"Automation" means different things depending on which direction your data needs to move — and treating it as one feature instead of two is how a lot of sync tools end up half-working. BPS Cloud's Automation sidebar has two separate switches for exactly that reason: AutoFetch and AutoSync. They solve different problems, and understanding which one you need (often both) is the difference between a sheet that stays current and one you're constantly re-pulling by hand.

AutoFetch: your sheet reacts to your store

AutoFetch runs off WooCommerce's own native webhooks — product.created, product.updated, product.deleted. The moment something changes in wp-admin, WooCommerce fires a webhook, an HMAC-verified receiver confirms it's genuinely from your store, and the matching row in your Google Sheet updates in real time. No polling, no waiting for the next scheduled run — if a price changes at 2:47pm, your sheet reflects it within seconds.

One detail that matters more than it looks: AutoFetch has a short echo-guard window against BPS Cloud's own sync webhooks. Without it, a sync you trigger from the sheet could immediately re-trigger a fetch back from the store, creating a feedback loop of pointless updates. The guard exists specifically so automation doesn't fight itself.

Automation lives right next to the manual Sync/Fetch actions in the same menu — same underlying logic, just running on its own.

AutoSync: your store reacts to your sheet, on a schedule

AutoSync runs the opposite direction, or either direction, on a schedule you set — hourly is the common cadence, but it's configurable to whatever fits how often your catalog actually changes. Two modes:

• Scheduled sync — pushes edits made in your sheet back to WooCommerce automatically, so you can batch-edit a sheet over the course of a day and let the next scheduled run apply everything at once.
• Scheduled fetch — pulls your store's current state into the sheet on a timer, useful as a safety net alongside (or instead of) AutoFetch's real-time webhooks.

Both directions run through the exact same matching precedence and per-row status reporting as a manual sync — id, then stored row-link, then exact SKU, never a guess. Automating a sync doesn't relax that; a scheduled run that silently mismatches a row would be worse than a manual one, not better, since nobody's watching it happen in real time.

Why this had to be two switches, not one

A single "automation" toggle would force a false choice: either your sheet lags behind your store, or your store lags behind your sheet, depending on which direction that one toggle happened to run. Real catalogs need both — the store is often the source of truth for stock and pricing, updated by other tools or staff, while the sheet is where bulk edits actually get made. AutoFetch keeps the sheet honest in real time; AutoSync makes sure sheet edits actually reach the store without you remembering to click Sync. Running both together is normal, not redundant — they're covering two different failure modes.

Try it

BPS Cloud is free to install from the Google Workspace Marketplace. If you haven't connected a store yet, start with our step-by-step bulk-edit guide — Automation is the last step once the manual workflow feels right.

Prefer the WordPress plugin? See the Bulk Product Sync plugin page for pricing and details.