How You Can Export WooCommerce Customers Manually and Automatically
Exporting orders or products from WooCommerce takes three steps. However, you can export WooCommerce customers in only two steps! In this article, we’ll explain how to do this and introduce an alternative method of how to automate exports of customers from WooCommerce at the desired frequency.
What are the options to export WooCommerce customers?
Basically, there are two ways to export customers from WooCommerce:
- Manual – this allows you to export WooCommerce customers as a CSV file, which you can later open in a spreadsheet app or upload to another software.
- Automated – this allows you to export customers from WooCommerce to a spreadsheet app or a database automatically on a schedule, say every day or every hour. It’s implemented with the help of the WooCommerce integration designed by Coupler.io.
Also, some users consider the option of installing a WordPress plugin to do the export. However, we recommend you stay away from this since, as you know, the more plugins you install, the worse the performance of your WP website is.
Export customers from WooCommerce manually
- Go to Customers.
- Click the Download button. A CSV file with information about your WooCommerce customers will be downloaded to your computer.
That’s the end of the story 🙂 This exporting method is rather fast and simple, but it’s not the only option you can use.
Can I auto export WooCommerce customers as CSV?
You can’t automate the export of WooCommerce customers’ data with the native exporting option, but you can using Coupler.io.
Why would one need to do this? Imagine that you monitor the customers’ information daily in a separate spreadsheet, which you can share with your team. To update information in this spreadsheet, you’d have to export WooCommerce customers as CSV daily and add this data to your spreadsheet. This manual work will take 2 minutes of your time every day. Not much at first glance, but this will result in 14 minutes every week (if you work on weekends as well), or 1 hour every month, or 12 hours every year! Instead, you could automate exports to save time and focus on some proper WooCommerce analytics instead.
Although you can’t do this with the native functionality, Coupler.io provides a WooCommerce integration to schedule exports of customers from WooCommerce. It will let you optimize your workflow in literally less than 2 minutes. Here is how it works.
How to export customers from WooCommerce automatically
- Sign up to Coupler.io, click Add importer, then select a source app, WooCommerce, and a destination app. In our example, we need to set up a WooCommerce export to Excel.
Coupler.io is a data integration solution to automate data flow from different sources, including WooCommerce, to Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and Google BigQuery. Check out all the available integrations.
Proceed to the setup of the apps:
- Connect your WooCommerce account and select Customers as a data entity to export. Optionally, you can filter the exported customers’ data by a search string.
- After that, you’ll need to configure the destination – connect your Microsoft OneDrive account and select an Excel file and a sheet to load data. This is enough to run the integration to export data to your Excel workbook.
However, since we want to automate exports of customers from WooCommerce, we need to enable the automatic data refresh and configure the schedule.
Click Save and Run to launch the integration and export WooCommerce customers to the chosen destination. You can check out the export results by clicking the View Results button.
Here is what it looks like in Microsoft Excel:
WooCommerce customer export: CSV vs. Coupler.io
We’ve introduced two methods to export customers from WooCommerce: the manual one as a CSV file and the automated one using Coupler.io. In addition to their core difference, they also differ in the data you get out of WooCommerce.
The CSV file offers a limited set of columns for your data. At the same time, it returns all the customers, including guests, i.e., those who made a purchase without sign-up. In our example, we’ve got 9 rows (including the title row) and 12 columns:
Coupler.io provides way more details about your customers, but it only returns the ones who signed up. In our example, we’ve got only 5 rows (including the title row) and 47 columns:
Which one is best? Hmm…it depends on what data you need. For example, the CSV option displays total orders per customer, which is not available in the data set exported with Coupler.io. At the same time, Coupler.io returns the entire billing information and metadata. Below, you’ll find some differences in the data you can export with both of the options
How to export customers and phone numbers from WooCommerce?
Well, to get the billing details of your customers, Coupler.io seems to be the best option. It allows you to get all the contact details, including phone numbers.
How to export WooCommerce customers by product?
The CSV option can only give you information about the total orders per customer. But that’s not the customer by product. When you export WooCommerce customers with Coupler.io, you won’t see such breakdowns as well. But hold on!
Coupler.io also allows you to export other types of data, including products, orders, etc. This could be the solver. Check out the next section to learn the details.
Export WooCommerce customers who purchased a certain product
To export customers by product, you’ll need to export orders from WooCommerce. For this, sign up to Coupler.io, click Add importer, then select a source app, WooCommerce, and a destination app as we did in the section above.
- Then connect your WooCommerce account and select Orders as a data entity to export.
You can either export all of your WooCommerce orders and get information about the customers per order and what products they purchased. Or you can filter the orders and customers per product right away.
For example, we want to get information about customers who purchased sunglasses. For this, enter ‘sunglasses’ as a search string to the respective field in the Advanced settings.
Proceed to the Destination part and specify where to export WooCommerce customers by product. You can refer to this section if you need help with this.
Eventually, click Save and Run and welcome your filtered data. There you go.
Can you export customers from WooCommerce to XML?
For some WooCommerce data entities, such as Products or Orders, there is another exporting option available. You can export these as XML if you go to Tools => Export. Unfortunately, you can’t export WooCommerce customers this way.
If you do need to export customers from WooCommerce in this format, the only option you have is a WordPress plugin, for example, WooCommerce Customer / Order / Coupon Export. There are also other alternatives.
Which method to export WooCommerce customers should you choose?
Both the native and automated methods for exporting customers’ data from WooCommerce are quite actionable. However, each of them is a good fit for a specific purpose.
The manual way of getting data in CSV works best for one-time export, for example, to move your customer details to another app.
The automated method with the help of the WooCommerce integration by Coupler.io is a good choice for different analytical or reporting purposes. For example, you can schedule exports of customers’ data from WooCommerce to Google Sheets, say every day, and share the spreadsheet with the stakeholders. This way, you will know that they have access to the most recent records from your WooCommerce store.
So, make a smart choice based on your needs. Good luck with your data!
