Plex and WooCommerce integration

What moves between them

Product catalog, pricing, and customer reference data flow from Plex into WooCommerce on a poll interval (5 to 15 minutes recommended). When orders are placed in WooCommerce, they arrive via webhook notification; ml-connector reads them, creates matching Plex sales orders with the customer and product references, and allocates inventory. As Plex fulfillment progresses and items ship, their status flows back to WooCommerce order line items and shipment tracking. Customer records are aligned in both directions to keep e-commerce customer accounts in sync with Plex customer master data.

How ml-connector handles it

ml-connector stores Plex OAuth 2.0 credentials and WooCommerce API Key encrypted, refreshing the Plex bearer token on 401 responses. On the Plex side, it polls the product, customer, and sales order entities on a cadence tied to your order volume and catalog change frequency. On the WooCommerce side, ml-connector accepts webhook events from WooCommerce (order.created, order.updated, customer.created, customer.updated), validates signatures using the webhook secret with HMAC-SHA256, and converts inbound orders into Plex sales order schema mapping WooCommerce line items to Plex part numbers and customer references. Plex does not publish rate limits in documentation, so ml-connector implements exponential backoff on HTTP 429 responses. Because Plex offers no idempotency guarantee on legacy SOAP DataSources, ml-connector deduplicates using unique external reference fields. Each record carries a full audit trail and can be replayed if a downstream API call fails. WooCommerce webhooks disable after 5 consecutive failures, so ml-connector logs webhook failures prominently and surfaces alerts if re-enablement is required.

A real-world example

A mid-sized appliance manufacturer runs Plex ERP for production, inventory, and sales order management. They sell direct-to-consumer through a WooCommerce storefront on their corporate website, taking orders and managing fulfillment in parallel. Before the integration, the e-commerce team manually exported order data from WooCommerce into a CSV every morning, re-entered new customer details into Plex, and created sales orders by hand, then waited for the warehouse to pick and ship before they could update order status in WooCommerce. With Plex and WooCommerce connected, orders placed in the store create sales orders in Plex automatically, products and pricing sync nightly from the manufacturing system so the website always reflects what is in stock and its current cost, and as inventory is picked and shipped in Plex, the order status updates back to WooCommerce so customers see their shipment tracking without manual intervention.

What you can do

• •Sync Plex product catalog, SKUs, descriptions, and pricing into WooCommerce product records on a scheduled interval.
• •Create Plex sales orders automatically when WooCommerce orders arrive via webhook, mapping customer and line-item data.
• •Keep customer master data aligned between Plex and WooCommerce, handling creates, updates, and reference validation.
• •Update WooCommerce order and shipment status as Plex fulfillment progresses, pulling warehouse pick and ship events.
• •Authenticate Plex with OAuth 2.0 client credentials and WooCommerce with API Keys, with encrypted credential storage and token refresh.

Questions

How do products and pricing flow from Plex into WooCommerce?

ml-connector polls Plex on a configurable interval (5 to 15 minutes recommended) for the product catalog, including parts, descriptions, pricing, and inventory levels. Those are written into WooCommerce product records matching by SKU or external reference, keeping catalog and pricing current without re-keying in the store.

What happens when a customer places an order in WooCommerce?

WooCommerce sends an order.created webhook containing the customer, line items, and totals. ml-connector validates the webhook signature with HMAC-SHA256, converts the order to a Plex sales order schema mapping customer and product references, and creates it in Plex for fulfillment and accounting. If a mapping fails (unknown product, invalid customer), the record is logged and queued for manual review.

How does ml-connector handle Plex's lack of webhooks and WooCommerce's webhook failure tolerance?

Plex publishes no webhooks, so ml-connector polls product and customer entities on a schedule you set. WooCommerce webhooks disable after 5 consecutive failures; ml-connector logs and alerts on webhook delivery failures so you can manually re-enable them if needed, and retries failed payloads from the audit log.