Order desk Pro

Saved views over your WooCommerce orders, bulk actions on the ones you pick, and an export you can hand to a bookkeeper.

It does not replace WooCommerce’s orders

Orders stay exactly where they are. The desk reads them through WooCommerce’s own query layer, so it behaves identically whether your store uses the classic posts table or High-Performance Order Storage, and every status change goes through WooCommerce’s own transition — which is what keeps stock, refunds and emails working the way they always did.

A desk that owned any of those would be a second source of truth about money, and the two would eventually disagree.

Saved views

Save the searches you run every morning: unpaid trade orders, this week’s orders over £500, anything on hold. A view stores a status filter, a date range, a customer and a search term, plus the columns you want to see.

Filters are cleaned when they are saved rather than when they are run. A malformed date is dropped at that moment and you can see it has gone, instead of silently matching nothing next Tuesday.

Bulk actions act on what you selected

Change status, or add a note, to the orders you ticked — up to a hundred at a time. Every action names its order ids explicitly. There is no "apply to everything matching this filter" path, because a filter re-evaluated on the server can differ from the rows you were looking at when you pressed the button.

An order that cannot take the action is skipped and reported, not forced.

The export, and the thing most exports get wrong

Choose your columns from an allow-list. Not "everything except the sensitive fields" — an except-list is always one WooCommerce release behind whatever new field ends up holding something that should not be in a spreadsheet on someone’s laptop.

Then there is the part you cannot see. A CSV cell beginning =, +, - or @ is a formula to Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice. A customer whose name is =cmd|'/c calc'!A1 is not a hypothetical; exports get opened on office machines, and the spreadsheet will do what the cell says.

Every value StoreMaster exports is neutralised so a spreadsheet reads it as text. The value is still there, still readable, still searchable — it simply does not run. Diagnostics tests the neutraliser by running it, not by checking it exists, because a guard that is only inspected is one that can quietly stop working.

Exports are streamed and the query is paged, so a store with a hundred thousand orders does not have to hold them in memory.

Order references

WooCommerce order ids are database ids: they jump, and on many installs they are shared with every other kind of content. Switch references on and each new order also gets a tidy sequential label — SM-00001, SM-00002 — which is what appears wherever WooCommerce would show an order number.

Two things are true of it by design:

• It is assigned exactly once, atomically. The reference and the order id are both unique columns, so two orders placed in the same instant get two references, and one order can never get two.
• It is a label, not a credential. A reference is short and easy to read out over the phone, which is exactly why nothing authorises on it. Order tracking still needs the order key or a signed link, exactly as it did before.