If you are looking to build a website that offers a shopping cart system for customers to place an order, then look no further than WooCommerce (a plug-in capability of WordPress). WooCommerce is the most popular open source shopping cart system in the world and dominates the shopping cart space with over 40% of all shopping cart sites running on the WooCommerce platform today. WooCommerce is a free open-source software solution that does all the heavy lifting of an online ordering system, but does require some initial technical know-how if you want the shopping cart system to work properly for B2B (Business-to-Business) order. WooCommerce relies on themes and plug-ins to provide much of the finer adjustments and layout on how the shopping cart system will look and feel. This article will dig into the basics of ManageMore and WooCommerce integration and the minimum requirements needed for this to work.
What are WooCommerce Plug-ins?
A plug-in, also called add-on or extension, adds functionality to WooCommerce without altering the main application itself. Plug-ins are developed by the WordPress team or third party developers and are intended to improve or change the standard behavior of the WooCommerce shopping cart to better adapt the ecommerce experience to your customer needs.
What are WooCommerce Themes?
A WordPress theme represents the design of your website. Themes install and integrate with WooCommerce in a similar way that plug-ins do, but provide a more robust library of capabilities that focus primarily on the appearance aspect of WooCommerce. It can control everything from colors, to fonts, to the entire layout. In essence, what you see when viewing the front-end of your site is shaped by the theme. The more robust themes also introduce advanced features that typically eliminate the need for many third party plug-ins. There are many woo themes available today, but we strongly urge ManageMore users to only select from our approved WooCommerce themes to ensure compatibility and high performance results on your ecommerce site.
Do I need Themes / Plug-ins for WooCommerce to work correctly?
WooCommerce, like most ecommerce shopping cart systems, are designed for a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) order experience out-of-the-box. If you are a wholesaler, your website will need a B2B (Business-to-Business) layout and this will require adjustments to the WooCommerce system. The first and most important plug-in, ManageMore connector, does most of the heavy lifting in turning your WooCommerce site into a true B2B shopping cart powerhouse. But you may still need to select an appropriate WooCommerce theme and a few extra plug-ins to get things just the way you want.
IMPORTANT: There are thousands of plug-ins and themes for WooCommerce today and many are free to use. However, Intellisoft can only provide technical assistance if you use our recommended plug-ins for compatibility and performance related reasons. If possible, try to use plug-ins sparingly as they can cause performance and compatibility issues if not tested properly. You need to consider what is important for your site and then choose the theme or plug-in that provides the functionality you are looking for.
DISCLAIMER: ManageMore is not responsible for the effectiveness of any theme / plug-in we recommend. Plug-ins mentioned by us are supported by third party developers and we make no claim of reliability or fitness for a particular purpose. Each third party plug-in should be verified to be compatible with the latest version of WordPress and WooCommerce before installing onto a live ecommerce site.
Other WooCommerce Costs to Consider
As mentioned already, the WooCommerce system is open source and free to download and use. However, there are separate costs you need to be made aware of beyond the ManageMore eConnect extensions.
- Web Hosting Provider: You will want to host your WooCommerce site with a reliable and proven hosting provider. Hosting costs vary based on performance needs. In general, expect a midrange unmanaged hosting plan to cost somewhere between $20-$50/mo. Larger distributors with a more active customer base (100+ web orders per day), should expect a more powerful dedicated hosting plan that may cost around $100-$200/mo. Click here for recommendations on top performing hosting providers.
- Theme and Plug-in Costs: No two WooCommerce sites are ever alike. Most of these third party theme and plug-ins range between $30 to $100, accordingly.
REQUIRED WooCommerce Plug-Ins with ManageMore
The following plug-ins and themes are required or very likely needed for a well laid out WooCommerce shopping cart site to work with ManageMore. Some of the products listed here will need to be purchased from the respective Developer shown below and prices are subject to change from each perspective software company. Prices listed here are just to provide a general idea of the costs involved and are subject to change from the developer.
| Plug-In | Developer | Required | Price | Plug-in Purpose |
| WooCommerce | WooCommerce | Yes | FREE |
This is the main plug-in for WordPress that adds Shopping Cart functionality to the WordPress product. It is free! |
| ManageMore Connector | Intellisoft | Yes |
This is our main plug-in which interfaces ManageMore Business Software to WooCommerce . This plug-in does all the magic of synchronizing ManageMore inventory, available quantity, customer specific pricing, and product images. Orders are automatically downloaded to ManageMore in real time. This plug-in must be downloaded from the link provided and manually installed on your WordPress site. For installation instructions, see our article on Installing the ManageMore Connector plug-in |
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| ManageMore Wholesale Prices | Intellisoft | Yes |
This companion plug-in provides many of the B2B specific functionality for WooCommerce. This plug-in handles all of the different product price levels, excise tax calculations for all 50 states and customer-specific pricing processes. This plug-in must be downloaded and installed separately from the ManageMore connector plug-in. |
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Intellisoft | Yes |
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This companion plug-in provides your clients a registration form process for becoming a customer along with an entire client portal for handling all of their CRM activities. Your clients will be able to review their own account balance, make payments, view credit limits, upload license documents, review order status, receive important messages and company announcements, and even quickly reorder from a past order on their account. Customers will find everything they need online and eliminates the need to call your office regarding their orders and/or outstanding debt. |
| Live Variation Table |
Intellisoft |
Yes |
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The Live Variation Table plug-in (aka PVT) by Intellisoft provides a powerful cart display solution for variation products (i.e. Matrix Inventory). Variations are displayed in a highly customizable AJAX table driven design for both desktop and mobile display. This PVT grid supports multiple field stacked columns, font/color settings, suppression of the field label, and much more. |
| BeRocket Ajax Product Filter |
BeRocket |
No | $45 |
This plug-in is recommended if you want to take full advantage of brands or product attribute searches within your shopping cart site. It provides many ways to display and configure your shopping cart with options of filtering products by brand, product attributes, tags, prices, and other custom taxonomies. There are several popular product filter plug-ins in the woo marketplace, but we recommend this one due to its performance, feature set and product support. |
| Conditional Shipping and Payments for WooCommerce | Woo | No |
$109 |
This plug-in gives you a streamlined way to restrict the shipping methods, payment gateways, and shipping destinations available to your customers. |
| W3 Total Cache | Bold Grid | Yes |
$99 |
A caching plug-in is critical for optimal ecommerce performance by reducing page load and leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration. This plug-in also includes a bonus image optimizer which reduce image file sizes on-the-fly for even quicker page loads. |
| WooCommerce Theme | Varies | Yes |
$100 |
A WooCommerce Theme sets the tone for your website identity and can have a big impact on the look and feel of your website. To learn more about themes, click here and play it safe by choosing popular proven lightweight themes like Neve, Botiga, or Zakra. |
Connecting WooCommerce with ManageMore
Once you have have installed all the necessary 3rd party plug-ins mentioned above, you are ready to integrate ManageMore into your shopping cart. Please contact Intellisoft to purchase the ManageMore eConnect module and receive the ManageMore Connector plug-in. Click Here for instructions on interfacing the ManageMore Connector plug-in to begin communicating with your WooCommerce site.
Security Plug-ins (RECOMMENDED)
Security plug-ins identify vulnerabilities and protect your site from hackers. Please consult with your hosting provider to determine if security plug-ins will work effectively with their hosted web server. Some hosting providers already provide very effective security tools that can block unwanted IP addresses before traffic hits your WooCommerce application and others will recommend plug-ins like the ones mentioned below.
Here are our top recommended security plug-ins (choose only one):
WordFence by Defiant
Wordfence provides an effective Web Application Firewall (WAF) that identifies and blocks malicious traffic. This plug-in is quite popular with most WordPress users. It checks core files, themes and plug-ins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It also compares your files with what is in the WordPress.org repository, checking their integrity and reporting any changes to you.
Sucuri
Sucuri is a cloud-based security solution that you can rely on to ensure the security of your WordPress site. It offers a Web Application Firewall to protect your site from hackers and DDoS attacks. Moreover, it will constantly monitor your site and notify you when there are potential vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it helps to boost your site performance with a CDN service. Also, you will get access to malware removal without any limits.
IQ Block Country by Pascal
iQ Block Country is a plugin that allows you to limit access to your website content. You can either allow or disallow visitors from defined countries to (parts of) your content. This plug-in adds an additional layer of security to your site by stopping visitors from doing harmful things and limiting the countries that can access your site.
Server Optimization Plug-ins (RECOMMENDED)
Server optimization plug-ins help with optimizing resource usage. The benefits of these plug-ins include faster load times, low resource usage, and enhanced user experience. However, it is critical you speak with your hosting provider to ensure that these plug-ins will work with their server hardware. In some cases, your hosting provider may already provide server-level caching (e.g. WPEngine, Kinsta).
Cloudflare by Cloudflare, Inc.
Speed up your WordPress site by up to 300% with Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin. APO allows Cloudflare to serve your entire WordPress site from our edge network of over 250+ data centers worldwide ensuring fast & reliable performance for your visitors no matter where they are. NOTE: Many hosting providers include this service at no additional charge.
Redis Object Cache by Till Kruss
A persistent object cache backend powered by Redis. Supports Predis, PhpRedis, Relay, replication, sentinels, clustering and WP-CLI. Object caching is a type of server-side caching and can be used in conjunction with other memory caching plug-ins that do not employ any object cache logic. Object caching stores database query results that have been loaded for faster retrieval on subsequent queries. This end result is a plugin that replaces the built-in WordPress object cache with a more persistent cache that helps server performance.
Developer Plug-ins
There are dozens of great diagnostic and database tools in the form of plug-ins that greatly enhance your ability to manage your WooCommerce site (i.e. backups, performance monitoring, activity logging, server testing, etc.). These productivity plug-ins are generally used by your web designers / consultants. Click here for our top productivity / developer tool picks.
