Going Cloud: Zoho Inventory – WooCommerce Integration

As many of you know, we became Zoho Partner back in April of this year to serve our customer to the fullest. We want to bring SME businesses to the 21st century and that requires a strong, flexible and affordable business operating system. Thus, we chose Zoho as the digital core of our current and future clients. One of the major challenges of Zoho was the integration with the WooCommerce system. This was the number one priority for our client base to switch to Zoho as their all-in-one business system. Today, we are proud to announce to have solved that challenge, with the world’s first realtime integration between WooCommerce and Zoho Inventory!

What was the problem?

To explain the problem better, lets dive in to what WooCommerce is and how significant it is to businesses. To do that quickly, you can read below infographic to get an impression of WooCommerce.

As you can see from the infographic, WooCommerce has a market share of 41% worldwide when looking at e-commerce stores. However, this fastest growing e-commerce does not talk to Zoho, to be more specific, Zoho Inventory. This was a big problem up until today for all these stores, because orders were not being synced with Zoho, there was no bridge between these two platforms. You had to do everything manually, which is impossible when you have a hundred or more orders per day.

Solution

We decided to build the first realtime connection between WooCommerce and Zoho Inventory. By utilizing the flexible and simple API, we managed to implement it directly in the woocommerce core and sync it in realtime. So whenever a client places and order, the entire order will be sent to Zoho Inventory.

Old Flow:

1. Customer places an order in WooCommerce store
2. Employee creates the customer, product(s) and finally the Sales Order in Zoho Inventory based on that order
3. Employee checks stock level of that product and starts the production/delivery process.
4. Automated workflow starts (if setup/activated)

New Flow:

1. Customer places an order in WooCommerce store >> Order gets sent directly to Zoho Inventory (contact, items, sales order).
2. Automated workflow starts (if setup/activated) to process the order

As you can see, there is very little human activity involved to process an order. This saves hours/days work for the employee of a small company and saves many days of work for larger companies. That’s a lot of money saved, which can be spent on better things, like marketing or R&D.

We will demo this solution in the near future together with Zoho in Utrecht. Please send us a message if you are interested in this solution and want to learn more.