General information

Keep your WooCommerce catalog up to date with automated price and stock synchronization. Learn how External Importer sync modes and controls work.

Synchronizing products

External Importer can automatically update prices and stock status for imported products in your WooCommerce store.

You can configure synchronization at: External Importer → Settings → Synchronization

How synchronization works

Many online stores change prices and availability frequently. External Importer doesn’t provide real-time prices in your WooCommerce catalog, but it will periodically refresh product data based on your sync settings.

A few important points:

• No real-time pricing External Importer updates products on a schedule, not instantly on every price change at the source.

• Avoid too-frequent updates If you sync very often – especially for many products from the same store – you increase the risk of being throttled or blocked by that source. We recommend using a moderate update interval, not the shortest possible one.

• Show last update date on the frontend (optional) You can display when a product was last updated on the product page. Go to: External Importer → Settings → Frontend → Update period and enable the option.

Synchronization modes

External Importer offers two ways to update products:

1. Frontend synchronization

When Frontend synchronization is enabled, a product can be updated when a visitor opens its product page.

Pros:

• Only products that actually receive traffic will be updated.

• Reduces unnecessary requests for products that nobody views.

Cons:

• Occasionally, visitors may notice a slight delay when loading the product page, while new data is being requested from the source.

2. Cron synchronization (recommended for background updates)

With Cron synchronization, External Importer runs a scheduled sync in the background using the built-in WordPress cron system.

• No additional cron setup is required.

• The sync script is launched approximately every 10 minutes.

• Under typical conditions, it can update up to 2,500 products per day (depending on your hosting and source throttling).

This mode keeps your catalog updated without impacting page load time for visitors.

Per-product sync controls

You can control synchronization for each product individually on the product edit screen.

On the product edit page, look for the External Importer Sync meta box (sidebar):

• Last update & status You’ll see the last synced time, current availability, and sync status (success/error).

• Manual update (“Sync now”) Click Sync now to immediately refresh this product’s data from the source.

• Disable automatic sync for a product If you don’t want External Importer to update a specific product automatically:

  1. Open the product in the editor.

  2. In the External Importer Sync widget, enable “Disable auto-sync”.

  3. The product will no longer be included in automatic synchronization, but you can still use Sync now at any time.

This is useful when you’ve manually edited a product and don’t want your changes to be overwritten.