Inventory handling

By its nature, Square allows for selling items across several locations, or via several venues (such as in-store retail / POS and online). Because of this, the inventory of items can be deducted by both online sales as well as other sales.

Many sellers will likely break up their inventory by location, such as an "in person" location and an "online" location, keeping this inventory separate. However, some sellers will use the same location to sell in multiple channels, such as a "central" location handling POS and online distribution.

In these cases, inventory could be deducted by in person transactions, online transactions via WooCommerce, or by other transactions in different sales channels (such as another store or social network).

To avoid issues where inventory is deducted from Square due to non-WooCommerce sales, we need to always sync inventory periodically between Woo and Square, regardless of the system of record.

• When Square is the SOR, inventory is never managed by Woo.
• When Woo is the SOR, inventory can be managed in Woo. However, it must first be fetched from Square to get the most up-to-date amount to allow editing. It is then pushed back to Square with the existing adjustments in place.
• Regardless of SOR, inventory changes are processed are for sales, which will result in deductions within Square. Refunds in WooCommerce will also push an inventory adjustment to Square.