How to export WooCommerce orders with Store Exporter Deluxe

Your accountant wants last month’s sales in a spreadsheet. Your fulfilment partner wants every line item with SKUs and shipping addresses. Your email platform wants customer names and order totals. All of that data already sits in WooCommerce, but the Orders screen only shows it on screen.

Store Exporter Deluxe pulls it out for you. You pick the columns you want, narrow the orders down to the ones that matter, and download the result as a spreadsheet or data file.

This article covers a one-off Quick Export of your orders first, then how to run the same export automatically on a schedule.

Prerequisites

Where to find Quick Export

Open WooCommerce → Store Export from the WordPress admin menu. That opens the Store Exporter Deluxe dashboard.

In the sidebar, Quick Export is its own button near the top, above the EXPORTS group. Click it to start a new export.

Step 1: Choose the Orders export type

On the Select Export Type step, click the Orders tile.

Every tile shows a live count of matching records, so you can confirm you’re pointed at the right data before you go any further. If the counts look stale, click Refresh to pull them again.

If the Orders tile shows 0 Records, it’s greyed out and can’t be selected. That means WooCommerce has no orders stored yet, so there’s nothing to export.

Step 2: Pick your order fields

On the Export Fields step, the columns you’re about to export appear as chips under Selected Fields, with the current count in the heading. On a store that has never exported orders, you start with four chips:

• Shipping Method
• Billing: First Name
• Billing: Last Name
• Billing: E-mail Address

That’s a thin starting point, so expect to add the columns you actually need, such as the order ID, date, status, and total. Once you’ve saved a selection for orders, Quick Export honours that instead, so the chips you see reflect your previous export rather than the four above.

From there you can shape the column list:

• Click Add more fields to open the Select Export Fields popup and add anything that isn’t already a chip.
• Click Manage Fields to open the same popup with the full list, a search box, and a group filter.
• Drag a chip to change the column order in your file.
• Click the pencil icon on a chip, or double-click it, to rename that column heading. The underlying data stays the same.
• Click the X on a chip to drop that column.
• Use Reset to Default to go back to the starting four, or Clear All in the popup to start from nothing.

Orders have well over a hundred fields available. The popup groups them so you can find things quickly: order info, financial, payment, shipping details, billing address, shipping address, customer, coupons, order items, notes and downloads, and dates. For the full list, see Supported export fields.

No status column is selected for you, so add one if you need it. The picker offers two that look interchangeable, Order Status and Post Status. On the current export engine both output the same WooCommerce status name, such as Processing or Completed, so the only practical difference is the column heading in your file. Pick Order Status unless you have a reason to prefer the other, or rename whichever chip you add with the pencil icon.

A few field pairs catch people out. Billing: State gives the full state name, while Billing: State (prefix) gives the short code. The same split applies to Billing: Country and Shipping: Country.

Adding your own order meta

Store Exporter Deluxe doesn’t auto-detect custom meta, so you register the keys you want first. Go to Custom Meta Fields under the TOOLS group in the sidebar. Orders have three boxes there:

• Order Meta for meta stored on the order itself
• Order Item Meta for meta stored on each line item
• Order Item Product Meta for product meta pulled from the line items

Enter one key per line, tick Quick Export under Available In, then click Save Fields. Your keys then appear in the field popup. For detailed instructions, see Exporting custom product, order, and order item meta.

Step 3: Filter and sort your orders

On the Filters & Sorting step, every filter is a card you switch on. Leave a card off and it doesn’t affect the export. With nothing switched on, you get every order in your store.

Both date cards work the same way. Pick one of the presets (Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days) or choose Custom range and set your own From and To dates.

Order Date and Date Modified are the only two dates you can filter on. There’s no separate date paid or date completed filter, so use Order Status alongside Order Date if you need completed orders from a given month.

Four more cards control the shape of the file rather than which orders land in it:

• Order Items Formatting decides how line items are laid out. See the callout below.
• Max Unique Order Items caps how many item column sets get created when you use Unique. It defaults to 10.
• Digital Products lets you keep everything, export digital products only, exclude digital products, or exclude orders that are digital-only.
• Exported Order Notes decides whether order notes are included. They’re excluded by default.
• Order Item Types picks which item types come through: line items, fees, shipping, taxes, coupons, and refunds.

Order Items Formatting is the setting people look for in the wrong place. Combined gives one row per order with all item values squeezed into a single cell per column. Unique also gives one row per order, but each item gets its own numbered set of columns. Individual gives one row per line item, repeating the order details on each row. If you need a row per product sold, that’s Individual.

To sort the file, use the Sorting panel on the right. Choose a field in Sort by, such as ID, Date Created, or Date Modified, then pick Ascending or Descending under Order. The direction buttons stay disabled until you’ve chosen a Sort by value.

Step 4: Choose a format and run the export

On the Export Options step, pick one of five tiles under File Format:

CSV suits most jobs. If you’ve already saved a setup on the Export Templates screen, apply it from the Export Template dropdown instead of rebuilding your fields and filters by hand.

Under Batch Settings you get three controls. Limit caps how many orders are exported, either from the preset list or with your own number via Custom. Offset skips a number of orders from the start, which pairs with Limit to work through a big store in chunks. Batch Size sets how many orders are processed per pass, and 100 is the default.

Orders also get a Description/Excerpt formatting choice on this step. Pick Leave HTML tags from Description/Excerpt intact to keep the raw HTML, or Strip HTML tags from Description/Excerpt for plain text.

There’s no delimiter, encoding, or header row option in Quick Export. Those controls live in the scheduled export form and in the plugin’s own Settings screen.

When you’re ready, click Run Export in the top right. The summary bar shows your export type, field count, filter count, format, and estimated rows, so it’s worth a glance before you start. Your file downloads once the run finishes.

Exporting orders on a schedule

If the same order export needs to run every night or every Monday, build it as a scheduled export instead. Go to Scheduled Exports in the EXPORTS group, then click New Schedule. That opens the Add New Scheduled Export form, which runs across five steps.

General: give the schedule a name in Schedule Name, which is required, then set Export Type to Orders and pick your Export Format. The label differs from Quick Export’s File Format, and so does the list. Scheduled exports add RSS 2.0 and JSON, and the two Excel options read as Excel (XLS) and Excel (XLSX). Fields work differently here too. Rather than a chip list, you choose All Fields, Use Template to apply a saved export template, or Saved Selection to reuse whatever you last set up in Quick Export for orders. This step also holds the formatting controls Quick Export doesn’t have: Column Delimiter for CSV, Excel Formulas, and Header Formatting.

Filters: the same order filters described above, applied to every run.

Method: choose how the file reaches you under Delivery Method. The options are Archive to Media, Save to Server, Send as Email, POST to URL, FTP / SFTP, and Google Sheets. Each one reveals its own settings, such as recipients and subject line for email, or host, port, and credentials for FTP.

Scheduling: pick Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Custom, or Manual. Custom lets you set your own Run every interval, and manual means the export only runs when you trigger it. Daily and hourly schedules can be limited to specific days of the week. The Schedule Preview panel shows the next run and a list of upcoming ones, so you can sanity check the timing before saving.

Advanced: set a Filename Pattern, add email Recipients for success or failure notices, control how many past files are kept under Archive Management, and configure retries under Failure Handling.

A Schedule Summary panel tracks your choices as you go, including the next run time. Click Create Schedule when you’re done, or Save Draft to finish it later.

Scheduled exports run through Action Scheduler, which WooCommerce already uses for its own background jobs. For detailed instructions, see How to schedule exports.

Troubleshooting

FAQ

Related articles

• How to schedule exports
• Supported export fields
• Exporting custom product, order, and order item meta
• How to export WooCommerce products

Need more help?

If you’re using Store Exporter Deluxe and hit something this article doesn’t cover, open a support ticket and our team will help you get your order export working.

If you’re using the free Store Exporter plugin, ask on the WordPress.org support forum and our team will get back to you there.