OOLP

Keeping a book catalogue in sync with WooCommerce, with zero external dependencies

Libreria OOLP is an independent bookshop in Turin, open since 1978 and specialising in exhibition catalogues and books on art, architecture, photography, fashion and design. Besides its shop in Via Maria Vittoria it sells online, shipping worldwide. For the bookshop I worked on both the e-commerce site and a very concrete problem.

The problem

The book catalogue is managed in Excel files, the tool the bookshop uses every day, but it has to stay in sync with the WooCommerce online store. Without a connection, every new list would have meant updating hundreds of product listings by hand: creating new ones, removing those no longer available, fixing dates and data.

The solution

I built OOLP Product Importer, a WordPress plugin that reads XLSX files directly and syncs the catalogue automatically:

• it reads the Excel files with a custom-built reader, with no external libraries to maintain;
• it inserts the new titles found in the list;
• it marks titles removed from the list as out of stock, without deleting them;
• it sets each listing’s publish date to the book’s release date, so new titles appear in the right order;
• it validates the file against the data already in WooCommerce before writing any change.

The result

Today the plugin manages a catalogue of more than 20,000 books. The catalogue stays in Excel and the online store updates when the file is uploaded: the import takes a couple of minutes instead of hours of work on listings. Data quality improves too, because every row is checked against what is already in the store before it is written, so the site always reflects the real assortment. It is the same principle I recommend to many small businesses: you do not need to throw spreadsheets away, you need to connect them reliably to the systems that use them.