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Understand the sync process from WooCommerce to Dotdigital Marketing

Learn about the data that’s synchronised from WooCommerce to Marketing, such as contact, Insight, and cart data.

Written by Gareth Burroughes

The WooCommerce connector syncs six different data types to Marketing:

  • Customers

  • Subscribers

  • Orders

  • Catalog

  • Cart

  • Custom fields

Typically, synchronisation occurs every five minutes after the last sync has finished, but times can vary based on the amount of data that is being synchronised at a given time. We’ve broken the different data types into four different categories.

Contact data

The WooCommerce connector synchronises your customers and subscribers to Dotdigital Marketing. By default, the connector synchronises subscribed customers automatically. If you want to synchronise customers, you need to map them to the appropriate list from your connector settings.

  • Subscribers
    All contacts who have opted into marketing communication on your website. This includes guests who opted in to marketing at checkout.

  • Customers
    All contacts who have entered their email address or mobile number on your site, but who have not opted in to your marketing. This includes those who checkout as guests and have not opted in to marketing communications.

In addition to the contact’s email address or mobile number, the connector synchronises additional information, such as name, addresses, tags, and more.

Identify Guests in your Customers list

To find which contacts in your Customers list are guests, you can create a segment using the Has account contact data field.

For guests, this data field has a value of disabled, meaning they don't have an account on your store.

The value for registered customers is enabled.

To create this segment, you must make sure you have mapped the Has account field in WooCommerce to a custom contact data field in Dotdigital Marketing. Any contacts that synced from your store before you add this mapping must be re-synced to populate this data field.

Insight data

Orders and catalog data are automatically synchronised after the connector is installed. They are stored in order and catalog insight collections in your Marketing account.

  • Orders
    All current and historical orders. This includes the purchase date, which items have been purchased, and the current order status.

  • Catalog
    All current products stored within your WooCommerce catalog. This includes product names, descriptions, SKUs, stock, status, and price.

By default, products are imported into Marketing only if all required fields are present.

If a product is missing any of the following fields, it isn’t imported:

  • ID

  • URL

  • SKU

  • Image

  • Name

  • Price

You can change this behavior in connector settings.

Cart data

Cart data is stored against a CartInsight collection which is used to trigger and send abandoned checkout or abandoned cart emails. Data is sent once an identified contact adds an item to their cart and then leaves before completing a purchase. This data includes the product names, descriptions, images, URLs, prices, and much more.

Custom field data

WooCommerce’s custom fields are unique in that they let you save specialised information that isn't usually captured in your WooCommerce account by default. Custom fields can be created in your WooCommerce account and used to record additional data from your customers and their orders.

Learn more in Custom Fields for WooCommerce.

  • Customers
    Customer custom fields allow you to gather more detailed information from your customers that isn’t usually captured by WooCommerce by default, like:

    • Region

    • Gender

    • Age

    • Favourite colour

All this data can be collected using custom fields. For customer custom fields to sync to your Marketing account you need to map them to custom data fields in your Marketing account.

Learn how in Map WooCommerce customer custom fields to Marketing custom data fields.

  • Orders
    Order custom fields can be used to collect more data about your customers’ orders, such as:

    • Product part numbers

    • Product colour

    • Product weight
      Order custom fields are automatically synced to the Orders Insight data collection in Marketing under the attributes property.

      Learn more in Overview of Insight data.

To find your order custom fields in your insight data:

  1. In Marketing, go to Audience > Contacts and select a contact to open the single customer view.

  2. Select the Insight data tab.

  3. Select an order from the left-side menu.

  4. Find the heading Attributes to see the order custom fields.

Delete a customer

Deleting a customer or their information from your connected store does not delete the customer data in Marketing. To delete customer data from Marketing, you must do it manually within Marketing. Learn more.

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