Extend Publish to Sync Web Ordering Data

Problem

The current propagation model requires merchants to perform up to four sequential actions to push a single change end-to-end:

1. Make a change in the back office
2. Click Publish (red arrow)
3. Navigate to Online Ordering → Stores → Settings → Sync Data under Sync Data To Web Order
4. Sync each POS station with the back office

Step 3 is consistently misunderstood by merchants. Most assume Publish already pushes changes to the Online Ordering site.

Merchant feedback (paraphrased from a recent support thread)

A merchant who had been troubleshooting menu propagation issues — and who has a software product management background — observed that they had assumed the Publish button already pushed changes to the online ordering site, because that had appeared to be the behavior in the past. They suggested adding the "sync to online" functionality to the Publish action so that merchants running both POS and Online Ordering can make a change and have it propagate across all customer-facing interfaces with one action.

The suggestion aligns with the principle of least surprise: a single user-initiated "publish" action should propagate to all downstream consumers of that data.

Proposed behavior

When a merchant clicks Publish in the back office:

• If the location has Online Ordering enabled, the publish action also triggers the equivalent of the manual Sync Data → Web Order call.
• If Online Ordering is not enabled, behavior is unchanged.
• Sync runs asynchronously; Publish should not block on it.
• UI should reflect a third state in the publish confirmation: "Published to POS · Web sync queued."
• For web sync failures, surface a non-blocking notification with a manual retry option.