BAS Exchange for WooCommerce — products, prices, stock and orders in sync with BAS

BAS Exchange for WooCommerce connects a WooCommerce store with BAS over the CommerceML 2 protocol. Products, prices and stock are kept in BAS and the site receives them by itself: no CSV exports, no retyping prices by hand, and no “in stock” on the site for goods that are already gone from the warehouse. In the other direction (Pro), BAS collects orders from the site and sends their statuses back.

BAS starts every exchange: in its website exchange settings you enter the address, user and password from the Connection tab, and BAS then sends the catalog and offers and collects orders on schedule or on demand. The store answers exactly the way the protocol expects.

What the customer sees

Customers see on the site what is in BAS — and never see the exchange itself:

• Up-to-date prices and availability. The price from the chosen price type, the stock and the in stock / out of stock status refresh with every exchange.
• The catalog as in your accounting. BAS groups become categories with the same nesting, properties become attributes that filters work with.
• Pictures and descriptions come with the product; a repeated exchange does not pile up copies in the media library.
• Sizes and colours (Pro) — variations with their own price and stock, the sale price shown crossed out.
• An item marked as deleted in BAS leaves the storefront (to drafts or trash, as you choose).

What the store admin gets

The WooCommerce → BAS Exchange page with the Connection, Catalog, Orders (Pro), Log and manual import, and Licence tabs. The screenshots show the admin in Ukrainian; the module interface is also in English and Russian.

• Connected in a minute. The module creates the address, user and password itself — you only copy them into BAS. The user and password are separate; they are not a WordPress account.
• Control over fields. Name, description, SKU, categories, pictures, attributes — each field can be left to BAS or kept editable on the site.
• Price types and warehouses are read from the BAS files and listed in the settings — no guessing names.
• The log records every exchange step with its result: what came in, how much was created and updated, what was skipped and why. The same log is in WooCommerce → Status → Logs.
• Manual import — upload import.xml, offers.xml or a zip with pictures right in the admin and watch the step-by-step import. Handy for the first load and for checking a problem file.

Pro: orders, variations, warehouses, sale prices

• Orders to BAS. During the order exchange BAS collects new and changed orders with the chosen statuses: customer, address, phone and e-mail, product lines with BAS ids, shipping and fees as services, payment method.
• Statuses from BAS. Cancelled, paid, the final status and your own rules like “Shipped = completed”. Every change is written as an order note.
• An honest “paid” flag. For cash on delivery only in the Completed status, for cards after the payment is confirmed.
• Variations from product characteristics: size, colour and so on become variations with their own price and stock.
• Sale price from a second price type (for example “Sale”) — when it is lower than the regular one.
• Warehouses: the stock on the site is the sum of the ticked warehouses only.
• Full upload: products that came from BAS earlier but are missing from a full upload go to drafts or out of stock. When they return in BAS, they are back on the site.

How it works, step by step

1. BAS calls the exchange address with the user and password and gets a session.
2. The store tells BAS whether it accepts zip archives and how large file parts may be — within what your server accepts.
3. BAS sends the files: import.xml (groups, properties, products), offers.xml (prices and stock) and pictures — in parts or as one archive.
4. The store imports a file in steps: when a step’s time is up, it answers “progress” and BAS repeats the request until the import is finished.
5. Every product and category gets its BAS id, so the next exchanges update them instead of creating new ones.
6. Exchange files are deleted right after import; the log keeps the result of every step.
7. Pro: during the order exchange BAS gets a file with orders, confirms it, and next time gets only new and changed ones. Statuses from BAS come back in a separate file.

Under the hood

• Streaming XML reading. Files are read one element at a time, not loaded whole into memory, so a large catalog does not hit memory_limit. Files in windows-1251 are read too.
• Resumes where it stopped. The import state of every file is kept between steps; a repeated request from BAS continues instead of starting over.
• Linked by BAS id in products, variations, categories and pictures: no duplicates on repeated exchanges or after renames.
• Security. A separate user and password for BAS compared in constant time; file names are checked (no “../” and no executable extensions), zip archives are unpacked with protection against escaping the folder.
• Files outside the public folder. The module picks a folder outside the site root for exchange files and deletes the XML right after import — order files included, as they hold personal data. The admin shows where the files are kept.
• Sites on plain permalinks get an address like /index.php/bas-exchange/ that reaches WordPress without rewrite rules.
• Cleans up after itself. With “Delete data on uninstall” ticked, deleting the module removes its settings, log, exchange folder and BAS ids; the products and categories themselves stay.

Installation

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose catcode-bas-exchange-for-woocommerce-free-1.0.0.zip (free version) or catcode-bas-exchange-for-woocommerce-1.0.0.zip (Pro) and activate it. WooCommerce must be active.
2. WooCommerce → BAS Exchange → Connection: copy the exchange address, user and password. The curl command on the same tab checks that the address answers “success”.
3. In BAS open the website exchange settings (CommerceML protocol) and paste the three values.
4. On the Catalog tab choose which fields BAS may update, and keep “Match by SKU” on if the site already has products.
5. Run the exchange in BAS. The result of every step is in the Log. After the first exchange pick the price type (and for Pro, the sale price type and warehouses).
6. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail you get after payment, or start the 7-day trial on the Licence tab, then switch the order exchange on.