Best approach to update WooCommerce products and variations – WordPress

Based on additional comments by @HotFix and answer provided by @VegasGeek, I created a PHP file that can be run on the WordPress server from the command line or a cron job.

The idea:

• We’ll create a PHP script that will load the WordPress inside, call the external API and update the product quantity if needed.

Let’s assume that 3rd party external API returns a JSON response like this

{
  "products": [
    {
      "id": 123,
      "sku": "PR1234",
      "name": "Product 1",
      "stock_quantity": 10
    },
    {
      "id": 456,
      "sku": "PR-3333",
      "name": "Product 2",
      "stock_quantity": 5
    }
  ]
}

There a 2 products with SKU and quantity info.

The PHP script requires wp-load.php so replace my path with yours. For simplicity, I created this file in the website root so I can run it in the browser too but you can put it somewhere else and change the path. It’s only important that the path to wp-load.php is correct. This line of code will load the WordPress and all plugins and make it available to the script.

I am simulating API response with a simple static JSON file, you replace the endpoint with the URL of the real API. Also, you may need to add some authentication to access the external API and your data will probably be different to my example, so you’ll have to change the code a bit. We are using curl to get the data from the API so it should be easy to modify the call.

Then, we iterate over the products, find the product in WooCommerce by SKU, check if the quantity has changed and update if needed.

// Load WordPress
define( 'WP_USE_THEMES', false );
//require_once( 'path/to/wp-load.php' );
require_once "wp-load.php";
// Set the API endpoint
//$api_endpoint = 'https://your-api.com/products';
$api_endpoint = 'http://bytwoo.local/TestData.json';

echo "<pre>";

// Build the cURL request to retrieve the list of products from the external API
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $api_endpoint );
curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );

// Execute the API request and decode the response
$response = json_decode( curl_exec( $ch ), true );
curl_close( $ch );

// Check if the API request was successful and if the products were found
if ( isset( $response['products'] ) && is_array( $response['products'] ) ) {
    // The products were found, loop through the products
    foreach ( $response['products'] as $product ) {
        // Get the product SKU and stock quantity
        $product_sku    = $product['sku'];
        $stock_quantity = $product['stock_quantity'];

        // Get the product ID from the SKU
        $product_id = wc_get_product_id_by_sku($product_sku);
        // Get the WooCommerce product object
        $wc_product =  wc_get_product($product_id);

        // Check if the product exists in the WooCommerce shop
        if ( ! empty( $wc_product ) ) {
            // The product exists, get the current stock quantity
            $current_stock_quantity = $wc_product->get_stock_quantity();

            // Check if the stock quantity needs to be updated
            if ( $stock_quantity != $current_stock_quantity ) {
                // Set the new stock quantity and stock status
                $wc_product->set_stock_quantity($stock_quantity);
                $wc_product->set_stock_status( 'instock' );

                // Save the product
                $wc_product->save();

                echo PHP_EOL."Successfully updated stock quantity for product with SKU '$product_sku' to $stock_quantity";
            } else {
                echo PHP_EOL."Stock quantity for product with SKU '$product_sku' is already up to date";
            }
        } else {
            echo PHP_EOL."Product with SKU '$product_sku' not found in WooCommerce shop";
        }
    }
} else {
    echo PHP_EOL."No products found in external API";
}

echo "</pre>";

I tested it with 2 products, only one of them needed an update. The result (log):

Stock quantity for product with SKU 'PR1234' is already up to date
Successfully updated stock quantity for product with SKU 'PR-3333' to 5