Epicentr: Price and Stock Sync for WooCommerce

Epicentr: Price and Stock Sync is a WooCommerce plugin that sends the price, the old (struck-through) price and the stock status of your store’s products to the Epicentr Marketplace seller dashboard through the official API. Change a price, run out of stock, launch a sale — the dashboard gets the same update, with no file exports and no manually editing product listings.

The plugin doesn’t change descriptions of products already in the dashboard. It updates what changes daily: how much something costs and whether it’s in stock. The listings in the dashboard stay yours — the plugin just keeps prices and stock in sync with WooCommerce.

The plugin also helps with new products. The public Epicentr API can’t create products, so the plugin builds an XML file for the dashboard import: it takes categories and attributes from the Epicentr directory, values from your products, and shows which required attribute is missing. After moderation, prices and stock of those products keep syncing through the API.

Why a store needs this

A seller on Epicentr runs two catalogues: their own store and the marketplace dashboard. The price gets changed in WooCommerce, but in the dashboard it stays the old one until someone gets round to updating it by hand. A product runs out on your site, but Epicentr keeps selling it, and the order has to be cancelled.

Every cancellation hurts the seller’s rating, and a price lower than the one on the website eats into margin. Across a few hundred SKUs, manual reconciliation can’t keep up with the changes, especially when the same stock is sold by both the website and the marketplace.

The plugin removes that reconciliation: it sees what changed on a product and sends only that to the dashboard.

What the admin gets

A settings page under the WooCommerce menu: connection, what to send, automation, sync, a list of products that failed to update, and a batch log. On every product’s and every variation’s edit page, next to the SKU, there’s an “Epicentr” line showing what last happened with that product.

What exactly gets sent

Price. Taken with or without tax, as you choose, so it matches what the customer actually sees. Epicentr only accepts prices in hryvnia, so the plugin sends price only when the store’s currency is UAH; otherwise only stock status is sent.

Old price. If a WooCommerce sale price is active on a product, it goes across as the price, and the regular price goes across as the struck-through old price.

Stock. “In stock” stays in stock. Out of stock becomes “out of stock.” For products with backorders allowed, you can choose how they’re shown in Epicentr. A stock threshold helps when the same warehouse serves both the website and the marketplace: stock at or below the threshold is already treated as “unavailable.”

Matching the product. By SKU: the site’s SKU must match the “Article” in the dashboard. Or by Epicentr product ID: the plugin adds an “Epicentr product ID” field to the product and variation edit pages, and if an import has already recorded the ID elsewhere, you can point it to your own meta key.

Variations. A variable product in Epicentr is a set of separate listings, so each variation is sent with its own SKU, price and stock.

How it works, step by step

1. You paste the dashboard token and click “Check connection.” The token is found in the dashboard: Company Settings → the API tab.

2. You click “Send changes now.” The plugin walks the catalogue in chunks of up to 20 seconds so it doesn’t hit a hosting timeout; on a large catalogue you click the button again and the pass continues from where it left off.

3. Changed products are batched up to 1,000 items and sent to Epicentr. Products with no changes since the previous submission are skipped.

4. Epicentr doesn’t apply changes instantly. “Update statuses from Epicentr” collects the result: what was updated, what was already the same, what was rejected.

5. Products with a problem land in a “Products that failed to update” list with a plain-language explanation.

In Pro, steps 2–4 happen on their own: changing a product or its stock queues it, and every 10 minutes the plugin sends the queue and collects the results.

Products that failed to update

The dashboard doesn’t always accept a change, and the reason matters. No product with that SKU exists in the dashboard — codes need reconciling. The product is part of an Epicentr promotion — the price can’t be changed while the promotion runs. The product has no SKU — there’s nothing to match it by.

The plugin shows this in plain words, not an API response code. The same set of values isn’t resent until you change the product, so the dashboard doesn’t get the same error every 10 minutes.

Batch log

Every submission goes into a log: when, whether by button or automatically, how many products, and what happened to them. A batch Epicentr is still processing waits for its status to be collected, after which it closes with a summary. The log can be cleared with one button.

New products with attributes

Epicentr accepts a new product only with the required attributes from its own directory: brand, country, volume — each category has its own set and its own value codes. By hand that is a spreadsheet of hundreds of rows. The plugin turns it into three steps:

1. Directory. A button loads Epicentr categories through the API; attribute sets and list values are loaded only for the categories you use.
2. Links. For a store category you pick an Epicentr category by searching its name, and for each attribute you choose where the value comes from: an attribute, the brand, GTIN, a meta field, weight and dimensions (converted to grams and millimetres), or one value for all products. List values are matched by name, and mismatches like “Рінгель” → “Ringel” are matched by hand.
3. File. The plugin builds XML in the Epicentr import format and lists the products that did not get into the file, with the reason: no photo, an empty required attribute, a value missing from the directory. Upload the file in the dashboard: Import → File → Update all.

Without Pro the file is built for one store category; with Pro, for all of them, and it rebuilds itself daily.

Changed-products file and a check before the import

A full file with several thousand products takes the dashboard a long time to process, while a store changes about a dozen items a day. So every build now writes two files: the full one and a file with the changed products only. The plugin remembers a fingerprint of every <offer> line and compares against it next time — only products where something really differs get into the changed file: price, old price, stock, name, image or an attribute.

After a build the report shows the line “Changed since the last build: 12, unchanged: 3,480”, links to both files and a separate “Gone from the file” block — SKUs that were in the previous file and are not there any more: the product was disabled, removed from the category, or lost a required field. An import does not remove such products from the dashboard, so they are worth taking down there by hand.

The changed file is fetched the same way as the full one: with a button on the “Epicentr: products” screen. Both files sit side by side in the non-public wp-content/uploads/cceps-epicentr folder, and the admin links to each of them.

The “what the dashboard will reject” report

Until now you learnt about a broken file from the dashboard itself: “Unknown tag shop on line 3” — and the import stops. Now the file is checked before the upload: the “Check the file” and “Check the changed file” buttons read the finished XML exactly the way Epicentr reads it and name the problem together with the line number:

• a foreign tag outside the set the dashboard accepts — the very line where the import breaks off;
• the same SKU twice in the file — the dashboard matches products by SKU, so the second line overwrites the first;
• an offer with no SKU;
• truncated XML or a non-UTF-8 line — with the line number;
• an empty file, or a file without a single product.

A separate table lists the products the dashboard accepts but with losses: an unreachable image (a local address, a format other than jpg/png/webp, a space in the URL), a category code missing from the directory, a name (150 characters) and a description (12,160) that get cut, an old price the dashboard ignores because after the multiplier and rounding it is no longer higher than the current one, a GTIN that fails its check digit, and optional attributes that quietly will not reach the product card. Such products do import — you simply see now what will be missing from them.

The changed file is a Pro feature; fingerprints are counted at all times, so right after buying Pro the first changed file is already correct. The file check works in the free version too.

Under the hood

The plugin works through Epicentr’s official Merchant API endpoints for updating prices and stock — no dashboard scraping, no simulated login. The token is stored in the database encrypted.

What was actually sent and what the dashboard replied is stored in the product’s metadata, so the plugin knows what changed and doesn’t send anything unnecessary. The change queue lives in a single option and is capped in size; the log keeps the last 30 batches. Automation runs on WP-Cron.

The plugin adds nothing to the storefront — the customer never sees it and it can’t slow the site down.

How to install

1. Upload the archive under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, and activate it.

2. WooCommerce → “Epicentr: Price and Stock” — paste the dashboard token and click “Check connection.”

3. Choose how to match products: by SKU or by Epicentr product ID.

4. Click “Send changes now,” then a few minutes later “Update statuses from Epicentr.”

If the API tab isn’t visible in the dashboard, access to updating prices and stock is granted by your Epicentr category manager.