Do you collect the tracking numbers of orders in your store?  If yes then is it possible for your customers to track the orders on your website? Can you at least send the tracking numbers by email to them?

Ideally, you as dropshipper should have all these features in your store.

In this article you’ll learn how to setup such function in your Woocommerce store using order tracking addon.

Let’s get started:

• Video about order tracking features
• What features come with tracking addon?
• Set up the plugin settings
• Use the Tracking list
• Synchronize the specific tracking codes if needed
• Use the special short-code to track orders in the website frontend
• How to change email template and other templates containing tracking information?
• Best practices for using the tracking plugin

In this video we’ll show:

• What tracking features are built-in in Ali2Woo (our plugin for dropshippers)
• Additional (advanced) features that become available if you install the tracking addon

Main features:

• Show tracking numbers in email notifications for your customers
• Show them in your client personal accounts and on the order page for site administrator
• Integrate with tracking services: 17Track, Cainiao, AfterShip
• Add a tracking form on your website using a special short-code
• Customize the tracking templates for email notifications, personal accounts and admin panel
• Add new “Shipped” status to the list of default WooCommerce order statuses. It creates a separate email notification and template that you can override in your theme. (new feature!)

Features that require AfterShip API Key:

• Daily automatic synchronization of tracking information
• Automatic detection of carrier code by tracking number
• Automatic changing of the WooCommerce order status if related tracking numbers get the “Delivered” state
• Manual synchronization function for specific tracking numbers
• Split tracking numbers into groups depending on their state: Pending, Shipped, Delivered, etc.

All tracking numbers added to WooCommerce orders are displayed on the WooCommerce> Tracking List page.

For convenience, tracking numbers depending on their status are divided into different categories:

Firstly, Error and Publish are statuses added by the plugin. Others are assigned in AfterShip.

Publish has a new tracking number that has not yet been synchronized.

Error are tracking numbers with some kind of synchronization error.

Moreover, you can find the description of the AfterShip statuses here.

Sometime you may want to run the synchronization manually.

So you don’t need to wait for automatic updates always.

Mark the necessary tracking numbers, select the Tracking Sync function and that’s it.

Please note that sometimes AfterShip cannot determine carrier code automatically.

It may happen for some tracking numbers.

In this case, you need to go to tracking editing and set the courier code manually.

The plugin implements a special short-code [wcae-track].

Just add it to any page or post on your site.

After that the 17Track service form will appear on the page.

So your website visitors can check their tracking numbers there.

Consider an example:

Please note this is the iframe form.

That’s why you cannot change its design.

But it is possible to change a design of the button and of the search field.

To do that, just edit the appropriate template.

In addition, adding a short-code to page, this page becomes available for selection in the Tracking service field.

For example, in the following screenshot, we put the short codes on two pages.

You can choose any of them.

Just a reminder that, during the choice of this page as a Tracking service, the tracking numbers (in notifications, order, account page, etc.) will lead to the tracking form located on the selected page.

The tracking information is displayed through the templates. 

So email notification, user account and shortcode – all have separate template that can be changed.

To know a template name and its structure, check the addon folder containing the templates:

Please don’t edit these templates directly, instead override appropriate file by creating its copy in your active theme folder.

See the red line highlights an area of the email template that you can change by editing the tracking template:

If you want to change not only that area, but the whole notification template you have to change the corresponding WooCommerce template.

WooCommerce has several notification templates depending on the status of the order.

All available WooCommerce notification templates you can find in

WooCommerce> Settings-> Emails

Also there option to choose which notifications WooCommerce sends automatically.

After the publication of this article, we saw that some dropshipers still have questions about the configuration of this add-on and some of its features.

In this section, we will try to answer those questions and share the best practices for using the tracking addon.

Popular question is how to send emails to a customer at the moment when an order gets the tracking codes from AliExpress.

Solution:

• Find the Tracking Code Order Status option in Ali2Woo settings. When you import tracking codes to your order, Ali2Woo changes the order status to  the Tracking Code Order Status.
• Add a new order status for this purpose, for example: Shipped. You can add the Shipped status by enabling an appropriate option in the tracking addon settings.
• As a result, when your order gets the tracking codes, the status is changed to Shipped automatically. Also, an email is sent to your customer.

By the way, if you want our specialist to help you to set up this behavior, contact support, we send you the quote.