POS-to-Website Data Sync: Management Tips
What is the Product Database Hub?
The STN Product Database Hub (PDBHub) is the set of tools we’ve developed to act as a bridge between your POS system, your website, and the STN Digital Product Library. By uploading your data to the PDBHub, we can then feed this data back-and-forth between systems in a variety of helpful ways.
Verifying your sync functionality
The system relies upon a matching POS Item ID and Website Item ID. Depending upon your POS system and your website system, this can be laballed any variety of ways. We will coordinate with you during setup to select the appropraite fields. For the sake of easier communications on this help page, we will refer to the fields as the POS_Product_SKU & the Website_Product_SKU. We will verify initial setup, and the PDBHub will send out daitl summary emails, but is important that you also use the website’s product editor to verify correct sync functionality. As a simple test, in your POS, choose a product that is in your website store, and change it’s Price and Inventory Stock values to something new. Then upload a new POS CSV report. Once the sync event is complete (allow 5 minutes), the item in the website should have been updated to match price and In Stock values that you set in your POS.
How frequent are products updated?
1) Near Real Time: Please allow roughly 5 minutes from CSV upload time for the PDBHub to update your website. In general, we recommend setting up a feed schedule of every 1/2 hour, but you may use a different schedule based on your POS systems ability to generate reports. Only Modified SKUs are updated: PDBHub updates your website for any POS_Product_SKU’s that have a new [price] or [qoh] – this is a comparison of the last data on file in PDBHub
2) Daily Full Sync: Overnight, PDBHub will also run a daily Sync feed as a backup. This overnight refresh will push up the most recent data for any POS_Product_SKU’s that you have uploaded to PDBHub over within the last 7 days.
Checking for Out-of-Sync items
An item on your website is considered to be Out-of-Sync with your POS data when there is no data being uploaded for a Website_Product_SKU. In other words, there is not a matching POS_Product_SKU for the Website_Product_SKU. Depending on what data you upload, and how often you upload, this can be easy to see, or complex to see. In general if you upload a new report with all your POS data, you can then use the Modified Date column in your website’s product editor to check for products that are not in sync. An item with a modified date older than 24hrs should be considered to be “out of sync”, and as such will not be getting your price or inventory updates. You can use “>0” for the Stock column filter, and “Y” for the Published column, then sort be date (descending) to quickly identify any items that are active on the website, but out-of-sync with your POS data. If the Modified date is not within the last 24 hours, that means the product on the website has not received any data from PDBHub over the last 7 days.
Deleting items from your POS?
When discontinuing items that have been in stock, you should run a sync event before removing said item from your POS. In other words, if you have an item with 1 qty left, then delete that record from your POS before running a sync event, your website will no longer be fed data for that item, and the item instance on your website will stay at 1 qty until a trigger event changes it.
The website inventory will only change for an item when:
– a web order is placed for the item
– you manually change the inventory level for an item
– you feed new qty data to the website
Adding New Items to the Website
The sync events only updates data for products that exist on your website. They do not create new items on the fly. You can add new web items using the Product Editor, via the STN Import Tool, and, if you have a lot of products you need added to your website, consider using our Product Matchup Service. We can typically match-up about 50% of any given toy store’s product data. Contact your Project Manager for further assistance.