The Best WooCommerce Export And Import Plugins For Store Data

Every January, accountants start asking store owners for last year’s orders. It’s the same request every year, and it catches a lot of WooCommerce stores out. WooCommerce has no native order exporter, so the fields the accountant wants simply aren’t there. The right WooCommerce export plugin turns a weekend of copy-pasting into a twenty-minute job.

I’ve seen this play out enough times to know where it goes wrong. Store owners reach for the built-in product exporter, find it doesn’t touch orders, then start hand-building a spreadsheet.

The root problem is that “export” covers several unrelated jobs. The native tools handle one of them well and the rest not at all.

So this guide separates the jobs first, then shows exactly where WooCommerce stops. After that, we’ll go through the plugins worth considering for each, and where each one stops.

Jump to:

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What WooCommerce Exports Natively (And What It Leaves Out)

WooCommerce ships a product CSV exporter, and that’s essentially the whole of it. Products go out, products come back in through the matching importer, and nothing else is covered.

For catalogue work, that round trip is genuinely useful. You export, edit in a spreadsheet, and re-import, which is still the cleanest way to make wide catalogue changes. Our roundup of WooCommerce bulk edit plugins covers when an editing panel beats a spreadsheet.

Here’s where it stops:

• Orders aren’t covered at all. The product exporter doesn’t do orders, and orders are the single most common thing store owners need out.
• Custom meta is all or nothing. There’s one “export all custom meta” checkbox, so you take every meta field or none of them. You can’t pick out the three you actually want.
• Filtering stops at columns, product types and categories. There’s no “orders from this date range with this status”, because there’s no order export to filter.
• Nothing runs on a schedule. Every export is a manual action someone has to remember.
• CSV is the only format. If the receiving system wants XML or a spreadsheet, that conversion is your job.

Still, customers are worth naming as a separate gap. WordPress includes a personal-data export tool, but it runs one user at a time for privacy requests. That’s a compliance feature, not a customer list export.

As a result, those last two limits are what push most stores to a plugin. A monthly export that someone has to remember to run is a monthly export that eventually doesn’t happen.

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Four Export Jobs, Four Different Tools

Work out which of these four jobs you’re doing before you compare anything. The right tool differs meaningfully between them.

• Orders for accounting and reporting. Line items, tax, shipping, payment method, dates and statuses. An order export like this usually needs date filtering and a specific column set your accounting software expects. It’s also the job most likely to recur every month.

• Products for a migration or a supplier. The full catalogue, including variations, attributes and images. In practice, completeness matters more than anything else here, because a migration missing variation data is worse than no migration. Supplier-facing exports have the same requirement, since a partial file becomes their problem too.

• Customers for marketing or compliance. Contact details, order history summaries and consent status. That said, this one needs care about what you’re extracting and where the file ends up. Treat it as a data-handling decision, not just a technical one.

• Scheduled exports that run unattended. Any of the above on a timer, delivered somewhere automatically. That’s a genuinely different capability. The tools that do it well are built around it rather than adding it on.

The distinction that matters most is one-off versus recurring. A migration wants completeness and doesn’t care about automation. By contrast, a monthly accounting file wants reliability and delivery, because it’ll run a hundred times.

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The Best WooCommerce Export And Import Plugins

Five options cover almost every version of this problem. They’re ordered by how much of the export job each one takes off your hands.

1. Store Exporter Deluxe

The widest coverage of the five, and the only one that includes scheduling and delivery without a second purchase.

Filtering is where it earns its place. Orders filter by status and by date range, with relative presets like last week and last month alongside custom dates. Meanwhile, you can narrow further to a single product, category, customer or payment gateway. Users filter by role, date registered and date modified.

That sounds mundane until you need twelve months of completed orders without the cancellations. That’s the accountant request, and here it’s a single screen rather than a spreadsheet afternoon.

Scheduling is built as a real feature rather than a bolt-on. Each schedule is its own saved record you can edit or clone. So last quarter’s setup becomes this quarter’s starting point. Delivery covers six routes: media library, server path, email attachment, POST to a URL, FTP or SFTP, and Google Sheets.

However, failure reporting is the part most tools skip. Here, a Recent Schedules panel and a dashboard widget show whether the last run succeeded, and why it didn’t. So a broken FTP upload surfaces as a message instead of a file that quietly never arrives.

It writes CSV, TSV, XLS, XLSX and XML, which helps when the receiving system is fussy about structure. Plus, export templates save a column set once so nobody rebuilds it.

It also reads from 125+ WooCommerce and WordPress plugins. So subscription fields, coupon records and vendor product data come through rather than dropping out. On top of that, custom meta can be picked field by field, not just as one blob.

One honest caveat before you decide. Importing is a separate product, Product Importer Deluxe, so needing both directions means two purchases rather than one.

Store Exporter Deluxe runs $49 a year for a single site, with an unlimited licence available for agencies.

Best for: order exports with real filtering, and any export that should run unattended.

2. Advanced Order Export For WooCommerce

The strongest free option, as long as orders are all you need.

With 100,000+ active installs, it’s one of the most widely used order exporters in the plugin directory. The free version covers the core job properly: pick your fields, rename the labels, reorder columns, filter, export. It writes six formats for free, including Excel, XML, JSON, PDF and HTML. That’s more than several paid tools manage.

Two limits decide whether it’s enough. The free version only hands you a browser download, so nothing lands on your server automatically. Scheduling, with email or FTP delivery, sits in Pro from $30 a year.

It’s also orders only, where Store Exporter Deluxe covers 15+ data types on one licence. Visser Labs keeps a head-to-head breakdown if you’re weighing the two.

Best for: occasional manual order exports, and finding out whether you need more.

3. Product Import Export for WooCommerce

Built around the round trip, which is its real advantage over an export-only tool.

If your work is catalogue maintenance, one tool handling both directions keeps the column mapping consistent. Better still, you map once and save it as a template. It matches each row to an existing product by SKU or ID. Then it updates only the fields that changed, which sidesteps the blank-column problem covered further down.

It stays products-focused, though. Pricing starts at $69 a year for one site, against $49 for Store Exporter Deluxe. That one also exports orders, customers, coupons and subscriptions. That said, if products are the whole job and you want both directions in one plugin, the premium is defensible.

Best for: spreadsheet catalogue editing, where export and import are one workflow.

4. Customer / Order / Coupon Export for WooCommerce

The official marketplace extension, and the most predictable of the five.

In practice, it exports three record types, orders, customers and coupons, in CSV or XML. Custom formats let you rearrange fields and add meta or static values, so an accountant’s column order stays reproducible. Meanwhile, scheduled exports deliver by email, FTP or HTTP POST.

Advanced Coupons has a guide to reading a coupon usage report once that data is out.

The trade-off is scope against price. It’s $79 a year for three record types and two formats. Store Exporter Deluxe is $49 for 15+ types, five formats and six delivery routes. Still, if you specifically want an official extension on the invoice, that’s a reasonable reason to pick it.

Best for: stores that prefer official extensions and have modest filtering needs.

5. WP All Export

The most flexible of the five, and the most work to set up.

It’s a general WordPress export tool, so it reaches data that isn’t product or order data at all. If you need an unusual output structure, a drag-and-drop column builder will get you there.

The cost shows up in two places. WooCommerce products and orders need the WooCommerce Export Package at $169 a year, or a Pro bundle above it. You also build the export template yourself.

By comparison, Store Exporter Deluxe shows every WooCommerce data type immediately at $49. Plus, there’s no add-on to install and no template to build. Visser Labs has a full comparison of the two.

Best for: unusual export structures, and exporting WooCommerce data alongside the rest of your site.

Feature comparison summary

Here’s how the five map across the jobs. Prices and feature sets move between versions, so confirm current details on each vendor’s own site before buying.

Tool	Price	Data types	Scheduling	Delivery	Formats
Native WooCommerce	Free	Products only, no order export	No	Browser download	CSV
Store Exporter Deluxe	$49/yr, 1 site	15+, including orders, products, customers, coupons, subscriptions	Yes, included	Media, server, email, FTP/SFTP, POST to URL, Google Sheets	CSV, TSV, XLS, XLSX, XML
Advanced Order Export	Free, Pro from $30/yr	Orders only	Pro only	Free: download only. Pro: email, FTP, APIs	CSV, Excel, XML, JSON, PDF, HTML
Product Import Export for WooCommerce	From $69/yr	Products, import and export	Yes	FTP/SFTP, WP or server cron	CSV, XML, Excel, TSV, Google Sheets
Customer / Order / Coupon Export for WooCommerce	$79/yr	Orders, customers, coupons	Yes	Email, FTP, HTTP POST	CSV, XML
WP All Export	$99/yr, WooCommerce package $169/yr	Site-wide, WooCommerce needs the add-on package	Yes	Zapier (email, Dropbox, Google Sheets, Google Drive)	CSV, XLSX, XML

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Scheduled Exports: The Case For Not Doing It By Hand

A recurring export that a person runs is a recurring export that eventually gets missed.

The pattern is predictable. Someone sets a calendar reminder, it works for three months, then a busy week arrives. The reminder gets dismissed, and nobody notices until the accountant asks. The data was always there, so the process was the failure point.

Scheduling takes the person out of the loop. In practice, three things separate a schedule you can trust from one you can’t:

• Filters that persist. The schedule should carry the same filtering as a manual export, so you aren’t pulling everything every time.
• Delivery, not just generation. A file sitting on the server that nobody fetches hasn’t solved the problem. FTP into a finance system, or email to whoever needs it, is what closes the loop.
• Failure visibility. You need to know when a run didn’t happen. Silent failure is worse than no schedule, because you’ll assume it worked.

🔍️ What we’ve seen: stores set up a scheduled export, confirm the first file arrived, then never check again. Months later the file is still landing, but a plugin update renamed a column. As a result, the receiving system has been quietly dropping a field ever since. Check the contents of a scheduled export quarterly, not just that it exists.

For catalogue work, our guide to WooCommerce inventory management covers what to do with the data once it’s out. Exports also feed supplier relationships. Our guide to running a wholesale store and Wholesale Suite’s B2B setup guide both get into that.

One distinction is worth keeping straight. An export gives you a file to work with. A product data feed pushes catalogue data to an external channel on a schedule.

AdTribes covers that side in their guide to ecommerce product data management. We compare the tooling in our roundup of WooCommerce product feed tools. They get confused constantly, but a feed is for advertising channels and an export is for you.

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Importing: The Riskier Return Trip

Import deserves more caution than export, because export only reads and import writes to your live store.

By contrast, the failure modes on the way back in are specific:

• Column mismatches that silently write data into the wrong field
• Duplicate products when the matching key isn’t what you assumed, since importers match on ID or SKU
• Overwritten data where blank cells get treated as “set this to empty” instead of “leave this alone”
• Broken variations where parent and child relationships don’t survive the round trip

That third one does the most damage, and it’s importer-dependent. That said, some tools update only the fields that changed, while others write the blanks straight over your data. WooCommerce’s own importer documentation doesn’t state which behaviour it uses, so test it rather than assuming.

Three rules keep imports safe:

1. Test on staging first, with a copy of real data. Not a sample, real data, because the edge cases live in the real catalogue.
2. Import a handful of rows, check them properly, then run the rest.
3. Keep the original export as your rollback. It’s the only undo you have.

If you can’t test on staging, take a full backup immediately before. Then run the import at your store’s quietest hour. Visser Labs’ rundown of product import plugins walks through the mapping step, which is where most of this goes wrong.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Choosing The Right WooCommerce Export Plugin

Exporting isn’t one capability, it’s four jobs with different requirements. Once you know whether you’re doing a one-off migration or a recurring accounting file, the shortlist gets short quickly.

• Check what the native exporter covers before installing anything
• Identify which of the four jobs you’re actually doing
• Automate anything recurring, then verify the contents quarterly
• Treat imports as riskier than exports and always keep the original file
• Test on staging with real data rather than a sample

If your problem is the January accountant request on a schedule, Store Exporter Deluxe is the closest fit here. You get order and date filtering, six delivery routes, and success-or-failure reporting on every run. That’s $49 a year on a single site. That’s the combination the native tools don’t attempt.