If you sell both in a physical shop and online, your website stock has to reflect reality. Selling something online that sold out in the shop an hour ago is the fastest way to lose a customer.
The three common approaches
1. Manual updates
Someone updates stock by hand. Fine for twenty products, impossible for thousands.
2. Periodic full import
The POS exports a file, the website imports everything on a schedule. Simple, but slow — a full import of a large catalogue can take a long time and hammer the server.
3. Delta sync
Only what changed since the last run is transferred. This is what we use in production. For Games Plus Malta it keeps around 30,000 products in sync across three shop locations.
What makes a sync reliable
- Delta tracking — store the last known state locally so you only push changes
- Alerts — a Telegram or email message the moment a run fails
- Retries — temporary API errors shouldn't need a human
- A dashboard — so you can see when it last ran and what it did
- Clear ownership of data — decide which system is the source of truth for price, stock and product details
Does your POS support it?
Most POS systems can be connected — through an API, a database, or exported files. Even older systems with no documented API can usually be read.
Tell us what you need — scoping and a quote are free.
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