Automate order, customer, and product management with the WooCommerce integrations connector

WooCommerce is undoubtedly one of the world’s most popular cloud-based eCommerce software platforms that is also free, highly customisable and open-source. It is built on WordPress and as such, integrates seamlessly with WordPress based websites. Even though it is considered to be “merely” a plugin, it is widely used by both small and large-sized online sellers, such as Weber (a large grill manufacturer) or Singer (sewing machines manufacturer), to create a beautiful and fully-functional online store.

When it comes to integrating WooCommerce with other business applications, there is a number of plugins and extensions built specifically for the open-source platform and provided by the vendor itself, both for free and paid. You can extend the functionalities of your online store by connecting it to e.g. Stripe, MailChimp, or HubSpot. Yet these cater for generic integration use cases. If you have heavily customised your store and data objects, you will probably need an integration tool that supports high levels of customisation as well.

About WooCommerce integration connector

This is a proprietary connector that allows to create a smooth and reliable exchange of product and customer data between the popular eCommerce WordPress plugin and any other systems of record you wish to connect with it – CRM, ERP, Finance, PIM, and so on. It was built specifically for use in the elastic.io platform’s integration flows and is included by default.

The WooCommerce integration connector provides both actions and triggers, meaning that you can use it at the beginning of your flows to send data from WooCommerce as well as in the middle or at the end of your flows to receive data. For example, you can connect it to your ERP and have the shipment status of an order updated in the WooCommerce online store as soon as its status changes in your ERP. Or you can configure it to receive updates about new products, any product changes, or updated customer data. More information regarding actions and triggers can be found on the connector’s documentation page under the link above.

As it is under a proprietary license, you can’t alter the WooCommerce integrations connector yourself. If you require other actions and triggers for your integrations, or in fact, any changes to the existing ones, please contact our pre-sales team at ps[@]elastic.io to discuss the details.

PLEASE NOTE: To use the WooCommerce connection connector in your project, you need to have an account on the elastic.io integration platform. If you don’t have it yet, you may sign up for a free 14-day trial of elastic.io here.

How to add WooCommerce integrations on elastic.io

As a trigger:

Step 1

Once on the elastic.io platform, go to “Dashboard” or “Flows” and click “Add new Flow” to choose WooCommerce from the list of available connectors as triggers. Scroll down the page (all connectors are listed alphabetically) or use the search box to locate it.

Step 2

The available trigger function “Webhook” will be selected by default when you’ve picked the connector, and you will be required to enter new credentials to authenticate yourself.

For that, you’ll need to know your store’s URL and create your consumer key and consumer secret, which is done in the WooCommerce admin panel (we provide the instructions in our documenation).

Step 3

After you’ve authenticated your store, you’ll need to enter the Secret Key that you have generated when creating a new webhook on WooCommerce. On our documentation page (link above), we provide a link to the respective page on how to create webhooks in WooCommerce.

No further configuration is required at this step. Your webhook will receive automatically the events that you have configured it for when creating it on WooCommerce – e.g. Order Created, Product Updated, Product Deleted, or New Customer Created.

Step 4

After that, you can request a sample of the records to verify that you configured WooCommerce correctly, create your own sample, or you can skip this step for the time being.

OUR TIP: The fastest way to test this connector as a trigger in a flow is to sync it with our Email connector — for example, to send yourself a “Product Updated” event. In a real-world project, you’ll use such system as HubSpot, Lightspeed POS or Quickbooks, which is closer to the actual business processes you would probably wish to automate.

As an action:

Step 1

Using WooCommerce as an action means that it “reacts” to changes in another system or application in your workflow. The configuration steps are almost identical, though: Select WooCommerce from the list of available connectors, choose a function to work with, and authenticate your online store on the elastic.io platform using already created or new credentials.

When it comes to functions, you can select the ‘Make Raw Request’ function to call any WooCommerce API endpoints using any of the GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE methods. Or you can execute the ‘Upsert Object’ function to create a new or update an existing object such as Category, Coupon, Customer, Order, Product. There are more actions available, so make sure to check out our documentation.

OUR TIP: You can begin your test flow with our Simple Trigger connector to quickly examine WooCommerce’s action connector settings. However, because it lacks any eCommerce-related data items to sync, Simple Trigger is not suited for testing how the WooCommerce connector gets datasets from other systems.

Popular WooCommerce automation scenarios

As previously mentioned, WooCommerce offers a number of so-called extensions, both free and paid, to connect to other business applications. Due to their nature, though, they are hard to customise when needed and are limited to 1-to-1 integration. If your task is to provide automation for complex business processes that require integration with several business applications – e.g. an updated customer address is pushed from your online store to your CRM and Finance, then you’re looking for the right tool by being on this page.

Here are a few of the most notable WooCommerce integrations that our users have already created:

WooCommerce with Quickbooks

To reduce the risks of human error and manual accounting by automatically syncing WooCommerce orders and payments to QuickBooks

WooCommerce with Hubspot

To automate the sync of customer, orders and product data between the CRM and eCommerce platforms in order to make recognising buyer behaviour easier

WooCommerce with Lightspeed Retail

To sync inventory across both systems by importing inventory from Lightspeed to WooCommerce and updating any inventory changes from WooCommerce to Lightspeed

WooCommerce with NetSuite

To improve the purchase experience by providing timely fulfilment and shipment shipment updates, and accurate product availability information

… and there are many more apps to connect to.

Discover all of the systems and business applications you can use to automate order fulfillment, product updates and upgrades, inventory management, and more for your online store. Get your free 14-day demo now, no credit card required to start.