To be able to use Dolibarr in conjunction with WooCommerce properly, it’s important to understand the workflow for this setup:
18.1. Buying physical products
In general, if you sell physical products, you have to buy them first. When you buy products you receive an invoice. Once you receive the invoice, you first log in to your WooCommerce website, add the new products with their name, description, price, SKU number, pictures, etc. When you save the products in WooCommerce, they will be automatically transferred to Dolibarr, with all their details. The next thing to do is to make the formal reception of those products into your stock, in Dolibarr. Log in to Dolibarr, create a purchase order containing all the products from the initial invoice, then create a vendor invoice from that purchase order (by clicking on the ‘CREATE INVOICE’ button on the purchase order card), then receive the products (by clicking on the ‘RECEIVE ITEMS’ button, on the purchase order card, then clicking on ‘Receive’). At that moment, the stocks for those products will increase with their respective quantities and they will be synchronized with WooCommerce. From that moment, you can sell any of those products.
18.2. Selling physical products
When an order is placed in WooCommerce, it will be automatically transferred to Dolibarr; then you can create the invoice for that order in Dolibarr, then create the shipment, then mark the invoice as paid. Once you create an invoice from a Dolibarr order, the corresponding WooCommerce order will be marked automatically as ‘Invoiced’. When you validate the shipment for a Dolibarr order, the corresponding WooCommerce order will be marked as ‘Shipped/Completed/Pending payment’.
18.3. Selling services and downloadable products
In general, when you sell services or downloadable products you don’t have to buy them first. So, the first step is to add them in WooCommerce, with all their details. Once you save them in WooCommerce, they will be automatically transferred to Dolibarr as services. Both the true services and the downloadable products, which are considered ‘improperly called services’, are transferred to Dolibarr as services. You will find them in Dolibarr under ‘Products | Services’ > ‘Services’ > ‘List’. Being services, they won’t have a stock quantity associated with them. Once a customer places an order for a service or a downloadable product in WooCommerce, the order will be automatically transferred to Dolibarr and here you can create the invoice, mark the invoice as paid, skip the shipment step, since services and downloadable products don’t need shipping, and mark the order as delivered by clicking on the ‘CLASSIFY DELIVERED’ button on the order card.
If you need to buy services or downloadable products before selling them, you will have to buy and sell them as you do physical products, with the exception that you won’t have stocks associated with them, so you won’t have to make the formal reception into stock, and you won’t have to create shipments.