its own. Test listings left up, and last season’s version sitting beside this season’s, are the usual sources. None of the three rules is ours, but all three decide whether this pair behaves.

Squarespace has a built-in Etsy import: Products and Services, then Products, then Import, then Etsy. It brings across up to 500 products, and it takes the whole shop rather than a selection you choose. It is genuinely useful, it costs nothing beyond the Commerce plan you are already paying for, and if what you want is to move off Etsy onto a Squarespace shop, that is the whole answer and this page has nothing to add.

What it does not do is keep the two level. Squarespace says as much in its own words: the import is one-time and will not continually sync inventories, so a quantity that changes on either side afterwards stays on that side. It also runs one way only. Nothing you do in Squarespace travels back to Etsy, which starts to matter the moment both shops are open and selling the same stock.

Two details catch people out on the way through, and both are cheaper to fix beforehand. If your Etsy shop currency and your Squarespace store currency do not match, the products arrive priced at zero, so set the currency first. And turn Etsy vacation mode off before you start, because with it on the import can pick up inactive listings instead of the ones you are actually selling.