3 WooCommerce integrations every manufacturer must use

You may feel as though you can make it work with just the vanilla platform, but if you want your scaling manufacturing business to succeed, you’ll need WooCommerce integrations to keep up.

Once upon a time, a manufacturer would create products, and a wholesaler or retailer would purchase them to sell them. But, as soon as we entered the internet era, forward-thinking manufacturers started cutting out the middleman and selling directly to consumers. With this, entrepreneurs could get total control over their business, from production to sales and even their supply chain management.

And luckily for those manufacturers who took on this greater responsibility, software developers also saw an opportunity in this new digital market. That’s why we’re investigating the best WooCommerce integrations manufacturers can use to boost their business’ productivity.

WooCommerce integrations are tools designed to make managing your online store easier.

As a manufacturer, finding suitable WooCommerce integrations for your store is confusing because most are tailored for dropshippers. It doesn’t help that the number of tools out there seems infinite.

However, some tools are purpose-built for scaling manufacturers, and we’ll help you discover the best three your business should adopt.

If you’ve already figured out that the place to be is online, but have already made the plunge with Shopify, have no fear! Take a look at our article on Shopify tools to figure out what apps are available for you on the market.

Otherwise, if you’re already set up, or thinking about getting started with WooCommerce, then this is the article for you since we’ll be looking at the best WooCommerce integrations to help manufacturers get control over their business.

What are WooCommerce integrations?

WooCommerce integrations are third-party plugins you can find online, which provide solutions for features missing in WooCommerce that your business needs to maximize its capacity. These plugins can range from inventory management and production to marketing.

Since WooCommerce is open-source, manufacturers can use specific WooCommerce integrations for their company’s needs to help customize their site or get tools to help manage their business.

As for WooCommerce itself? WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to use e-commerce functionality on your WordPress website to set up an online business for your manufacturing company easily and relatively cheaply.

Here are some fun facts about WordPress and WooCommerce integrations before we look at the top three integrations your manufacturing business should consider:

• The plugin launched in 2011 and was purchased by Automattic (the owners of WordPress) in 2015
• Woocommerce is the second most popular open-source platform on the internet
• WooCommerce has been downloaded 211 million times

Knowing these facts is one thing, but if you want to get ahead of the competition, you need to understand how the vanilla plugin works.

Be sure to read more about WooCommerce inventory management when trying to figure out how to optimize your website and business.

So, that’s the basic explanation of WooCommerce as a WordPress integration. But moving on, let’s look at the best WooCommerce integrations.

1. Katana — WooCommerce manufacturing plugin

As a manufacturer, you have to contend with the issues that plague dropshippers but also figure out how to schedule operations and develop a smooth manufacturing process.

And unfortunately, unless you want to spend megabucks on it, there aren’t a lot of great choices to choose from.

Enter Katana’s WooCommerce plugin, the inexpensive all-in-one solution developed for manufacturers looking to get total control of their business, from order fulfillment to inventory management and production.

Katana’s powerful WooCommerce plugin enables manufacturers to centralize their whole business into one ridiculously intuitive visual platform. This allows them to get a quick overview of their company’s performance and to monitor the status of sales orders and manufacturing orders that are waiting, in progress, or fulfilled.

When you use Katana’s WooCommerce integration, you can easily synchronize your stock levels between the two platforms and track your inventory levels at different locations, allowing you to focus on the important stuff — making your products.

But this piece of software doesn’t stop there. Katana also has:

• Real-time master planner — Every time a sales order is created via WooCommerce or a manufacturing order is created in Katana, the master planner autonomously takes available finished goods or materials, and commits them to the open orders, so you can fulfill them as soon as possible.
• Priority-based planning — Katana automatically schedules manufacturing orders in the order in which they were generated. However, if a VIP customer’s order needs to be fulfilled first, the nifty drag-and-drop feature allows you to reprioritize your workflow, and the system will redistribute your committed inventory following the new schedule.
• Improved raw material management — Katana allows manufacturers to easily monitor their raw material levels. Hence, they know immediately if they can start production or need to order more materials.

Katana also lets you easily set reorder points and will notify you if your inventory runs low, so you can avoid stockouts.

If you want to know more about Katana’s WooCommerce manufacturing plugin, be sure to check out the video below.

2. MyWorks Software — WooCommerce automation

If you’re a scaling manufacturer playing it safe, it is more than likely that you’ll get yourself set up with QuickBooks Online to track your finances.

That’s why you want to look for WooCommerce to QuickBooks Online integrations so you can get more control over your business finances.

That’s why QuickBooks Online sync for WooCommerce, developed by MyWorks Software, is an excellent solution for managing both of your accounts.

The software aims to help you save time and easily monitor your business’ financial health by integrating your online store with your accounting software.

A fully automated and real-time WooCommerce to QuickBooks Online solution allows you to synchronize your orders, products, and payments.

This integration allows you to determine which information you wish to synchronize between your accounts to better understand your business’ performance. Once synced, both accounts will correctly display the latest information about your business.

The biggest benefit of this integration is that it can make your accounting endeavors effortless.

Once it’s been correctly set up, you can easily manage your business from the app and then push over any of your financial information to QuickBooks, so you don’t need to navigate between the platforms manually transferring information.

While this product is perfect for dropshippers, it’s missing certain features manufacturers need.

You can find out more about MyWorks Software in the video below.

3. Klaviyo — WooCommerce marketing integration

Getting your business up and running offline is a challenge in and of itself. However, it doesn’t matter how smooth your production processes are if you cannot attract leads and provide shoppers with a positive shopping experience.

Introducing the Klaviyo WooCommerce integration, a marketing tool that helps manufacturers create personalized, targeted emails as easily as can through data-driven analysis.

The importance of having WooCommerce integrations such as Klaviyo allows scaling manufacturers to create stronger relationships with their customers by collecting information on their visitors, so you can better understand their actions and anticipate their preferences.

This alone can help manufacturers foster a trustworthy brand, which will be crucial in facilitating faster growth.

So, how exactly does the Klaviyo WooCommerce integration help you achieve all this?

Quick set-up

Firstly, you can almost immediately get set up with the Klaviyo WooCommerce integration. Automatically synchronize your WooCommerce historical data and any new data to get started with your stronger marketing communications.

Data analytics

Klaviyo automatically takes your customer data to predict their lifetime value, churn risk, gender, and optimal send time. It goes even further by making personalized recommendations to customers without you inputting any data. Klaviyo does it simply based on a customer’s purchase history.

Complete lifecycle engagement

The Klaviyo WooCommerce integration allows you to deliver targeted, branded forms for building your marketing list. This helps manufacturers engage with customers via multiple channels and better understand if a customer is likely to churn or identify as a high-value shopper.

Choose the right one

And there you have it, three WooCommerce integrations that can undoubtedly help any scaling manufacturer boost their sales. You can get set up with all three integrations or play the field to see what other options are available.

Whichever platforms you end up choosing, there are some features that every manufacturer needs:

• 4 types of inventory management:
  • Finished goods
  • Raw materials
  • Work-in-progress
  • MRO
• Production scheduling
• Shop floor planning

Yes, marketing is equally as important, but if you’re bringing in leads but don’t have the backend to meet those increasing orders, then your company will just be wasting valuable resources.

Katana’s WooCommerce manufacturing plugin has it all. Request a demo so you can see how it can optimize your business’ performance for yourself.

Henry Kivimaa

Content Manager

Henry is an avid traveler with a passion for writing. Having lived most of his adult life abroad, he’s amassed a variety of experiences from many different fields. From ForEx trading to compliance to mobile engineering to demolition, he’s definitely not afraid to test out new things.