Connect your WooCommerce shop to SitesPlaced

If you already sell on WooCommerce, you can keep that shop exactly as it is and still use SitesPlaced to run your orders. A plugin copies every order from WooCommerce into SitesPlaced. You then get the SitesPlaced order dashboard, the mobile app, courier booking, WhatsApp order messages, a tracking page for your customers and the AI Co-founder, all working on your WooCommerce orders.

WooCommerce stays in charge of payment, stock and cancellation. The plugin does not change your checkout, your payment gateway or your stock. SitesPlaced sends back only the shipping status and the tracking details.

Before you start

• You need to be able to install plugins on your WordPress site. If someone else manages the site for you, send them this page.
• You need a SitesPlaced account. The free plan is enough, and you can create the account during the connection.
• The plugin is a zip file you download from SitesPlaced and upload yourself. It is not listed in the WordPress plugin directory.

Install the plugin

1. 1Download the plugin from the WooCommerce plugin page. The file is called sitesplaced-for-woocommerce.zip. Do not unzip it.
2. 2In your WordPress admin, open Plugins and choose to add a new plugin.
3. 3Choose the option to upload a plugin, pick the zip file you downloaded, and install it.
4. 4Activate the plugin. It needs WordPress 6.0, WooCommerce 7.0 and PHP 7.4, or newer.

Connect it to SitesPlaced

1. 1In your WordPress admin go to WooCommerce → SitesPlaced and press Connect to SitesPlaced.
2. 2Your browser goes to SitesPlaced. Sign in, or create a free account if you do not have one.
3. 3SitesPlaced shows the address of the website that is asking to connect. Check that it is your shop. If it is not, close the page.
4. 4Choose where the orders should go: create a new connected store, or pick one of the stores you already have.
5. 5Approve. Your browser goes back to your WordPress admin and the plugin shows that it is connected.

Behind this, SitesPlaced hands your site a one-time code that works once, for 10 minutes, and only for your shop's own address. The plugin swaps the code for its own key. You never have to copy a key by hand.

Bring in your past orders

Right after you connect, the plugin imports your last 30 days of orders by itself. To go further back, choose Last 90 days or Last 365 days on the plugin's screen and press Import past orders. You can press Cancel import while it runs, and Resume import if it stopped part way.

Past orders are copied in batches and keep their original dates, so your reports stay correct. They are treated as history: no phone notification, no WhatsApp message and no webhook is sent for them.

What is copied, and what is not

Copied into SitesPlaced:

• Every order, as it is placed and each time it changes: the order number, status, items, totals, the customer's name and contact details, the delivery address, the customer's note, and how it was paid.
• Cancellations and refunds. Cancel or refund on WooCommerce and the copy in SitesPlaced follows. A part refund is recorded with its amount and the order stays open.
• Your product list, with names, prices and photos. It is kept apart from SitesPlaced products, so a copied product can never be sold on a SitesPlaced storefront. The AI Co-founder uses it so its creatives can show your real product photos.

Never copied, and never changed:

• Your checkout and your payment gateway. Shoppers pay on WooCommerce exactly as they do today.
• Your stock. WooCommerce stays in charge of it. A copied order does not change stock anywhere in SitesPlaced.
• Draft and trashed orders. An order that is still a checkout draft is not sent. If you trash an order later, the copy in SitesPlaced is archived, not deleted.
• Emails. SitesPlaced sends no email to your shoppers for copied orders. WooCommerce keeps sending its own.

What you will see in SitesPlaced

• Your WooCommerce orders in the Orders list of the connected store, each with a label that says it came from WooCommerce and a link that opens the same order in your WordPress admin.
• The real payment method the shopper used, as WooCommerce named it.
• A push notification in the SitesPlaced mobile app when a fresh order arrives.
• Courier booking on the order, the same way as for any SitesPlaced order. See Manage orders & shipments.
• WhatsApp order messages, if the store has WhatsApp connected. See WhatsApp order alerts.
• Risk flags on cash-on-delivery orders. A note appears on the order when the contact details look wrong, when the customer has cancelled before, when one customer has many open cash-on-delivery orders, or when the order is unusually large. The flags are free, they follow fixed rules, and they only appear on cash-on-delivery orders.
• Cancel is switched off for these orders. Cancelling a copied order inside SitesPlaced is blocked, with a note that says to cancel it on WooCommerce. This is on purpose: WooCommerce took the payment, so the cancel has to start there.

What goes back to WooCommerce

Only shipping news. When an order is shipped, out for delivery or delivered in SitesPlaced, the plugin updates the WooCommerce order with that status and with the tracking number, the courier and the tracking link. Nothing else is written back.

Your shopper then sees a Track your order section, with the courier, the tracking number and a link, in three places: the WooCommerce order emails, the order page under My Account, and the thank-you page after checkout. The link goes to the courier's own tracking page when there is one, and to the SitesPlaced tracking page when there is not.

You see a box titled SitesPlaced on the order screen in your WordPress admin. It shows whether the order has been sent, its tracking, an Open in SitesPlaced link and a Send to SitesPlaced now button for an order you want to push by hand.

The plugin's screen has three settings: Send products to SitesPlaced, Mark the order Completed when it ships, and Show tracking in customer emails. Press Save settings after you change one.

SitesPlaced tries to send each update to your site straight away. The plugin also asks SitesPlaced for waiting updates every 15 minutes. So if your host blocks incoming requests, the tracking still arrives, a little later.

The tracking page

A connected store gets a public tracking page. The shopper types the order number and a second detail: the last 4 digits of the phone number on the order, or the email address. They then see the order's status, the items, the courier and the tracking link. The page never shows a name, a phone number, an email or an address.

The second detail is there for a reason. WooCommerce order numbers go up one at a time, so they are easy to guess. Without the second detail, anyone could type the next number and look at a stranger's order. After five wrong tries, further tries are refused for 15 minutes.

The connected store's public address shows only this tracking page, and the page links back to your real shop.

You can also put a tracking box on your own WordPress site. Add the shortcode [sitesplaced_tracking] to any page. It shows an order-number field and a button, and sends the visitor to your SitesPlaced tracking page. It loads no scripts from outside your site.

A staging or test copy of your site

Many shops keep a staging copy: a private duplicate of the site for testing changes. A duplicate carries the plugin and its key with it. To stop test orders landing in your real order list, the plugin checks its own address. If the address is not the one that was connected, the plugin pauses itself and sends nothing. Your live site is not affected.

The notice reads: “SitesPlaced is paused: this site's address does not match the shop that was connected.” It appears on every page of the WordPress admin for shop managers. On a staging copy, leave it paused. If you have moved your shop to a new address for good, press Reconnect.

Disconnect

Press Disconnect on the plugin's screen in WordPress, or disconnect from Settings → Developer in SitesPlaced. The plugin's key stops working at once and no more orders are sent. The orders already copied stay in SitesPlaced. If you connect the same shop again later, it reuses the same connected store, so you do not get duplicates.

• Deactivating the plugin stops its scheduled jobs and keeps its settings, so you can switch it back on later.
• Deleting the plugin revokes its key at SitesPlaced and removes the plugin's settings, temporary data and scheduled jobs. It does not remove the tracking numbers already saved on your WooCommerce orders, because those are your shipping history, and it deletes nothing inside SitesPlaced.

Troubleshooting

• “SitesPlaced is paused: the connection key was revoked, or the connected store was removed in SitesPlaced.” No orders are being sent. Press Reconnect on the plugin's screen to start again.
• “SitesPlaced is paused: this site's address does not match the shop that was connected.” You are on a staging copy, or the shop's address changed. See the staging section above.
• A new order has not appeared. Check that the plugin shows it is connected. Orders that are still a checkout draft are not sent until they become real orders.
• Tracking has not reached WooCommerce. Give it 15 minutes: that is how often the plugin collects waiting updates when your host blocks incoming requests.
• You are told you have reached your limit of connected shops. The free plan allows one and a paid store plan allows five. Disconnect a shop you no longer use, or see pricing.
• Two shops use the same order numbers. The second shop's numbers get a short prefix in SitesPlaced so the two can be told apart.
• Still stuck? Write to us from the contact page with your shop's address.