WooCommerce Supplier Portal
A bespoke plugin that turned supplier email threads into a workflow.
- Role
- Architect · Plugin developer
- Timeline
- Built in-house
- Surface
- Custom plugin
A bespoke plugin that turned supplier email threads into a workflow.
Fulfilment across multiple international suppliers had become a manual process: copy order details out of WooCommerce, paste into an email, wait, then hand-type tracking numbers back in. It worked at low volume and broke at every other volume.
The plugin models the real process rather than the ideal one. Orders are evaluated against supplier routing rules, split where necessary, and emitted as structured payloads a supplier can act on without interpretation. Every state transition is recorded, so an order's history is queryable instead of buried in an inbox.
The hard part of supplier automation is the return path. Tracking data is ingested, matched back to the originating order and line items, written into order notes, and surfaced to the customer — with an exceptions queue for anything that fails to match, so nothing silently disappears.
It is a WordPress plugin, not a black box: hooks and filters at the extension points, scheduled jobs for reconciliation, and admin screens that make the system's state legible. That means the workflow can change without a rewrite.