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:
- Create a “Scenario” in Make and select the “Custom Webhook” module.
- Make gives you a web address (e.g.
https://hook.make.com/...). - Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Webhooks.
- Paste the URL and choose the event “Order created”.
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:
- Trigger: Enter the order from WooCommerce.
- Router Module: Divides the path in two or more ways.
- Route A (Filter: Country = Spain): Sends a formatted email to the Madrid warehouse with the shipping label ready to print.
- Route B (Filter: Country = Rest of the world): Connects to the API of a dropshipping service or sends the data to a specific spreadsheet for international shipments.
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:
- WooCommerce: New order.
- Iterator: This is a vital module of Make. An order can have 5 different products. The iterator “breaks down” the order and separates the products one by one.
- Google Sheets (Add a Row): For each itemized product, add a row in your master Excel with: Date, SKU, Product Name, Unit Price, Cost (if you have it mapped), and Net Margin.
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.
- Module: WooCommerce > List Orders.
- Filter configuration within the module:
- In the “Search” field, leave empty.
- In the filters section, look for the “Customer Email” field.
- Value: Drag the tag
Billing: Emailthat comes from your first module (the purple Webhook).
- Limit: Set
2. (Optimization trick: We don’t need to know if you bought 100 times, we only need to know if you boughtmore than one . By setting the limit to 2, you save operations and memory).
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.
- If you find 1 order: It is the same one you just entered. You are a new customer.
- If you find 2 orders: It means that there is a previous one. You are a Recurring Customer.
Path A: Filter for “New Customer” (Welcome)
Click on the line that connects the Router to your welcome action.
- Label: First Purchase.
- Condition:
- Click on the first field.
- Look in the variables of the “List Orders” module (the green one).
- Select the variable:
Total number of bundles(Total number of packages). - Numerical operator: Equal to.
- Value:
1.
Translation: “If when searching for this email I only find 1 order (the current one), then treat it as new”.
Route B: The filter for “Recurring Customer” (Loyalty)
Click on the other Router line.
- Label: Recurring Customer (VIP).
- Condition:
- Variable:
Total number of bundles(from List Orders module). - Numerical operator: Greater than.
- Value:
1.
- Variable:
Translation: “If I find more than 1 order with this email, this user already knows us. Send him/her the loyalty coupon instead of the welcome coupon”.
Why this logic is invincible
The brilliant thing about using the Email as the search key (instead of the user ID) is that it works even with Guests.
Many people buy without creating an account. If John Smith bought a month ago as a guest, and buys again today as a guest using juan@gmail.com, your automation will detect him as a Recurrent thanks to this formula, and you will be able to treat him as he deserves, even if he has not logged in.
Where to start? Ecommerce Agency
Make’s learning curve can be intimidating at first due to its “infinite canvas” interface. However, you don’t need to build the Death Star on day one.
The winning strategy is Incremental Automation:
- Identify the most repetitive and boring task of your day (e.g., creating invoices or adding customers to the CRM).
- Create a simple scenario in Make of only two modules: WooCommerce + The other App.
- Test it by using the “Run Once” button while placing a test order in incognito mode.
Watching data magically travel back and forth is addictive. Once you master the simple connection, you’ll start to see “nodes” and connections in all aspects of your business.
Conclusion
Automating WooCommerce with Make is not just a technical improvement; it’s a strategic business decision. You are buying future time. You are building a system that scales without the need to hire more administrative staff.
The technology is there, it’s accessible and it’s visual. You no longer need to know PHP to connect your store to the world. You just need curiosity and a Make account.
