Squarespace eBay integration that keeps one stock count

Three of the four directions on this pair run on a check rather than an announcement. Squarespace tells us the moment an order is placed, and that is the one live signal. A stock figure you edit by hand inside Squarespace comes with no announcement, so we look every couple of minutes. eBay announces nothing at all, for stock or for orders, so it sits on the same short timer.

None of that makes the pair unworkable, but it does mean you should not expect either side to react within seconds to a number you typed yourself. If you have just counted a shelf and corrected the figure in Squarespace, give it a couple of minutes before you expect the eBay listing to agree. Knowing that up front beats refreshing a page and assuming the connection has broken.

The practical answer is headroom. Keep a unit or two spare on the items that sell fastest and the timer stops mattering, because the window in which the two sides can disagree is only ever a couple of minutes wide. Where it does matter is a one-off item you cannot afford to oversell, and for those the safer habit is to end the eBay listing yourself.

Items match by SKU and the shorter limit governs. Squarespace stores up to 60 characters and eBay takes 50. The two are close enough that this is a check rather than a rebuild, but those ten characters are exactly where a catalogue built to Squarespace’s limit gets caught. Anything over 50 is truncated on the way to eBay and stops matching the item it came from.

Because we truncate rather than refuse, nothing about it looks wrong. The listing updates, no error appears, and the shortened SKU pairs with nothing at all. What you see months later is a count on one side that has stopped following the other, with no event to blame it on. Ten minutes sorting your catalogue by SKU length before you connect avoids the whole thing.