B2B Order Import for WooCommerce — turn a customer purchase order in Excel, CSV or PDF into an order

B2B Order Import for WooCommerce is a plugin for shops that sell wholesale. A wholesale customer rarely checks out through the cart: they send the manager a file — an Excel sheet, a CSV export or a PDF from their accounting software — with their own article codes, names and quantities. The manager then looks up every line in the catalogue, types the quantities into a WooCommerce order and makes a mistake on line twenty.

The plugin does this work for the manager: it reads the file, finds the table in it, matches every line with a product of your shop by SKU, barcode or name and shows the result for review. The manager fixes what the plugin did not recognise and clicks “Create the order”. Without that click no order appears — the plugin never orders anything on a guess.

The customer’s wholesale prices come from our Wholesale Prices for WooCommerce plugin: when it is active, every order line gets the price for the customer’s role and quantity — the same as in the cart.

Running OpenCart? There is a separate B2B Order Import for OpenCart module (versions 4.x, 3.x and 2.3) with the same approach: purchase order file, review by a manager, order.

What the customer sees

Nothing changes for regular shoppers: the plugin does not touch the cart or the checkout. A wholesale customer receives the order the same way as after the cart — with the usual WooCommerce e-mails (if the status of new orders sends them) and the order in their account.

In Pro, wholesale customers can send purchase orders themselves: My account gets an “Upload an order” item. The customer chooses a file, optionally types the PO number and a comment, and sees their uploads with a status — “Received, being checked”, then the order number. You decide which roles see the page; one customer can send up to 10 files an hour. The manager gets an e-mail, and the upload waits in the admin — no order is created without review.

What the admin gets

WooCommerce → “B2B Order Import” with the tabs Imports, Settings and Licence. The Imports tab has the “New order from a file” form (file, customer, PO number) and the list of all imports with the filters Waiting for review, Order created and Discarded.

Reviewing a purchase order

• Customer and PO number: a customer of your shop and the number the plugin found in the file’s letterhead (“Purchase Order …”, “Order No …”) — or type your own.
• Lines: what the file says, the quantity read, which product was found and how — “by SKU”, “by barcode”, “by name, similarity 100%”, “chosen by hand”. Next to it — stock, the price from the file and the price in the order.
• What needs you is highlighted: product not found, a variable product without a chosen variation, a weak name match, not enough stock. Such lines stay unticked until you confirm them.
• “Columns of the file”: if a line was read wrongly, choose where the code, name, quantity and price are, and the plugin reads the file again.

The order

“Create the order” adds a regular WooCommerce order: items, the customer’s addresses, the status from the settings, taxes under your rules. The PO number and the original file are in the “Purchase order” sidebar box, and the number is searchable in the orders list. A double click does not create a duplicate.

PDF purchase orders (Pro)

A PDF with a text layer is parsed on your server, without external services: the table is rebuilt from the positions of the text on the page, item names wrapped over several lines are joined, and a header repeated on every page is skipped. The screenshot shows a Word purchase order saved as PDF with prices from the file turned on: the difference from your price is highlighted on every line.

Settings

• Order: status of the new order (Pending payment sends no e-mails; On hold and Processing send the usual WooCommerce e-mails and reserve stock), customer wholesale prices.
• Matching: flexible SKU, name matching and the similarity threshold (85% by default; a weaker match is only a suggestion).
• Files: maximum size (10 MB by default, never above the server limit) and how many days to keep the originals (180 by default).
• Pro: remembered matches and file layouts, prices from the file and the difference threshold, the customer account page, roles and notification addresses, AI recognition — the OpenAI key is stored encrypted.

How it works, step by step

1. The manager uploads the file (or the customer does in their account, in Pro). The plugin checks the content, not only the extension, stores the original in a private folder under a random name and reads it without third-party services: Excel as a zip of XML, CSV with encoding and separator detection, PDF by parsing the text layer.
2. It looks for the header row by words like “SKU”, “code”, “item”, “description”, “quantity”, “price” and their equivalents in five languages — even under a letterhead. Lines such as “Total” or “VAT” and a repeated header are skipped. The PO number is taken from the text above the table.
3. Lines are matched in order: (Pro) this customer’s memory → exact SKU → SKU without spaces, hyphens and dots → barcode → name with similarity. Variations are found by their own SKU.
4. The price is the shop’s price or the customer’s wholesale price from the wholesale pricing plugin; in Pro — the price from the file.
5. The manager reviews the lines and clicks “Create the order”. WooCommerce creates the order: stock, e-mails and taxes work the same as for an order from the cart.

Under the hood

• No heavy libraries. Excel is read by the plugin’s own code on ZipArchive and XMLReader with a size limit against zip bombs. For PDF, Pro bundles smalot/pdfparser 2.12.5 (LGPL) — byte for byte from the official release, loaded only while a PDF is being read.
• WooCommerce creates the order with its own functions, so stock, e-mails, taxes and other plugins’ hooks are not bypassed. An atomic claim on the import keeps a double click from creating two orders.
• Hundreds of lines: the review form sends its lines as one field, so a purchase order with hundreds of lines does not hit PHP’s max_input_vars limit.
• Purchase order files are kept in uploads/ccboi-private/ under random names with direct access denied; they are served to managers only, with a nonce check, and deleted after the period you set.
• Data: the free version makes no external requests at all. A file leaves your server only in Pro, only with AI turned on and only after a manager’s click.
• Deleting the plugin removes its tables, settings, the private folder and cron jobs; orders stay.

Installation

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin: choose catcode-b2b-order-import-for-woocommerce-free-1.0.0.zip and activate it (WooCommerce must be active).
2. WooCommerce → “B2B Order Import” → choose the customer’s file and, optionally, the customer → “Read the file”.
3. Check the highlighted lines, pick a product or a variation where needed and click “Create the order”.
4. On the Settings tab choose the status of new orders and the name similarity threshold.
5. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail after payment or click “Try Pro free for 7 days” on the Licence tab.