🛒 Sales channels: say where each product is sold, and send products to your WooCommerce store
Add the places you sell, put products on them from the Products list or from each product, and connect a WooCommerce store to send products, prices, pictures and stock to it after checking a price preview.
Most companies do not sell in one place. There is the online shop, the counter, a wholesale price list, perhaps a marketplace. Until now Erpilo knew your products but not where any of them were sold.
Sales channels are those places. A channel can be connected to a WooCommerce store, so Erpilo sends your products there, or it can simply be a name - a shop counter, a price list - that keeps track of which products belong on it.
Add a channel
Go to Settings â–¸ Sales channels and press Add channel. Give it a name and choose a platform:
- WooCommerce for a store Erpilo connects to.
- No connector for anywhere you sell by hand. Erpilo connects to nothing; it records which products are on the channel. You tell it the channel's currency and whether its prices include VAT.
A channel you stop using can be archived. It keeps its history and can be restored at any time.
Connect a WooCommerce store
On the channel's page, enter the Store address. In WordPress, go to WooCommerce â–¸ Settings â–¸ Advanced â–¸ REST API, create a key with Read/Write permission, and paste the Consumer key and Consumer secret into Erpilo. The key is stored encrypted and never shown again.
Press Check connection. Erpilo reads the store's currency, whether its prices include VAT, whether it charges tax at all, and its tax classes. Then finish three settings:
- Tax classes: match each of your VAT rates to the store's tax class for it. A product whose rate is not matched is not sent, because the store would otherwise charge its standard rate.
- Stock location: the warehouse whose stock the store is told.
- Publish language: which of your product languages the store receives.
Put products on a channel
There are two ways, and they do the same thing.
- Many at once: tick products on the Products list, press Sales channel, choose the channel, and add or remove.
- One product: open it and go to its new Sales channels tab - the last one - where every channel has a checkbox. Tick it and press Update.
A product always goes on a channel with all of its variants. Taking a product off a WooCommerce channel never deletes anything in the store: the next time you send, the product is set to draft there and keeps its place, so adding it back updates the same store product.
Preview, then send
The channel's page has a Publishing card showing how many products are on the channel and how many are live on the store.
Preview checks every product without sending anything. It lists what would be created, updated or left alone, and shows each price as it is in Erpilo beside the price the store will be told - with VAT added when your store shows prices with VAT. The first time, Send to store appears only after a preview has finished, so you see the prices before a customer does.
Send to store then creates or updates the products in the background. For each product it sends the name and descriptions, the price (and the compare-at price as a sale), categories, tags, brand, attributes, variants, weight and dimensions, pictures, and stock from the stock location. A product you have switched off in Erpilo is set to draft in the store.
Before you send anything, the channel page also lists products this store cannot take - for example a product with no SKU, which WooCommerce needs - so you can fix them first.
When something cannot be sent
Open Sync health from the channel page. It shows what is on the channel and what is live, and it groups every problem by reason, naming the products each one affects, with a link to fix each product. Fix the product or the setting and press Send changes.
A few reasons stop a whole store rather than one product, and Erpilo says so in plain words instead of sending wrong prices:
- The store prices in a different currency from your company. Erpilo does not convert currencies.
- The store's tax settings could not be read. Every preview and send reads them again first.
- The store has tax switched off, in which case only products at 0% VAT can be sent.
Send everything again puts Erpilo's version back on every product the store holds, which is the way to undo edits someone made directly in the store.
Worth knowing
Nothing is sent on its own. Products reach the store when you press Send. A product you edit in Erpilo goes to the store with the next send; the store is not updated the moment you save.
Erpilo is the source. Edits made directly in WooCommerce are not read back, and the next send of that product overwrites them.
A store product Erpilo did not create is never taken over. If the store already has a product with the same SKU, that product is reported and left alone rather than overwritten.
One language per store, for now. Stores that sell in several languages through WPML or Polylang are planned.
Not sent yet: SEO titles and descriptions, barcode, MPN, country of origin and HS code. Renaming a category, tag, brand or option that is already in the store does not rename it there.
WooCommerce is the only store Erpilo connects to so far.
Who can do what: setting up channels, previewing and sending are for admins and owners. Anyone who can edit products can put them on a channel or take them off.