Shopify & WooCommerce Orders in Your Kitchen

Orders land in your online shop. Your kitchen works from a diary, a whiteboard or a spreadsheet. Somewhere between the two, an order gets missed, a quantity gets mistyped, or a regular customer quietly becomes two different people in your records. Here is how to close that gap — what to automate first, how to keep fulfilment status in step both ways, and what to do about allergen information on online orders.

The double-entry problem

Almost every small food business that opens an online shop ends up running two systems that do not talk to each other. Orders land in Shopify or WooCommerce. The kitchen works from a diary, a whiteboard or a spreadsheet. So every morning somebody copies the first into the second. That transcription step is where the damage happens, and the failure modes are not random:

The order that never gets copied. One placed at 11pm, after the morning copy-across. It exists, the customer is expecting it, and it is not on the list the kitchen is working from.
The order copied wrongly. Six becomes eight. Thursday becomes Tuesday. The gluten-free variant becomes the standard one.
Status drift. The kitchen marks something done on the whiteboard; the shop still shows it unfulfilled, so the customer gets no notification — or worse, gets chased.
The split customer. A regular who orders online sometimes and by phone other times exists twice. Neither record shows what they actually buy from you.

None of these are carelessness. They are the predictable output of asking a busy person to be a reliable data-transfer mechanism between two systems, every day, forever. The fix is not to try harder; it is to remove the transcription.

Stage of the order	Retyped by hand	With automatic sync
Order arrives	Someone checks the shop admin, then copies it into a diary or spreadsheet	Arrives in FoodCore by webhook the moment it is placed
Who the customer is	A new line every time; regulars appear under several spellings	Matched to the existing customer record, so one history across channels
Production list	Rebuilt by hand from whatever was copied across	Built from the orders already in the diary
Fulfilment status	Marked in one system, forgotten in the other	Mark ready in FoodCore, marked fulfilled in the shop
Payment status	Checked in the shop admin when someone remembers	Imported as information — no money passes through FoodCore
Allergy note at checkout	Buried in a free-text field nobody opens	Visible on the order in the diary the kitchen actually works from

What to automate first

You do not have to automate everything at once, and the order matters. In rough priority:

Order intake. Getting the order into the system the kitchen works from, without anyone typing it. This removes the missed-order and mistyped-order failures in one step, and it is the single biggest win.
Customer matching. Making sure the online buyer resolves to the customer record you already have. Do this early — the longer you run with duplicates, the more painful the clean-up.
Fulfilment status back to the shop. So the shop reflects reality without a second manual step, and the customer gets the notification the shop was always going to send.
Production planning from the combined order book. Once online and offline orders sit in the same place, your prep list can be built from all of them rather than from the ones somebody remembered.

Deliberately not at the top of that list: reporting and analytics. Dashboards built on data that is still being retyped by hand are decorative. Fix the intake first.

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One customer, one history

The under-rated benefit of connecting a shop to your kitchen system is not speed. It is that a regular customer stops being two people.

Small food businesses run on knowing your customers — that this café always wants sourdough on Tuesdays, that this family orders the same dairy-free birthday cake every March. That knowledge is worth real money, and it is destroyed by keeping half the history in a shop admin and half in a diary.

When an order arrives from Shopify or WooCommerce and is matched to the customer who placed it, the online order joins the same record as the phone order, the market-stall order and the wholesale standing order. You get one history per customer across every channel — which is what you need before any of the questions you actually want to ask (who are my best customers? what do they reorder? who has gone quiet?) can be answered at all.

Do the tidy-up before you connect, not after. If you already have customer records in two places, spend an hour merging obvious duplicates and standardising how names and email addresses are entered before you switch on a sync. Matching works from the data it is given; connecting a shop to a messy customer list mostly produces a bigger messy customer list. It is a short job done once, and a long job done repeatedly if you skip it.

Keeping fulfilment status in step both ways

A one-way sync solves half the problem and creates a new one. If orders flow into your kitchen system but status never flows back, the shop becomes progressively less accurate: it shows orders as outstanding that were collected days ago, sends the wrong notifications, and gives you a customer-facing record you cannot trust.

Two-way status is what keeps the two systems honest. The rule to aim for is simple: the kitchen system is where work is marked done, and the shop is told. One place to update, one source of truth, no daily reconciliation.

In practice this also removes a small daily irritation — nobody has to log into the shop admin to press “fulfil” on things they already finished at 6am.

Allergen information on online orders

Selling online does not reduce your allergen obligations; if anything it makes them harder to discharge, because the customer is not standing in front of you and cannot ask a question. Three things deserve attention.

Product information must be accurate where the customer chooses. Allergen information on a product page does the job a conversation over a counter would otherwise do. If your shop’s descriptions were written eighteen months ago and the recipe has changed since, that gap is a real risk. Allergen data should come from one place — your recipes — not be retyped into a shop listing and left to rot.

Free-text allergy notes need a human. Most checkouts have an order-notes box, and customers use it to write things like “my daughter is allergic to nuts”. Treat that as a flag requiring a decision, not an instruction to be quietly followed. Somebody needs to see it, decide whether you can safely fulfil it, and say so — which only happens if the note reaches the order the kitchen actually works from.

Know which labelling rules apply to you. Distance selling, delivery and pre-packed for direct sale are not the same case, and what you must provide differs. Check the current FSA guidance on distance selling, mail order and delivery and our Natasha’s Law guide rather than assuming your situation matches somebody else’s.

Where your allergen data lives matters more than where your orders land. Order sync is a workflow improvement. Allergen accuracy is a safety and compliance question. If your recipes, allergens and labels are all derived from one ingredient database — which is what FoodCore does from the Essentials plan upward at £25/month inc. VAT — then changing an ingredient updates every recipe, every label and every allergen statement that depends on it. Retyped allergen text in a shop listing has no such link, and will eventually be wrong.

How FoodCore connects Shopify and WooCommerce

Shopify and WooCommerce sync is a Core feature (£65/month inc. VAT, £650/year).

Orders arrive automatically

Shopify and WooCommerce orders arrive in FoodCore automatically by webhook — your shop notifies FoodCore as the order is placed. No export, no CSV, no morning copy-across. The order lands in the orders and collections diary next to the ones you took over the counter.

Matched to the right customer

Incoming orders are matched to the customer who placed them, so an online buyer who is already one of your regulars joins their existing record rather than creating a duplicate.

Fulfilment flows back

Mark an order ready in FoodCore and it is marked fulfilled in the shop. You work in one place; the shop stays accurate on its own.

Be clear about the money

This is where honesty matters most. On imported shop orders, no money passes through FoodCore. The buyer paid your shop, through your shop’s own payment provider. FoodCore imports the payment status as information so you can see whether an order is paid — that is all. There is no FoodCore platform fee on imported Shopify or WooCommerce orders.

Separately, Core also offers card payment links for orders you take outside the shop — a phone order, a bespoke quote, a deposit on an event. There, you connect your own Stripe account and you are the merchant of record: funds settle to your bank, and refunds and chargebacks are yours. FoodCore never stores card details; all card entry happens on Stripe-hosted pages. A 1% platform fee applies only to payments taken through a FoodCore-hosted payment link — not to imported shop orders, and not to your subscription. Stripe’s own processing fee is charged to you separately by Stripe. If you take deposits on bespoke work, our guide to taking deposits on cake orders covers that in detail.

One more thing to state plainly: FoodCore is not an accounting, invoicing, VAT or payroll system. It shows you what was ordered and what has been paid against it, which is useful to hand to your bookkeeper — but it does not do your books, raise your invoices or handle your VAT.

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Shopify and WooCommerce orders: frequently asked questions

Can Shopify orders sync into kitchen software?

Yes. On the FoodCore Core plan (£65/month inc. VAT), Shopify orders arrive automatically by webhook — the shop notifies FoodCore the moment an order is placed, rather than you exporting a CSV or retyping it into a diary. The order is matched to the customer who placed it and appears in your orders and collections diary alongside orders taken by phone, email or in person.

Does WooCommerce work with FoodCore?

Yes. WooCommerce is supported on the same basis as Shopify, on the Core plan. Orders arrive automatically by webhook and are matched to a customer record, and marking an order ready in FoodCore marks it fulfilled in the shop.

Does FoodCore take payment for my Shopify or WooCommerce orders?

No, and this is worth being clear about. On imported shop orders no money passes through FoodCore at all — the buyer paid your shop, through whatever payment provider your shop uses. FoodCore imports the payment status as information so you can see whether an order is paid, but it is not part of the payment flow. There is no FoodCore platform fee on imported shop orders.

How are online customers matched to existing customer records?

When an order arrives from Shopify or WooCommerce, FoodCore matches it to the customer who placed it, so a regular who orders online in March and by phone in April builds one history rather than two half-histories under different spellings of their name. That single record is what lets you see what a customer usually orders and what they have spent with you across every channel.

Does marking an order ready in FoodCore update my shop?

Yes. Fulfilment status flows both ways on the Core plan: orders come in from the shop, and marking an order ready in FoodCore marks it fulfilled in Shopify or WooCommerce. That stops the two systems drifting apart, and the customer gets the shop’s normal fulfilment notification without you logging into the shop admin.

How should allergen information be handled on online orders?

Your allergen duty does not change because the order arrived through a website. Product allergen information should be accurate where the buyer chooses, your allergen data should come from one source rather than being retyped into product descriptions, and any free-text allergy note left at checkout needs to reach the person making the food. Treat that box as a flag requiring a human decision, never an instruction to follow silently — and check current FSA guidance on distance selling for what applies to your business.

Which FoodCore plan includes Shopify and WooCommerce sync?

Shopify and WooCommerce sync is on the Core plan at £65/month inc. VAT (£650/year), which also adds food safety, card payment links, staff rota, Business Insights, menus and allergen matrix, meal planning, and teams and multi-site. The orders and collections diary itself, and recording payments and deposits by hand, start on Growth at £40/month inc. VAT. Essentials at £25/month inc. VAT covers recipes, ingredients, allergens and labels. All plans start with a 7-day free trial, no card required.