WooCommerce to Xero Integration - Competition

Xeroom Competitors

Although there are a lot of companies pretending to compete in this space it really boils down to a simple choice: a) The plugin hosted in the WooCommerce shop, which was developed by a nameless third party or to b) One of the generic connectors which are essentially Data Entity Transition layer (ETL) tools.

WooCommerce – Xero Plugin

This is the only WooCommerce plugin to compete with Xeroom and has been around almost as long as us.  It was first launched in 2014  and has steadily improved over the years playing a “catch-up” game. It provides a basic connection to Xero providing the ability to post orders and create invoices but without all the additional integration that Xeroom offers.  Xero is a fully-fledged accounting package and so a simplistic approach like this misses out on a lot of potential benefits that can be achieved from integrating more fully with the core WooCommerce plugin.  The management of the essential metadata, Xero settings and order process is missing that makes it difficult to mirror real-life financial processes that take place.

Generic ETL Connectors

We include the various tools like Zapier and the now deceased OneSaas that got taken over in 2021 by Intuit/Quickbooks.  These tools are based on datawarehousing and typically use an intermediation layer which holds the data extracted from any of the many apps that they connect to.  It then performs the necessary manipulations on this data and pushes it to the intended destination app.  This obviously introduces an extra platform that needs to be learned plus limits the breadth of integration since everything has to go via it.  Also reverse dataflow back into WooCommerce can be tricky and is very limited.  They can be useful for some more sophisticated data manipulations for example if data from other systems needs to be integrated and are favoured by IT professionals who can understand how they work.  However their ability to mirror financial processes is again limited and they are also expensive to develop and maintain.

Xeroom Feature Comparison

We list below a detailed list of the main features that Xeroom offers.  Whilst certainly not all will be relevant or needed right now Xeroom future-proofs your integration by providing you things you may not have thought of but find you need or can offer additional value going forward and generally make life easier for you.  Other features are more synergistic and add power to your business by leveraging WooCommerce and Xero’s strengths which can both save time and help your business run better eg a simple example is to run a sales report in Xero breaking out sales by product groups and even by individual products ranked by revenues or by geography if selling in multiple locations.

Note that we don’t price Xeroom based on all these features but on what is the typical cost of an hour of a qualified accountant’s time which we think represents great-value and well worth investing in even if you are a small business with a limited budget as Xeroom will save you time. (Click table to open as downloadable PDF).