Extending Your FileMaker WooCommerce Integration

It’s been more than 5 years since we first released v1.0 of fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition), our Claris FileMaker solution for integrating with the WooCommerce eCommerce Platform. Since that first release we’ve helped hundreds of customers connect their FileMaker business apps with their online store to eliminate manual processes and double data entry, saving them time and money.

As well as the core online store functionality WooCommerce also has a marketplace that has hundreds of free and paid extensions that add features and functionality to your store. We’ve helped a number of customers and FileMaker developers integrate with many of the most popular WooCommerce extensions, many of which have their own APIs.

Here’s some of the ways in which we’ve helped customers extend their FileMaker WooCommerce integration beyond the core WooCommerce API features:

Custom Fields: we regularly encounter WooCommerce stores that contain custom fields and more often than not the store owner would like to be able to update the value in these custom fields when uploading (e.g. Products) and also download the value in these fields (e.g. Orders). There are many ways to add custom fields to your WooCommerce store, including using a WordPress plugin such as the Advanced Custom Fields plugin or modifying php files.

The easiest way to work with custom fields is via the Meta Data which is accessible using version 2 or later of the WooCommerce REST API. You can both update custom fields and retrieve them via the Meta Data, which uses a Key/Value pair system where the key is the name of the custom field and the value is the value for that custom field. We have several articles on our support site that cover working with custom fields, including:

• Can I Update Product Custom Fields – this article demonstrates how to use the meta data to update a custom field when uploading a Product from FileMaker to WooCommerce
• Downloading Custom Fields – this article demonstrates how to access the meta data when downloading an Order from WooCommerce to FileMaker

WooCommerce Subscriptions: one of the most popular extensions for WooCommerce is WooCommerce Subscriptions which allows customers to subscribe to your products or services and pay on a weekly, monthly or annual basis. This extension also has its own API which you can make requests to get subscription specific data that isn’t included in the core WooCommerce API. Using their API you can access subscriptions data from FileMaker and create, read, update and delete subscription data.

Shipments: this is another popular category for WooCommerce extensions. For stores that have to ship physical goods to their customers using a shipments extension can help customers track their orders and integrate with shipping carriers to print labels and assist with fulfilments. We’ve helped several customers integrate with the Shipment Tracking extension which allows you to add shipment tracking information to your orders, providing customers with an easy way to track their shipment. Once again this plugin also has it’s own API which we can make requests against, for example to create shipment tracking for an order as it is being processed.

We’ve also integrated with the AfterShip WordPress plugin which also has it’s own API and allows you to create shipment tracking for a WooCommerce Order.

Gift Cards: WooCommerce includes support for Coupons but not Gift Cards which allow customers to purchase digital gift cards that can be redeemed online in the future. We’ve recently helped a number of customers integrate with the WooCommerce Gift Cards extension to retrieve details of any gift cards used in an Order and check the balance of a gift card.

These are just some of the examples of ways in which you can extend your fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) integration. If you would like to discuss extending your integration please get in touch for a free initial consultation to discuss your requirements.