Getting started with idealo for WooCommerce

Suppose you want to sell your WooCommerce products through the idealo service. In that case, our idealo plugin for Woocommerce is the best solution: a reliable and easy way to update your WooCommerce orders with the idealo platform quickly.

This allows your customers to buy on idealo while you manage the related orders in WooCommerce as usual. idealo for WooCommerce takes care of the rest.

What is idealo, and what can idealo for WooCommerce do?

idealo is a price comparison service: customers can use it to search for the best offer for the products they want to buy. When they find it, the platform links to the original merchant page where the customer can make the purchase. While this doesn’t change for customers outside of Germany, it has recently been extended for users buying within Germany. In such cases, customers can purchase directly on the idealo shop without any merchant online shop redirection.

To achieve that, the merchants need to open an account on idealo, set up their products, and manage the related orders directly on idealo.

If the merchant wants, they can work on idealo and sell their products there. But what if the merchant wants to sell the same products through their shop? In this case we will have double the work to do: the merchant will have to manage the orders in idealo and the orders relating to their WooCommerce store.

In order to get more sales opportunities does there have to be more work? Not necessarily.

This is where idealo for WooCommerce saves you time and energy.  When the merchant uses WooCommerce on their shop,it  is possible to automatically download the orders;’ relevant data from idealo and manage them on the WooCommerce side.There is no additional work. You sell on idealo, but rely on the usual WooCommerce workflow.

What is required to use Idealo for WooCommerce?

To install idealo for WooCommerce, you need the following:

• An installed version of WordPress >= 5.3
• An installed and activated version of WooCommerce >= 3.9
• PHP version >= 7.1

Installing idealo for WooCommerce

1. After you have purchased idealo for WooCommerce, please log in to your customer account and download the product in the API Downloads section
2. Log in to your WordPress installation
3. Go to Plugins → Add new
4. Click the Upload Plugin button and upload the idealo for WooCommerce zip file from your computer
5. Click on Install now and wait until WordPress says the plugin was installed successfully
6. You can activate the plugin immediately by clicking on Activate now on the success page. If you want to activate it later, you can do so via Plugins → Installed Plugins
7. After the installation, you can proceed as described here to activate your license

Settings for idealo for WooCommerce

Setting idealo for Woocommerce is easy and straightforward. First, you must create a new account on the idealo platform .

After that, you access the idealo backend, where you find a lot of information to start selling your products on the idealo platform. For our purpose we are actually interested in the API information that connects idealo for WooCommerce with the idealo platform and automatically updates your orders in WooCommerce.

API Settings on idealo platform

Go to the My idealo section and click on Settings to access the API information.

Select API Clients from the menu on the left, and then you can see your Shop-ID.

Scrolling down the page, you access another section, Merchant Order API v2, where generating a new Client Id and the related Client Secret is possible.
The system can generate this information in two options: Sandbox, for testing purposes, or Production, for the live environment.

To enable the plugin, you need to generate a new Production Client, and choose to Generate a new production client as reported in the picture below.

So, with this main information: Client Id, Client Secret, and Shop-ID, you can configure idealo for WooCommerce in your WooCommerce shop.

idealo for WooCommerce settings

Please note: when connecting the plugin to your idealo account, all existing idealo orders with a Processing status not previously imported, will be automatically imported as soon as the Run orders import now button is clicked, or the scheduled import is automatically triggered. You must first Complete the orders in the idealo platform to prevent them from being imported.

Proceed to WooCommerce → Settings and click on the idealo Tab, which takes you to the idealo settings page, as shown in the following picture:

Here you can fill in the settings fields:

• Merchant Name: set the unique name of the marketplace participant here
• Shop Id: insert the number that identifies the specific shop connected to the idealo platform
• Client Id: insert the Client Id value
• Client Secret: insert the Client Secret password value
• When to synchronize Orders with idealo: select the time interval to trigger the orders import process
• Run orders import now: this button lets you manually trigger the orders import

Press the Save button to save the settings.

When the orders import starts automatically after the selected time interval or manually using the related button, idealo for WooCommerce imports the orders in your WooCommerce shop.

When the plugin performs an import, it does not provide any feedback. Just check your orders (WooCommerce → Orders) to verify if new orders have been imported, or see the Debugging section for further info.

Products

Every order refers to one or more products.

To ensure the import is performed correctly, you should set the products on idealo should also be set in your WooCommerce.

In that case, be careful that the related SKU values are properly set in the idealo platform and in your shop, too: this is because that value lets you correctly match the products related to the order.

Orders

After a customer successfully purchases through idealo, the plugin can download the related order into your WooCommerce shop.

The new order will be in Processing status and related to the WooCommerce products via the SKU value. In that case, WooCommerce will retrieve the related tax information as usual.

Similarly, the shipping cost will be taken from idealo and the stock level of the product will be updated in your store.

If the product SKU in the order does not match the one in your WooCommerce environment, WooCommerce will use the default tax rate, and will not update the stock level for the product.

Furthermore, after the order in Processing status is downloaded through the plugin, it is also flagged. This way, it won’t be imported again, regardless of its status.  The debug plugin is required to import orders in a status other than Processing or already imported ones.. More information about the Debug Plugin is available here.

Refunds

You can still manage the refund process for an imported order from your shop. In that case, you must proceed as described below to perform the refund properly.

• Access the order page
• Scroll down to the Refund metabox and click on Refund
  

  

• Now the refund information is visible: you can select the number of items and the amount you want to refund

  

• Finally, you can perform the refund. The standard refund button that WooCommerce provides is labeled as Refund manually. If you use it, you will need to access the payment system to manually perform the refund for the requested amount. But depending on the gateway the customer used to perform the purchase in idealo originally, a second button may be available.

The refund process is automated using this button; no further action is needed after pressing it.

Refunds status mapping

It is also important to consider that when a refund is performed on the WooCommerce side, the idealo platform will mark the order as revoked or partially revoked: these statuses will be changed in idealo only if the original quantity of the products of the order is decreased.

Through a dedicated select box in the WooCommerce site you can choose the revoke reason related to the particular refund action.

Recently, a new order status has been added to the idealo platform: the revoking status. This is selected in idealo when a revocation request from a customer is received. So, in this case the plugin maps the revoking order in the WooCommerce store as Canceled.

This way, the merchant can understand which WooCommerce order needs to be refunded because the customer requested it, and proceed with the refund process as previously explained.

Debugging

During the import, and while using the plugin, there may be no feedback on whether everything is happening as expected. The log is the best place to go if something doesn’t seem right.

The plugin processes several actions/tasks during its function, and some of them generate messages in the log. We use the WooCommerce log UI to track these messages, as shown in the picture below.

The log is essential for understanding and fixing import related problems.

We also implemented a Debug Plugin that let the testing process easier to perform. For further information, you can refer to The idealo Debug Plugin tutorial.

Please include the complete import log if you need to contact support for any issue related to the plugin.