How to keep a supplier price list synced to WooCommerce — without losing your own edits

Most shops start the same way: the supplier sends a price list, and someone copies it into WooCommerce by hand. It works atproducts. Atit eats an afternoon a week. At 5,000 it simply stops happening, and the shop drifts out of date.

The obvious fix is automation. The less obvious problem is that naive automation makes things worse: the first time a sync overwrites the product description you spent an hour writing, or resets a price you set deliberately, you turn it off and go back to the spreadsheet.

The rule that makes automation safe: lock what you touched

OhoSync treats every product field as either supplier-owned or yours. Price, stock, title, description, images, gallery, categories and brand can each be locked independently:

• Unlocked fields follow the supplier feed. When the supplier changes a price or stock level, your store updates on the next sync.
• Locked fields are never written again. The sync flows around them and keeps updating everything else on the same product.

Publishing a product locks its content fields automatically, because a published product is one you have presumably finished editing. If you later edit a price by hand in WooCommerce, that field locks itself too — the sync notices the drift between what it wrote and what is there now, and treats your edit as the truth.

What a sync actually does

Every run follows the same sequence:

1. Read the feed — XML, CSV, Excel or Google Sheets.
2. Apply your pricing rules — markup, minimum margin, rounding (more on this below).
3. Compare against your store — what would change, product by product.
4. Write only what is allowed to change — unlocked fields on selected products.
5. Record everything — each run leaves a reviewable history entry: created, updated, skipped, held back, and why.

You can run stepwithout step 4: a preview shows the full list of changes without touching the shop, and you can limit a first run to ten or fifty products to check the result before doing the whole catalogue.

Pricing stays yours, too

A supplier feed carries cost prices. Your selling price comes from rules you set once: a default markup, category rules, cost-band tiers, per-product overrides, a minimum margin floor, and a rounding strategy. If a feed price would break your margin floor, that product is held back and reported rather than published at a loss.

Start small

Connect the store, load the feed, sync ten products, and look at the history entry. If the ten look right, run the rest. The whole point of a safe sync is that you never have to trust it blindly — every run shows its work.

Written by OhoSync. Questions about your own supplier feed? Send it to us and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.