Waypoint 3PL - Documentation

WooCommerce plugin

Our WooCommerce plugin does the same job: your paid orders come to us, and the tracking, the completed order and your stock figures go back into WooCommerce. What it means for your shop.

Available now. It came through its beta on live shops and is maintained against each WooCommerce and WordPress release. If something looks wrong, tell us rather than working around it — a workaround in your shop is a bug we never hear about.

WooCommerce	8.2 or newer
WordPress	6.2 or newer
PHP	8.1 or newer

Getting it installed

Download the plugin from the API & Integrations page of your Waypoint account — open the account menu at the top right of the portal to find it. Then in your WordPress admin go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the file and activate it. Same as any other plugin, and nothing to do on the server.

If you would rather use FTP, unzip it first and upload the waypoint3pl-connector folder into wp-content/plugins, then activate it under Plugins.

To update it later, download it again and upload it the same way — WordPress will offer to replace what is already there. Your settings and your order history with us are kept, so nothing needs setting up twice.

Removing the plugin also leaves those alone, which means putting it back does not send us orders we have already picked.

Switching it on

Under WooCommerce → Settings → Waypoint 3PL:

Copy your two keys from API & Integrations in your portal.
Paste them in, set Mode to Sandbox, turn the plugin on and save.
Press Test Connection.
Press Send Sellable Products To Waypoint once, so we know what you sell and what each thing weighs.
Place a test order and mark it paid. It should show up in your portal within a minute.
Happy? Change Mode to Live.

Sandbox orders are never picked or posted, so you can try the whole thing without a parcel moving.

What gets sent, and how often

Which way	What	How often
Woo → Waypoint	Paid orders, including which delivery option the customer chose and what the parcel weighs	Every minute
Woo → Waypoint	Cancellations, so we stop picking	Straight away
Waypoint → Woo	The courier and tracking number, and the order marked Complete — which sends your customer their email	Every 5 minutes
Waypoint → Woo	A refund recorded if the order comes back	Every 5 minutes
Waypoint → Woo	Stock figures, set to what you can actually sell	Twice a day, or more if you want
Woo → Waypoint	Your product list	A button you press once when setting up

If the connection hiccups and the same order gets sent to us twice, we notice and still only pick it once.

WordPress only does its scheduled jobs when somebody visits your site. On a busy shop you will never notice. On a quiet one an order can sit waiting until the next visitor arrives — which looks exactly like the plugin being broken. If orders are reaching us late, ask your host to run this every minute instead:

// in wp-config.php
define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );

# then, as a normal scheduled job on the server
* * * * * curl -s https://your-shop.example/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

Two things WooCommerce does differently

No part-shipments	WooCommerce cannot show an order as half sent. So when your parcel leaves us, the courier and tracking go onto the order and it is marked Complete — that is what sends your customer their tracking. If an order goes out as more than one parcel, it is only completed once the last one has left.
Returns	Same as Magento: a note on the order saying what came back and in what condition. Nothing is refunded and no stock is added back — the goods are here with us, graded, and the next stock update will say so.

What happens to your orders

In Waypoint	In WooCommerce
Being picked or packed	Nothing changes. These are our stages, not news for your customer
Dispatched	Courier and tracking added, and the order marked Complete once every parcel has left
Delivered	Marks the order Complete, if it was not already
Some of it came back	A note saying what came back and what state it is in
All of it came back	The same, for the whole order
Cancelled	The order is cancelled, or flagged for you to look at if only part of it was

Paying by bank transfer or cheque? WooCommerce leaves those orders on hold, because the money has not arrived yet — and we do not start picking an order that has not been paid for. It comes to us as soon as you mark it Processing, which is what you would do anyway once the money lands.

Cancelling an order

Cancel in WooCommerce and we stop picking, before WooCommerce records it. If the parcel has already left, the cancellation is refused and the order goes back to how it was — so your customer never gets a cancellation email for a parcel that is on its way. Raise a return instead.

Putting a cancelled order back to Processing afterwards does not start it again. Once we cancel, the stock we were holding goes back on sale and may already have gone to someone else. You will see a note on the order saying so. Place a new order for anything still to be sent.

If something looks wrong

Every order we receive gets a note on it in WooCommerce. There is a fuller log under WooCommerce → Status → Logs — choose waypoint3pl from the list. If an order did not reach us, Force Push Orders sends anything we missed.

Documentation.