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

B2B Order Import for OpenCart is a module for stores that sell wholesale. A wholesale customer rarely orders 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 item codes, names and quantities. The manager then looks up every line in the catalog by hand, copies quantities and prices into an order and makes a mistake on line twenty.

The module does that work for the manager. It reads the file, finds the item table, matches every line to a store product by SKU, model, barcode or name and shows the result for review. The manager fixes what the module did not recognise and clicks Create order. No order appears without that click: the module never orders anything automatically.

Free reads Excel (.xlsx), CSV and ODS and creates orders of up to 20 lines. Pro adds PDF with a text layer, orders of any size, similar names, memory of each customer’s codes and a page where wholesale customers upload their orders themselves. Scans and photos of orders are read only through an AI service with your own key: optional, off by default, and paid by you to your provider.

Other CatCode modules for OpenCart that help a wholesale store: Wholesale tiered pricing by customer group (B2B Order Import uses exactly these group prices), Supplier Price List Import, BAS Exchange to exchange orders with your accounting system and Stock Reserve & Reorder to reserve stock for orders.

Running WooCommerce? There is a separate B2B Order Import for WooCommerce plugin with the same approach: a purchase order in Excel, CSV or PDF, review by a manager, an order.

What the customer sees

Regular shoppers see no change: the module adds no scripts to the storefront and does not touch the checkout. A wholesale customer gets the order just as after the cart, with the store’s standard confirmation e-mail, their PO number in the comment and the status history in their account.

In Pro you can give wholesale customers their own Upload an order page. A logged-in customer sends a file, a PO number and a comment and sees their recent orders with a status. The page is for logged-in customers only, optionally only for chosen customer groups, with a daily upload limit. The manager gets an e-mail and the order waits in the admin; nothing is ordered automatically.

What the admin gets

A menu item Sales > B2B Order Import with a counter of new customer uploads.

• File upload: pick the customer, order currency and price source right away, or set them on the next screen.
• Import list with In progress, From customers, Orders created and All tabs: date, customer, file, PO number, how many lines were matched.

Reviewing an order

• Customer: a store account (default address and group) or a guest with company, name, e-mail, phone, address and price group.
• File columns: the module shows in which row it found the header and which column it took for code, name, quantity, unit, price, line total and barcode. If it got one wrong, pick the column or header row and click Read again.
• Lines: what the file says, which store product was found and how: by SKU, by model, by name, similar name (check it), chosen by hand. Next to it are product search, quantity, price, total and Skip.
• Warnings: the product is disabled, has required options, low stock, a minimum quantity, or the file price differs from the store price.

After the order is created

The import gets the status order created and a link to the order, and its lines are locked. The customer’s original file stays in the history and can be downloaded at any time.

Settings

• General: new order status, payment and shipping method names in the order, default prices, maximum file size.
• Matching: which fields hold item codes (SKU, model, EAN, UPC, MPN, JAN, ISBN); in Pro also similar names with a threshold and the matching memory.
• Customer upload (Pro): page address, allowed groups, notification e-mails, daily limit.
• AI recognition (Pro): API address, your key, model, auto-run. Off by default.

How it works, step by step

1. A manager uploads the file (or the customer does, on their page in Pro). The module stores the original in storage/upload and reads it without any outside service: Excel and ODS as XML archives, CSV with encoding and delimiter detection, PDF with its own text layer parser.
2. It looks for the header row by words such as item code, SKU, description, quantity, price and total in five languages. In a PDF it sets column borders by the text coordinates and joins wrapped names. The table ends at Total. The PO number is taken from the text above the table.
3. Lines are matched in this order: (Pro) this customer’s memory, exact code, code ignoring spaces, dashes, dots and slashes, barcode, exact name, (Pro) similar name above the threshold. Queries run in batches, so a file with hundreds of lines does not load the database.
4. The price is the store price for the customer group, with quantity discounts and specials, or the file price converted to the order currency.
5. The manager reviews the lines and clicks Create order. The store’s standard order logic creates it: stock, e-mails, taxes by the customer address and other modules’ events work just as for a checkout order.

Under the hood

• No third-party libraries and no paid services. Excel, ODS, CSV and PDF are read by the module’s own code, compatible with PHP 7.0. One class library is shared by all three builds.
• No core edits. No OCMOD patches; the menu item is added by an OpenCart event. The store’s standard order logic creates the order, so stock, e-mails and other modules are never bypassed.
• Own tables for imports, lines, matching memory and column layouts. Core tables are not changed.
• Safe creation: the admin issues a signed one-time link, and the confirmed-to-creating step is atomic, so a double click never makes a duplicate.
• Order files are kept in storage/upload/cc_orderimport/ under random 32-character names with direct access denied.
• The licence lives in its own settings group, so Save never touches it.
• Uninstall removes the event and the menu item but keeps the import history, because it is your customers’ order history. To remove everything, drop the oc_cc_orderimport_* tables by hand.

Installation

1. OpenCart 4: Extensions > Installer, upload cc_orderimport.ocmod.zip (keep the file name) and click Install. OpenCart 3: Extensions > Installer, cc_orderimport-oc3.ocmod.zip. OpenCart 2.3: upload the contents of the upload/ folder from cc_orderimport-oc2.ocmod.zip to the store root (FTP or the hosting file manager).
2. Extensions > Extensions > Modules > CatCode B2B Order Import > Install.
3. Sales > B2B Order Import, choose the customer’s file and click Read the file.
4. Check the lines, pick the customer or fill in a guest and click Create order.
5. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail after payment or click Try Pro for 7 days in the Licence tab.