Automate Dropshipzone orders on Woocomerce using APIs – For Free!

Do you sell goods from Australian Dropshipping supplier DropshipZone on a WooCommerce website? Are you tired of manually updating prices and stock quantities, copying and pasting orders from WordPress into Dropshipzone, and sending tracking numbers to your customers? So were we, until we used the Dropshipzone and WooCommerce APIs to automate these processes.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can automate these processes yourself, with minimum coding knowledge. Can’t be bothered to do it yourself? email me at samficek@gmail.com and I can help set it up for you.

Update stock quantities and prices automatically

Before I automated this process, I had a number of times where we sold an item on the website, only to find that it was out of stock on Dropshipzone. This inevitably caused a lot of hassle contacting the customer to explain the problem, then either cancelling the order and issuing a refund (and losing any payment fees) or in the best case scenario, sending an alternative product instead. Either way it was a hassle I could do without, given the low margins we make as dropshippers, so this was the first thing I automated.

How to configure the APIs

1. You will need to contact Dropshipzone customer support to request API credentials
2. Setup API credentials in WooCommerce (instructions here)
3. Write a script that does the following:
   1. Send a request to the WooCommerce API to get all the IDs of products currently live on your site
   2. Loop through each of those product IDs. Inside the loop, make a request to the Dropshipzone API to find the corresponding price and inventory level.
   3. Calculate your desired sale price by adding a percentage onto the purchase price returned by Dropshipzone (or use their RRP – but they are usually crazy expensive)
   4. Send the updated details back to your site via the WooCommerce API
4. Host the script on your server somewhere
5. Create a cronjob to trigger the script to run every hour (or however often you want)

Can’t do this yourself? Drop me an email at samficek@gmail.com and I’ll help 🙂 

Transfer orders from your website to Dropshipzone

This script works a little differently as the data will flow the other way – from your website to Dropshipzone. I used to find this the most tedious part of the whole order process as there are quite a few fields that need to be copied across. Using a manual method also leaves a lot of room for human error, which means stuff turning up at the wrong address – not ideal!

Setup instructions

1. You will need to contact Dropshipzone customer support to request API credentials
2. Setup API credentials in WooCommerce (instructions here)
3. Write a script that does the following:
   1. Send a request to the WooCommerce API to get all the IDs of orders made in the last few days. The API will return the order details in JSON format.
   2. Loop through each of those orders. Within the loop, you will need to extract all the relevant fields – name, shipping address, phone number etc, then pass those fields into Dropshipzone via their API.
4. Host the script on your server somewhere
5. Create a cronjob to trigger the script to run every hour (or however often you want)