Connect a WooCommerce store

A WooCommerce shop connects through the Printeers plugin for WordPress. For the other ways to connect, see Connect your webshop to Printeers.

Connect your shop

You start in your own WordPress admin:

1. Install the Printeers plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory.
2. Open the Printeers menu and select Connect to Printeers.
3. Log in to the Dashboard, or create a Printeers account if you do not have one yet.
4. You are sent back to WordPress to complete the link. Your shop then appears on the Create store page.
5. Select your shop there and fill in the billing account, store name, brand and incident email address. Connect your webshop to Printeers explains each field.

The store now appears in your Stores list. Blueprints you connect to it are added to your shop as draft products for you to publish, and orders for those products come to us automatically.

What syncs, and how often

• Products: we update a product in your shop when something changes on our side, such as its title, its price or the models it is available for. Without a change we do not touch it.
• Preview images: each preview is uploaded once, when it is ready.
• Stock: when our warehouse stock changes we update your shop, at most once every two minutes, and only the variations whose stock differs. Every fifteen minutes we check all your Printeers products for differences.
• Orders: your shop sends new orders to us right away.

Stock above 100 is shown as 100 in your shop. A variation with plenty of stock stays untouched while orders come in, so your shop only sees updates for variations that are running low.

Images and disk space

Preview images arrive in your WordPress media library at full resolution, and WordPress adds its own resized copies of each one. On a small hosting plan that adds up.

An image optimization plugin keeps this in check. It compresses images as they are uploaded, including the ones we send. Most can also convert large PNG files to JPG or WebP and compress the images you already have. Back up your site before letting a plugin process your existing library.

When you remove a product from your shop, its images stay in the media library. Delete them there if you do not plan to restore the product.

Pause or disconnect

Selecting Disconnect in the plugin only pauses the store. Nothing is removed, and connecting again from the plugin resumes syncing where it left off, including orders placed in the meantime.

To take a store out of use for good, disconnect it from its settings page in the Dashboard. See Manage your store settings.

Troubleshooting

Most shops never run into the situations below.

The store stopped syncing

When a connected store stops syncing, its settings page shows a warning and we notify the users who have store notifications enabled. The usual causes are a security plugin or firewall that started blocking our requests, API access that was revoked, or someone selecting Disconnect in the plugin. In the last two cases an issue also appears in your Action center.

What to do depends on the warning:

• We cannot reach your store: check that your site is online and that no security plugin or firewall is blocking Printeers. Syncing resumes automatically once our requests get through again.
• The store is no longer connected: open the Printeers menu in your WordPress admin and select Connect to Printeers again. If the plugin still shows the store as connected, select Disconnect first. This repairs the existing connection with fresh credentials. Your store, products and settings in the Dashboard stay as they are, and orders placed while the store was paused are imported.

A copy of your site is connected too

A staging environment, or a site moved to a new domain, carries the plugin's connection along with it.

• Plugin version 1.1 or newer: the plugin on the copy notices that it runs on a different address. It only offers to remove the connection from that copy and leaves the live store untouched.
• Older plugin versions: selecting Disconnect on the copy pauses the live store. Reconnect the live store as described above.

Update the plugin on every copy before you disconnect it.