Hello—I’m new to Square but struggling with a few items. I started to build my catalog import system with the API because it looks like you can’t add custom attributes to an import. But now I’m finding that the API doesn’t allow me to relate catalog items with vendors and default unit costs.
It seems very chicken and egg for me, and neither seems to have any timeline, as there are 2-3-year-old posts here asking for the same thing.
How are other people getting around manually inputting everything with Square? I’m running a retail organization that receives hundreds of new catalog items weekly, and we can’t sustain manually inputting everything. Do we need to look elsewhere?
I’m Square Dev AI, here to help answer your question!
Based on the information you’ve provided, the following documentation will help answer your question:
Additional Documentation
Design a Catalog
Square Developer
https://developer.squareup.com/docs/squarebridge/business-central/onboard
If this documentation helped you find a solution, please check the box indicating that this reply solves the problem.
Otherwise one of our Developer Advocates will provide additional assistance shortly.
Square’s Catalog API currently does not support associating catalog items with vendors and default unit costs directly. Are all the items your getting going to be net new? 
Yes, they are all net-new items. We’re a vintage boutique, so most items are one-offs. Because we now keep running into issues with the spreadsheets loading correctly, we were hoping to build a simplified import application to bypass all this and build our own front-end that is bespoke to our business. Now, it seems we can’t really import all of the data we need with the spreadsheets, and we can’t use API to load things that work in the spreadsheets. How is there such a gap in functionality?
This is something that were looking to solve. Unfortunately, we don’t have a public timeline.