Have you ever felt that your online store is an insatiable monster that devours your free time? You have sales, yes, but the operational cost is brutal: copying data to Excel, sending manual notices to suppliers, uploading invoices to Drive… If you use WordPress and WooCommerce, you have a Ferrari parked in the garage, but you are pushing it yourself. The key to start the engine and let it drive has only one name: Make. In this in-depth analysis, let’s forget about “patch” solutions and focus on how to turn Make (the evolution of Integromat) into the central brain of your ecommerce. It’s not just about connecting things; it’s about orchestrating a symphony of data where you are the conductor, not the musician playing all the instruments. Why Make and not a WordPress plugin? It’s vital to understand the architecture behind this decision. Installing automation plugins inside your WordPress (like AutomateWoo) is great for internal stuff, but when you want to push data outside (to Google Sheets, Slack, HubSpot, or your account manager), using a plugin overloads your server. Make operates in the cloud, independently of your hosting. It works as a “universal translator”. Your WooCommerce speaks “WordPress language”, your accountant speaks “Excel language” and your support team speaks “Slack language”. Make sits in the middle, receives the message from one, translates it and delivers it to the other in milliseconds. Key concept: By taking the processing load off your website, you ensure that your customers’ browsing speed (WPO) is not affected by your back-end automations. The core of automations: WooCommerce Webhooks To master Make, you must first lose your fear of the word Webhook. Think of a Webhook as a doorbell. When someone buys from your store, WooCommerce usually saves the order and goes silent. When setting up a Webhook, you tell WooCommerce, “Hey, every time an order comes in (Order Created), ring this bell”. That “bell” is a unique URL provided to you by Make. The simplified technical process is: From that moment on, the connection is alive. Make receives a data packet (JSON) with all the customer information, products, prices and address, ready to be manipulated. Scenario 1: The intelligent logistics router This is where Make crushes the competition (such as Zapier) thanks to its Router module. Let’s say you sell clothing and you have two different suppliers: one in Spain for domestic shipments and one in China for accessories. Without automation, you would have to look at every order and send manual emails. With Make, we design a flow with conditional logic: This ability to bifurcate decisions based on order data (cart value, product category, customer location) makes it possible to manage complex operations without human intervention. Scenario 2: The “Database” in Google Sheets or Airtable Although WooCommerce has its own reports, they are limited. Professional ecommerce owners love spreadsheets to analyze real margins. Creating a “Shadow Database” is one of the most cost-effective automations you can set up in Make. The structure of the scenario would be: At the end of the month, you don’t have to export CSVs or wrestle with pivot tables. Your spreadsheet has been populated in real time, sale by sale, allowing you to see your exact profit live. Error management: What sets professionals apart Anyone can make an automation that works when everything goes well. But what happens if Google Sheets crashes, or if the customer put in an email with invalid characters? In basic tools, the automation breaks and you lose the data. Make allows you to configure Error Handlers. You can tell the system: “If you try to save the row in Google Sheets and it fails, wait 5 minutes and try again. If it fails again, send me an alert message on Telegram and save the data to a temporary memory (Data Store) so you don’t lose it.” This resilience is what makes Make an enterprise-grade tool suitable for stores that turn over millions. Quick comparison: Make vs. Zapier for WooCommerce It’s the million dollar question: why choose Make? Although Zapier is more famous, Make is superior for WooCommerce for very clear technical and economic reasons: Feature Make Zapier Price Much more economical (generous free plan). Expensive as soon as you scale the volume. Interface Visual (balls and lines), allows to move modules freely. Linear and rigid (vertical list). Logic Allows loops, iterators and complex arrays. Limited logic in basic plans. History You can see exactly what data went through each “ball”. Less detailed in the debug. If your store has a high volume of transactions (many “operations”), Make will cost you a fraction of what Zapier would cost you. Real application to improve LTV in wordpress A real case of applying automations in Make to improve LTV is by creating the exact formula you need to put in the “Filter” module to detect if it is a customer’s first purchase or if it is a recurring customer. This is the “missing piece” that separates novice from expert automators. WordPress, by default, does not send a field that says “This is the first purchase: YES/NO” in the standard Webhook. We have to deduct it ourselves. To achieve this, we need to insert an intermediate step between the Webhook (the trigger) and the Router (the brain). We are going to ask the database, “How many times has this email appeared before?”. Here is the exact technical configuration for your scenario in Make: Step 1: The “Detective” module (List Orders) Right after your initial module(WooCommerce > Watch Orders), you should add a search module. Step 2: The logical formula in the router Now you connect this module to the Router. This is where we apply the mathematical formula to separate the paths. Make counts how many “Bundles” you found in the previous search. Path A: Filter for “New Customer” (Welcome) Click on the line that connects the Router to your welcome action. Translation: “If when searching for this email I only find 1 order (the current one), then