Its been almost a year since we launched the WooCommerce Zoho CRM plugin and we have learned a lot from it, the good and the bad. The release of that plugin had two goals: find out what WooCommerce store owners really want to sync to their Zoho CRM and understand all relevant aspects of the Zoho API for phase 2. We have now arrived at phase 2; rebuilding everything we learned in the cloud. You are wondering; what will make this new platform so special? Lets highlight the three biggest differences between the plugin and the new platform.
1. All API based
One indisputable fact we learned from our 10 year experiences in building integrations, is that the safest and most reliable way of pushing and pulling data is utilizing the API of platforms. For this reason and more, all the syncing will happen via the Zoho CRM API and the WooCommerce API. The best part about it? You will only be a click away to setup the connection, our platform will connect your store and Zoho account with a single click on the button.
2. No more Plugin
Because we are connecting your store and Zoho CRM account via API to our cloud platform, you no longer need to upload a plugin on your WordPress website. This saves you a lot of time in implementation and it saves us a lot of hours in code maintenance and support.
What does this mean for the current plugin?
We have just released version 2.1.0 to solve some major bugs, this will be the last major release of the plugin. We will release minor releases for the next two months for the plugin to address possible bugs.
3. Full two-way sync – in realtime
Within the WordPress plugin, we had already introduced partial two-way sync integration. We synchronized the contact address changes in Zoho to your WooCommerce store. However, for our new cloud platform we will add support for the Zoho Notifications API, which will allow us to listen for changes made in Contacts, Orders and Products and push those changes in realtime to your WooCommerce website. We will do the same from WooCommerce to Zoho CRM via the WooComerce Webhooks, which our platform will automatically create for your site.
When will this get released?
You are now wondering when we will release this new gem. At this point, we are working hard on releasing the Beta in April. We will soon start testing the new platform with our existing customers. When all of that is done and the major bugs are crushed, we will open the Beta for the general public. You can register now to get notified for the Beta release!
