Extending and Automating WooCommerce
If you’re just arriving to this site for the first time, you should know this post is part of a WooCommerce series of thirty posts I’m writing this summer. Here are the first 10 posts.
Today I want to show you all the power that’s available to you when you want to extend and automate more of the day-to-day operations of your store (that are normally outside of the digital side of things).
I’m going to use my own t-shirt store as an example, but I learned this lesson working with a client. And as we worked together, I realized there was more she was doing with her store than I was doing with mine. So after helping her, I dug into why I wasn’t doing more with Zapier.
Wait, what is Zapier?
While everyone else was playing with IFTTT, a more business-centric solution popped up that let people integrate more than social media apps. That’s Zapier. It’s a powerful connector between different solutions – and tons of them – to help automate routine processes.
Think about it this way…if you want something (like a new Trello card) to be created in a system (Trello) every time a new person creates an order, that’s something that you might have done manually (or paid an assistant to do), and now you can automate it with Zapier.
And I’m going to show you how. And more!
But first, you need one WooCommerce extension – the Zapier extension.
Once you have that in place, getting WooCommerce and Zapier to talk to each other is really simple!
Connecting WooCommerce and Zapier
When you get to Zapier, you’re going to create a Zap – a connector – that let’s you have a source (with a trigger) and a destination (with an action). In our world, WooCommerce will likely be the source firing triggers (like “new order”) and Zapier will allow us to pick a variety of destinations.
Step one is really simple, and if you’re at Zapier already, you’ll be reminded that any Zap you create that starts with WooCommerce will require that you have the extension installed.
They’ll also give you a url (see below, it’s in the box where it says, “use this”) that you install on your own store, under the WooCommerce > Zapier Feeds.
Once you do that and click continue, Zapier will validate it for you to make sure all is good.
Now let’s assume we wanted to do something like I said already, create a trello card every time we got an order. Let’s assume I could convince my wife that every time someone placed an order she would write a handwritten note or personal email to our customer. Let’s further assume that she would know about this without looking into WooCommerce but manage all her tasks and to-dos in Trello.
When we pick Trello as the destination, it will ask us to connect to our account.
From there we have to authorize Trello and Zapier to talk to each other.
If you have more than one Trello account (like I do), you can click the “Switch accounts” to get to the right one.
Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to integrate WooCommerce with Trello. And you do it by configuring your Action step, which you’ll see below. The nice thing is that all the WooCommerce variables you might need are available by clicking on the icon in the right of the field where you need to put in data.
So if you want to put in a person’s email, you click and find it from the drop down – and that’s how easy it is to link WooCommerce order data to another solution (like Trello).
Your last step will be to name the Zap and turn it on.
You can see that my test worked, as I can have a new Trello card from our WooCommerce sample order.
You don’t have to stop at a single integration
Even if you have a Zapier Feed configured already, you can add another Zap to do something different. It simply requires a different feed. But creating it is just like you did before.
What you see here is that I added another zap for an integration with Lob.
If you’ve never heard of Lob, let me give you the quick lowdown. It’s a solution that automates direct mail – as in post cards. And you can send postcards automatically to customers who just made purchases on your store.
Let me show you how simple it was to set up a Lob Postcard. It asks you what size card, and then you give it a url for the front (and back) and you add the address and note you want added.
It’s amazing and after you save and test it, you see the sample card appear in your Lob dashboard.
I can’t tell you how awesome this is. You really have to try it out for yourself. But hopefully you can see how amazing and automated this all can be if you’re using the WooCommerce extension for Zapier and have a Zapier account.
I’m using the Basic plan at Zapier which costs me $15/month and gets me 20 zaps and up to 3000 actions. As you can see, I’m not at 20 yet.
Have you combined WooCommerce and Zapier yet?
Maybe you’ve not heard of Zapier before. It connects to 500 different applications, not just WooCommerce. But what that means is that your WooCommerce store can now connect to 500 other systems and solutions – to help you automate and extend your store.
That’s why it’s a no-brainer for me and I hope a no-brainer for you.