WooCommerce: integration guide
About this guide
This guide describes ChannelEngine's WooCommerce plugin, how to install it, how to configure it, and more.
Table of contents
Link product data with ChannelEngine
Shipments, cancelations, and returns
Introduction
WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress, which is a content management system (CMS). While WooCommerce can add some basic ecommerce options to a website, it is not a full ecommerce platform. This is why features such as returns are not supported within WooCommerce.
Features
| Supported | Not supported |
| Product data (via product feed) | External fulfillment orders |
| Orders | Returns |
| Shipments | Order extra information/data |
| Cancelations |
Requirements
The only one requirement to install the WooCommerce plugin is WordPress 4.9 (or higher).
Installation
ChannelEngine's WooCommerce plugin is offered via the official WooCommerce plugin manager.
To install WooCommerce:
- Log into the WordPress back-end.
- Open the plugin page and click Add new.
- Use the Search plugins field to find ChannelEngine and click WooCommerce ChannelEngine to install it.
Alternatively, you can install the plugin from the WordPress website. For the source code for the plugin , go to ChannelEngine's GitHub pages.
Configuration
To configure WooCommerce:
- On the plugin list, click Settings.
- Enter the credentials, such as the account name and API key.
- The account name is the subdomain for your channelengine.net environment (e.g.: woocommerce-test). If you enter the wrong account name, the following error may occur:
Unable to communicate securely with peer: requested domain name does not match the server's certificate.
- Go to Settings, Merchant API key to manage the API key. Here you can create new API keys or copy an existing one for use on WooCommerce. ChannelEngine recommends to create a separate key for WooCommerce. The API key needs to be copied into WooCommerce's General settings.
Note that in earlier versions of the plugin, the API secret key was also required. Although this is no longer the case, the latest version of the plugin still has a validation for this field. You can ignore the Invalid credentials warning.
Link product data with ChannelEngine
To import your product data from WooCommerce to ChannelEngine, you must import the product feed from the WooCommerce plugin to ChannelEngine.
To load the product feed:
- Go to WooCommerce, ChannelEngine and in the Product feed URL field copy the URL.
- On ChannelEngine, go to Products, Product feeds and click Add feed.
- Paste the URL and click Load product feed.
- In the Select the product node field, from the drop-down list, select Products, and click Continue.
- In the feed mapping overview, you can map all the data attributes from the product feed to attributes on ChannelEngine. For more information on feed mapping and how it is set up, check out the article Product feeds.
To map WooCommerce attributes:- Leave all the settings as shown as feed options on the top of the feed mapping screen as they are. The feed should be 'leading', have no commas as decimal separator, and no parents or grandparents should be generated.
- If your GTIN, Color, and Brand fields are empty for the examples that are shown in the feed mapping, check if you have these filled in on WooCommerce: go to WooCommerce, Products, Product data, ChannelEngine. The GTIN (EAN) is particularly important, but sizes, color, and shipping information are also essential for many channels.
- If you have custom attributes for products on WooCommerce, they should be available under Products --> Specs.
- Once you save the settings, the import task is automatically scheduled. Your products appear in your ChannelEngine account once the Import product data from merchant task is completed. This usually takes a few minutes.
Get orders from ChannelEngine
To retrieve orders from ChannelEngine, follow the instructions detailed in the ChannelEngine: webhooks article. Make sure that your URL is structured as https://your-store.com/channelengine/callback, and that the only event configured is Orders create.
If you need assistance with this process, please contact your Onboarding Specialist.
Activation
Once you have installed and configured the plugin, and added and imported the feed on ChannelEngine, verify your installation by checking if the notification URL can be used to retrieve orders. If no orders exist, you can create a test order.
Product data and stock
The product data comes from the product feed, as generated on WooCommerce. This feed also contains the product stock.
By default, ChannelEngine imports it hourly, but it is possible to have this done every 30 minutes if needed. Bear in mind that the feed is generated the moment the URL is called, which causes some load on your web server because it fetches all the products and their data. This is why ChannelEngine discourages calling the feed more than once every 30 minutes.
What's more, ChannelEngine strongly discourages disabling stock reservations when using WooCommerce, as stock updates have a delay and out-of-stock orders might occur often – especially when connected to multiple marketplaces. More information on stock can be found on Stock.
Orders
New orders from ChannelEngine appear in the WooCommerce > Orders overview.
On orders coming from ChannelEngine to WooCommerce:
- Orders are created as a 'guest', as it is not possible to create and reuse a customer for every order.
- The channel name and order number cannot be seen in the Orders overview, and they cannot be used as a search parameter either. If you need to find a specific order, you are advised to look up the order on ChannelEngine.
- There you can see the Merchant order number. This number matches the ID of the order on WooCommerce. In the example above, Merchant order number 55 can be used to find the related order on WooCommerce.
- Orders do not contain any order extra data, like some marketplaces do.
Shipments, cancelations, and returns
WooCommerce lacks support for shipments, cancelations, and returns (at least as separate entities). Except for returns, these operations are possible but are limited in comparison with other platforms.
Shipments
Shipments are supported by WooCommerce, but are not exported to ChannelEngine unless submitted via a specific way and process. To submit a shipment to ChannelEngine, do the following:
- Edit the order's shipping address.
- Add the track-and-trace code and the shipping method (carrier) to the corresponding fields.
- Update the order status to Completed.
- Update the order by selecting Update in the top right corner.
- This triggers an API call to ChannelEngine's API, creating a shipment on ChannelEngine. This, in turn, is exported to the channel.
More on shipments
- It is not possible to partially ship items. Shipment created in this way apply to all items in the order.
- If you want to automate the addition of the track-and-trace information to orders, make sure these two fields are filled in and that you do not change the status of the order to Completed before this is done.
Cancelations
Cancelations are supported by WooCommerce. To submit a cancelation to ChannelEngine (please be aware that a 'partial' cancelation of a single order line in case of multiple order lines, is not possible), set the status of an order to Canceled and update the order status.
This triggers an API call to ChannelEngine's API, creating a cancelation on ChannelEngine. This, in turn, is exported to the channel.
Returns
Returns are currently not supported. If this is a priority feature for you, please contact your Customer Success Manager as they can give more priority to features if popular demand warrants that.
ChannelEngine's advice is to use the ChannelEngine web interface to create and handle returns.
FAQs
My product feed is not generated or it is empty. What should I do?
This is usually caused by a timeout during the generation of the product feed. Note that if you have a shared hosting web server with strict limits and a lot of products, the generation of the product feed may time out – causing the feed to be empty, or only partially generated. Please contact you hosting company.
It is also possible that not enough write permissions were given. Make sure that there are sufficient rights to write data to the ChannelEngine folder.
Whatever the reason, you should be able to find it in the error log of your webserver. Depending on your host, the used webserver, and configuration, the exact location can vary. E.g.: the default location for an Apache web server is /var/log/apache2/error.log.
I am using the latest version of the Mollie plugin together with the ChannelEngine plugin, and this is returning errors.
Both the Mollie plugin and the ChannelEngine plugin use a certain dependency on external code, in this case the GuzzleHttp client. The newest version of the Mollie plugin uses a newer version of GuzzleHttp than ChannelEngine, which causes errors because they are not compatible. The upgrade to a newer version is planned, however, there are a lot of linked dependencies so this is a multi-stage process.
In the meantime, you can use an older version of the Mollie plugin (the latest version supported is 5.3.2) if you want to use ChannelEngine and Mollie together.
Can ChannelEngine automatically add the track-and-trace information from my carrier's fulfillment plugin?
While this is possible for other types of webshop software (such as Magento, which has a separate section for shipments), it is not possible for WooCommerce. Most fulfillment plugins only add a comment to an order with some information about the shipment, but nothing in a fixed format that can be used across all fulfillment providers/carriers – and offer a one-size-fits-all solution. Without WooCommerce generic input fields and a specific trigger to create a shipment, ChannelEngine can only offer the manual option to add information.
However, if you incorporate some code into your fulfillment plugin or WooCommerce's environment, you can trigger shipments to ChannelEngine. The following code is used for storing the track-and-trace information on WooCommerce:
update_post_meta($wc_order->get_id(), '_shipping_ce_track_and_trace', '3S1234ABCD')
If you store the relevant track-and-trace code in the _shipping_ce_track_and_trace metafield, it should trigger an export of a shipment to ChannelEngine.
How to solve libcurl error code 51?
Error message: Unable to communicate securely with peer: requested domain name does not match the server's certificate.
This error can occur if the account name in the WooCommerce plugin is not correct.
To solve it, click on Settings under the plugin list and make sure you entered the correct subdomain name for your channelengine.net environment in the Account name field. E.g.: woocommerce-test.
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