We have 3 different customized WooCommerce integrations setup for prepared meal delivery online ordering for Rebekah’s Kitchen. We needed 3 different stores because her business has different requirements for different types of prepared meal delivery ordering and this was the best way to achieve that.
On the original site, we needed to sync the ordering data and revenue with QuickBooks Online, the accounting platform that she uses. In reviewing and researching the options at the time, we landed on MyWorks QuickBooks Sync. This plugin is a recommended plugin on the WooCommerce site, so we set it up and configured it. The plugin gives you an interface in the backend of WooCommerce that allows you to map fields and configure it in various ways to sync the data. After setting it up and configuring it, the plugin worked well and we continued to use it for a couple of years. The drawback to this plugin is that it is very expensive, at $468 annually! This is a hefty pricetag for a smaller business with non complicated syncing requirements, but we thought it was our only option.
When we setup the second WooCommerce site, part of the expense calculation included this high priced plugin which at the time we thought was the only option. Because of the cost, I decided to do some research on other options and see if anything had been developed in the meantime. With a little digging, I came across WooCommerce Connector by Intuit which is an app developed by Intuit itself that seemed to accomplish the same thing. The best part about it? This app was completely free! I was somewhat skeptical that it would do the same thing, so we set it up on the development site and configured it. This process wasn’t extremely intuitive, but that is common for 3rd party integrations so after some trial and error and documentation analysis I got it setup.
One big difference with this integration is that it does not have an interface in the backend of WordPress. There are positive and negative aspects to this. The positive is that it is one less thing for WordPress to load and consume resources, maintain, update etc. The negative is that it requires you to login to a separate interface and configure everything externally. Once you understand that, the configuration is pretty straightforward but it requires you to remember that it is setup externally and syncing to QuickBooks in the background. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, but it could lead to syncing with a development site or something similar down the road. It also needs to be managed and maintained separately, so you have to remember that it is setup and running in the background. It will send notifications if it has issues and you can specify more notifications, so you can stay on top of it as long as you configure it to do this and you pay attention.
The bottom line is that the WooCommerce Connector by Intuit synced WooCommerce data with QuickBooks Online relatively effortlessly and didn’t cost Rebekah’s Kitchen an additional $468 dollars a year. After configuring it on this site, we decided to set it up on the original site as well and discontinue our licensing with the original plugin. All told, had we used the original plugin on all 3 sites, Rebekah’s Kitchen would have had an annual additional expense of almost $1,500! I was very happy to help save her that expense and find a solution that achieved everything that we needed, win win.