Written by Barry Rhodes

WooCommerce back office integration

I was approached by a local full service design agency to create a custom WordPress Plugin for a client of theirs, on a white-label basis.

Their client was moving from a very dated ecommerce solution to a bespoke WooCommerce theme, designed by the agency and built on their behalf by myself, as part of their team.

Secondary to the theme build, the client also required tight integration between their back office systems and their customer-facing ecommerce solution. When the original site was built, the client purchased additional software to push their product catalog to the site, and pull new orders down to their warehouse management software. This software provided great time savings for them, but was not compatible with WooCommerce.

Our options were to build a new piece of desktop software to do the same job, and an adapter to plugin to WooCommerce, or to reverse engineer the existing desktop software and ascertain whether or not it could be used with WooCommerce.

Woocommerce Integration Code

After some discussion we decided that the savings of re-purposing the existing software could be worth it, so long as it was feasible. We planned and strictly timeboxed an investigation into the current software, with a plan to pivot if not feasible. Luckily in this case the software seemed predictable and straightforward and I was able to quickly and cheaply produce an adapter plugin for WooCommerce.

This adapter pulls the export data feed from the existing software, translates it and inserts it into WooCommerce, priced and available for purchase. When an order is received my bespoke software pulls the details from WooCommerce and securely exposes it to the warehouse management software, ready for immediate picking and despatch.

This is not only great for the bottom line of the business, as they can rapidly service new orders, but great for the environment as it cuts out a whole swathe of labour, often coordinated with printed paperwork.

If you’ve got an idea for how your business could benefit from tighter systems integration, why not get in touch?