Bulk Update Product Stock Quantities

In the previous tutorial we already discussed updating WooCommerce product stock quantities programmatically when we covered how to do it with REST API specifically.

The whole idea can be deconstructed into two simple things:

1. Connect to woocommerce_product_set_stock (or woocommerce_variation_set_stock action hooks for product variations).
2. Send a REST API request to /wc/v3/products/{$product_id} (or /wc/v3/products/{$product_id}/variations/{$variation_id} for product variations).

That’s pretty much it. But there is a “but”. If a specific WooCommerce order in your store can contains a lot of products, then you have a problem. For example, there are 50 products in a single order, then guess what? 50 REST API requests are going to be sent in order to sync all the products stock quantities.

So there is no other way than to update the stock quantities in bulk. But how to do it?

If you check an official WooCommerce docs, then you will see that there is a batch endpoint available, which is /wc/v3/products/batch for products or /wc/v3/products/{$product_id}/variations/batch for product variations.

So in order to update product stock quantities for a lot of products (up to 100) within a single REST API request, we need to do something like this:

wp_remote_post(
	'https://YOUR STORE/wp-json/wc/v3/products/batch',
	array(
		'headers' => array(
			'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode( "$login:$pwd" )
		),
		'body' => array(
			'update' => array(
				// first product
				array(
					'id' => 5, // product ID on Site 2
					'stock_quantity' => 2, // product stock quantity to set
				),
				// second product
				array(
					'id' => 8,
					'stock_quantity' => 120,
				),
				
				...
				
			),
		)
	)
);

Let’s change this code to a more usable format:

$product_ids = array( 1, 8, 25 ... ); // up to 100 products
$products_to_update = array();
foreach( $product_ids as $product_id ) {
	if( ! $product = wc_get_product( $product_id ) ) {
		continue;
	}
	if( ! $product->get_manage_stock() ) {
		continue;
	}
	$products_to_update[] = array(
		'id' => $product->get_id(),
		'stock_quantity' => $product->get_stock_quantity(),
	);
}

wp_remote_post(
	'https://YOUR STORE/wp-json/wc/v3/products/batch',
	array(
		'headers' => array(
			'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode( "$login:$pwd" )
		),
		'body' => $products_to_update
	)
);

And now a little explanation:

• If you don’t know where to get $login and $pwd variables then I recommend you to read about application passwords.
• I am also using if( ! $product->get_manage_stock() ) { condition because we don’t want products without any stock quantities to be added to the sync request.
• Of course, we can not use woocommerce_product_set_stock action hook anymore, becase then our batch request is going ot be sent 50 times anyway, so we just need to switch to woocommerce_reduce_order_stock instead.

And as always, if you don’t want to deal with the code, I recommend you to take a look at my inventory sync plugin.

# WooCommerce, Product inventory

Misha Rudrastyh

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