WooCommerce Squarespace integration that keeps one stock count

A Squarespace order reaches us as soon as it is placed. Squarespace announces those. A stock figure you change by hand inside Squarespace is different: there is no announcement for it, so we look every couple of minutes and pick it up on the next check. Both things are stock movements to you, and only one of them is instant, which is why counting adjustments sometimes seem slower than sales.

In practice this is a small difference and it lands in a helpful place. Selling is the fast path, so the case everyone worries about, the same item going out of both shops within a minute of each other, is the one Squarespace tells us about immediately. The slower path is you running a stocktake inside Squarespace and expecting WooCommerce to show it in the same breath. Give that a couple of minutes.

Items pair up by SKU and the shorter limit governs. WooCommerce will store 300 characters, which is more than any catalogue needs. Squarespace takes 60. Anything longer is truncated on the way to Squarespace, and once truncated it no longer matches the item it came from, so the count on that item quietly stops moving while everything around it keeps working.

Sixty characters is generous, so for most shops this is a five-minute check rather than a project. The catalogues that trip over it are the ones with SKUs built out of words, where a long product name, a variant and a supplier code end up glued together. Sort by SKU length, look at the top of the list, shorten the pattern once, then connect. Doing it first costs far less than reconciling two counts later.