WooCommerce Integration – Feature & Process Guide

WooCommerce is not a third-party marketplace like Amazon, eBay or TikTok — it's the seller's own self-hosted WordPress store, connected to Pentagon Connect through a companion plugin. There's no shared catalogue, no central marketplace approval process and no other company sitting between the seller and their customers: it's the seller's store, so refunds, cancellations and listing decisions are entirely under the seller's own control through Pentagon Connect, not gated by an operator/marketplace role.

Because each connected store is its own independent WordPress installation, exact behaviour can vary slightly from store to store depending on which plugins the merchant has installed. Two capabilities in particular only work because of a plugin: shipping and tracking depend entirely on a third-party Shipment Tracking plugin being installed on the store (core WooCommerce has no shipping/tracking capability of its own), and partial shipments plus a true customer returns workflow depend on a custom plugin Pentagon Connect would need to build for that store — not available today. If a store doesn't have the required plugin installed, the corresponding feature simply doesn't work for that store.

Quick Reference

Product Management

Pricing & Stock

Orders & Fulfilment

Refunds, Returns, Cancellations & Claims

Product Management

Creating products

• Products can be created as standalone ("simple") items, or as part of a variant group — for example, the same item in several sizes or colours grouped under one listing.
• For a variant group, one variant is used to create the parent "container" listing first, and the rest are added underneath it as purchasable variants; the parent listing itself can never be purchased directly.
• Every value that appears across the group's variants (e.g. every size offered) has to be present on the parent listing, or the store won't recognise the full set of variations.
• Images differ by level: a simple product sends all of its images; a variant group's parent listing sends only its primary and secondary images; each individual variant sends just its own single image.
• Products can carry multiple categories and multiple brands.
• The barcode/identifier sent for a product is resolved from whichever source is available, in priority order (marketplace-provided EAN, product EAN, barcode, MPN, then UPC).
• Pentagon Connect checks price against RRP at creation time and flags an error if the price is higher than the RRP — WooCommerce's own store would otherwise accept this without complaint (it just wouldn't display it as a discount).
• "External" (dropshipped) products aren't currently supported.
• The most common reason a product fails to create is a duplicate or invalid SKU.

Updating products

• Content, price and stock can each be updated, and price or stock can be left out of a given update using per-product lock settings.
• Protect Price — excludes price from what's sent, so the price live on the store is left untouched.
• Protect Stock — excludes stock/quantity from what's sent.
• Protect the whole item — skips the update entirely for that item, rather than sending a partial update; the item is left flagged for review instead.
• Updates to a variant group always update the parent listing and its variants together, since Pentagon Connect can't reliably tell from an update alone whether the change was meant for the parent or a specific variant.
• Updates are sent in batches of up to 100 items at a time.

Deactivating / removing products

Not currently a supported action on this integration. Pentagon Connect always creates and keeps products in a published/live state on the store; the closest available control is Protect the whole item, which stops an item from receiving any further updates — it does not unpublish, hide or remove the listing from the store itself. There's no delete or unpublish action documented for WooCommerce today.

Pricing & Stock Sync

• Stock and price can each be synced independently of a full content update, and either can be locked per product (see Protect Price / Protect Stock above) so Pentagon Connect never overwrites a value the merchant wants to manage manually on their own store.
• Stock and price changes are sent in batches of up to 100 items at once.
• WooCommerce's own store accepts a sale price higher than the regular price without complaint — it just won't display it as a discount on the storefront. Pentagon Connect runs its own check and flags an error if this happens, so it's caught before going live rather than silently failing to show.

Order Management

Getting orders

• Orders are pulled in automatically and continuously. The first check looks back 90 days; every check after that picks up from where the previous one left off, with a small overlap window built in so an order can't be missed at the boundary.
• If a store doesn't provide a currency on an order, Pentagon Connect falls back to the currency configured for that connection.
• WooCommerce doesn't break shipping cost out per product line on an order, so Pentagon Connect spreads the order's shipping total evenly across its products.
• If an order has no payment/transaction reference (common with direct bank transfer orders), Pentagon Connect uses the store's own order number in its place.
• Order status (e.g. pending payment, processing, on hold, completed, cancelled, refunded, failed) is mapped to Pentagon Connect's own status set; a small number of purely internal WooCommerce statuses aren't mapped and are ignored.

Order information we store

• Order ID, status, currency, and the dates it was created and paid
• Customer email and buyer reference
• Payment method, order subtotal and total, discount amount, and any marketplace/platform fees
• Billing address: name, phone, company, country, state, street, city, postal code
• Shipping address: name, phone, company, country, state, street, city, postal code
• Carrier, shipping cost, shipping service, tracking number, and shipped date
• Per line item: SKU, product name, price, quantity, and line status

Shipping orders

• Shipping and tracking only work if the seller's store has the Shipment Tracking plugin installed — core WooCommerce has no shipping or tracking capability of its own, so without that plugin Pentagon Connect can't mark an order shipped or send tracking information for that store.
• When available, Pentagon Connect reads that store's own live list of registered couriers by country and matches the carrier on the order against it. If there's no match, it falls back to a default carrier set on the connection, and if that doesn't apply either, the carrier name is still sent through as free text so tracking information is never lost.
• Adding tracking information and marking an order as shipped happen as two steps that normally run together. If the first succeeds but the second fails, Pentagon Connect remembers and retries just the second step next time, rather than re-sending the tracking information.
• Only full-order shipments are supported through this plugin — no per-item or partial-quantity shipping information is sent.

Cancellations

There's no separate cancellation action on this integration. Once an order is fully refunded, the seller's store moves it to a cancelled status itself, and that status flows back into Pentagon Connect as Cancelled. There's no fixed list of cancellation reasons — refunds, which serve this purpose, take a free-text reason instead.

Refunds & returns

• Refunds are always initiated by the seller through Pentagon Connect — not requested by a customer through WooCommerce itself, since (unlike a marketplace) there's no buyer-facing return-request flow built into the store.
• Supported: a full refund (items and shipping together), an items-only refund, or a shipping-only refund.
• The reason given for a refund is free text, not a fixed set of reason codes.
• There's currently no way to pull a store's own refund history back into Pentagon Connect — only refunds that Pentagon Connect itself issues are reflected against the order.
• A true customer-initiated returns workflow (request, approval, tracking through to completion) isn't available yet. It depends on a custom plugin that hasn't been built; until then, any return request a customer makes has to be handled by the seller outside Pentagon Connect, with the outcome processed as a manual refund.

Carriers Supported

Pentagon Connect doesn't maintain its own fixed carrier list for WooCommerce — it reads whichever couriers are registered in the Shipment Tracking plugin on that specific store, live. A carrier on an order is matched against that list (via a mapping table or a default carrier); if nothing matches, the carrier name is still sent through as free text so tracking information isn't lost. Which carriers are available therefore varies store to store, depending on what that merchant has configured.

Return & Refund Reason Codes

Not applicable. WooCommerce refunds take a free-text reason rather than a fixed set of reason codes, and there's no separate cancellation-reason list — this is the seller's own store, not a marketplace with standardised reason codes.

Known Limitations

• Behaviour can vary store to store, since each connected store is an independent WordPress/WooCommerce installation and depends on which plugins that merchant has installed.
• Shipping and tracking only work if the store has the Shipment Tracking plugin installed — there's no fallback shipping capability in core WooCommerce.
• No partial shipments — every order ships to the store in full.
• No native customer returns/claims workflow yet — it depends on a custom plugin that hasn't been built.
• Store-side refund history isn't pulled back into Pentagon Connect — only refunds issued through Pentagon Connect are reflected.
• WooCommerce doesn't validate a sale price against the regular price itself — Pentagon Connect's own check is the only safety net against a price higher than RRP going live.
• "External" (dropshipped) products aren't currently supported.
• There's no supported way to unpublish, deactivate or remove a listing from the store through this integration.

Source Materials

This guide was built from Pentagon Connect's internal WooCommerce integration specifications covering authentication and setup, product and taxonomy management, order retrieval, shipping, and refunds.