fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) Now Supports Order Uploads

Since we first released fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) back in 2016 we’ve had a number of requests from customers asking us to include the ability to upload Orders from FileMaker to WooCommerce. fmEcommerce Link was created from a solution we built for our own business to solve a very pressing problem at the time – automate the downloading of Orders from WooCommerce into FileMaker so we didn’t have to manually enter these one-by-one.

At the time we didn’t see a huge need for having the ability to go the other way, as the whole point of WooCommerce is to handle online orders from your website. Having spoken with our customers who were requesting this and also having used fmEcommerce Link in our own business for a few years we can now see some scenarios where it would be helpful to have the ability to upload Orders entered in FileMaker to WooCommerce, including:

• not all Orders for your products are entered directly into WooCommerce by all customers. Some customers might receive your product as part of a larger consulting project, or have to use payment methods that are not accepted on your store.
• sometimes you just need to send the customer to your store to pay for an Order without wanting them to start from scratch and select the various products, add them to the cart and complete the checkout page. There is a way to create an Order for a customer and send them the link to the customer payment page so all they need to do is enter their credit card/payment details (see video below)
• you might have orders from legacy systems that pre-date your WooCommerce store which you wish to upload so WooCommerce is in sync with your CRM software, allowing customers to be able to login and download updates and see their full history

Having had to enter a number of Orders manually into WooCommerce over the past few years we saw the light and started work on an update to fmEcommerce Link that includes the ability to upload Orders from FileMaker to WooCommerce. We’re pleased to announce that v1.53 of fmEcommerce Link (WooCommerce Edition) is now available as a free update for all existing customers.

When working with Order uploads to WooCommerce please be aware of the following:

• the tax fields are “read only” in the API so when you upload an Order we then download the updated details from WooCommerce which include the tax amounts that WooCommerce calculates automatically
• Coupons are not applied when they are included in an Order upload with the REST API v2 that we currently support, so we’ve decided not to include them to avoid any confusion. The REST API v3 that was recently released includes some changes around Automatic total calculations when applying/removing coupons, so this is something we will included when we release an update designed to work with the v3 API
• if you want to delete an Order Line item you don’t delete the line item in FileMaker – just set the Qty to 0 and include that when uploading and WooCommerce will remove it from the Order for you

Here’s a video showing the Order upload in action, including the ability to retrieve the URL for the customer payment page if you wish to send your customer a link to pay for an Order you create in FileMaker.

You can view the full release notes on our version history page.