I am a fan of WordPress and WooCommerce for creating cost effective eCommerce websites for businesses which can easily add content themselves and for having a wide range of plugins to choose from to overcome most problems. Also being a Xero advocate its natural that eventually I would need to use the official WooCommerce Xero plugin

 

If possible I try to recommend existing solutions to clients which are simple to set up and well supported and have posted before about services such as OneSaas and Zapier. Here are my thoughts on the Xero plugin for WooCommerce.

 

Installation

 

Installing the plugin is done as per most WordPress plugins by uploading it from the Plugin section so you will need to be comfortable with this process. Woothemes offer full set up instructions here.

 

Setup Connection Between WooCommerce and Xero

 

This uses the standard Xero API 2 legged OAuth and requires some technical experience in this area and FTP access to the sever. You also need to set this up through as an application which runs through your Xero API account. When compared to offerings such as OneSaas which just requires a plugin to be installed that generates an authorisation key to be copied into your account with them the level of technical knowledge require is significantly higher.

Once the public and private keys have been generated and copied to the server the Xero account settings can be added but only include mapping to one account for each of the following:

Sales Account
Discount Account
Shipping Account
Payment Account

This works fine if you want all your eCommerce transaction to be posted to the same account but does not allow any other split.

Items are sent to Xero when an order in WooCommerce is set to complete and you can choose to send invoices and/or payments and stock codes (you need to manually enter the stock items in both Xero and WooCommerce). The customer record is created in Xero when the order is sent.

 

WooCommerce Order Management

 

From the store managers perspective they just need to mark the order as complete and the customer record and invoice will be sent to Xero. Additional information is provided on the order page under the notes section to confirm is the invoice was created successfully or failed due to errors:

 

 

 

 

 

 

If an error does information is provided as to why, as in the case below the email address was invalid (WooCommerce does not validate email addresses as well as Xero).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These can be fixed by editing the order in WooCommerce to correct the problem and from the Order Action drop down the plugin has added a ‘Send to Invoice Xero’ option to enable the user to resubmit.

Support Issues

 

I have encountered some problems with the plugin which I have highlighted to their support team, namely:

 

Order Number

 

The order number from WooCommerce is passed to Xero as the invoice number rather than letting Xero issue the next available invoice number and passing the order number to the reference field. The current configuration only works if you have no other sales invoices raised in Xero and all sales are made via the website. This is a big oversight and could have been easily fixed when the plugin was being developed.

 

VAT

 

The plugin has no ability to deal with VAT and appears to pass the transaction value to Xero net of tax and then depending on the tax status of the account in Xero lets Xero calculated the VAT. This works if all your items on your ecommerce store share the same tax status but if for example you plan to sell internationally there is no support for this.
I have not received a response from their support team on these issues. Apologies have been made for the late replies and they are going to chat to the developers about this but no solution. This is a paid plugin at $79.00 with one years support but they have provided no support as of yet.

 

Would I recommend this plugin?

 

This plugin is only really suitable for a basic eCommerce store with no tax requirements. Setup does require technical knowledge but most web designers with WooCommerce experience should be able to provide with input from the person managing the Xero account for the organisation. Order management from within the store works fine and the ability to correct and resend orders is good.

Support could do better and so could this plugin, its almost there and with a bit more development I could recommend it.