Create a WooCommerce order from an emailed purchase order

Wholesale customers rarely order through your checkout. They send a PDF, a spreadsheet or a few lines in an email, and someone on your team turns it into a WooCommerce order. This guide shows how to do that by hand, what to watch for, and how to stop retyping.

Create the order by hand in WooCommerce

WooCommerce has no built-in way to read an email, so the standard route is the admin order screen:

1. Go to WooCommerce > Orders > Add order.
2. Pick the customer, or create one. The billing and shipping addresses fill in from their account.
3. Click Add item(s), then Add product(s), and search for each product on the purchase order by name or SKU. Set the quantity.
4. Check the prices. If you use a wholesale price plugin, the price shown may follow the customer's role or may not, depending on the plugin. Edit any line that is wrong.
5. Add shipping and tax if needed, then press Recalculate.
6. Set the status and save. Many shops use "Pending payment" until the order has been checked.

What goes wrong

• Names do not match. The buyer writes "Oat bar 12pk" and your product is "Oat Bar Box of 12". Searching by SKU helps, but buyers often use their own codes.
• Wrong price. A retailer on a 40% tier gets the regular price because the order was keyed in under the wrong customer.
• Typos. One wrong digit in a quantity is hard to spot once the order is saved.
• Time. A 30-line order takes a while, and the same task comes back every week.

Cut the work down without a plugin

A few habits make the manual route faster. Ask regular buyers to use your SKUs, or give them a simple order sheet. Keep one person responsible for entering orders so the process is the same every time. Search by SKU instead of by name. These help, but each order is still typed by a person.

Let Tadrik Inbox do the typing

Tadrik Inbox is a WooCommerce plugin that reads the order for you. Under WooCommerce > Tadrik you upload the file the customer sent (PDF, Excel, CSV, Word or a photo) or paste the email text, and pick the customer. Tadrik then:

• matches every line to one of your products;
• sets the price for that customer, using Wholesale Suite, WooCommerce Wholesale Pro (Barn2), B2BKing or Addify, or your regular price if you pick no customer;
• creates a draft order in WooCommerce, with lines it is unsure about highlighted and unmatched items listed.

The draft is a "Pending payment" order. Nothing is sent to your customer until you press Approve order, which moves it to Processing and adds a note saying who approved it. Each draft has a review box that shows what the customer wrote next to the product it was matched to, so checking takes a moment instead of a re-entry.

What it costs

The free plan covers 10 orders a month, with no card. Paid plans start at $49 a month (Starter, 30 orders); Growth is $119 a month for 120 orders and Scale $239 a month for 350. The first 20 founding stores are free until 1 January 2027, then $49 a month for life. It works with the newer WooCommerce order tables (HPOS) and the older order storage.

Still to come, not yet in the plugin: your own forwarding address, so orders arrive without uploading, and memory of each customer's product codes.