How to schedule exports in Store Exporter Deluxe

Exporting your WooCommerce data by hand every day or every week eats into time you could spend running your store. Store Exporter Deluxe lets you set up a Scheduled Export once, then it runs on its own after that, on the interval and delivery method you choose.

You can create as many Scheduled Exports as you need. Each one keeps its own filters, export fields, and delivery settings, so a daily order export and a weekly product backup can run side by side without interfering with each other.

Prerequisites

Where to find Scheduled Exports

Open WooCommerce → Store Export from the WordPress admin menu. This opens the Store Exporter Deluxe dashboard. Select Scheduled Exports from the EXPORTS section of the sidebar to see your existing schedules.

Creating a scheduled export

1. From the Scheduled Exports screen, click New Schedule.
2. On the General step, enter a name in the Schedule Name field. This name only appears within your WordPress admin, so use something you’ll recognize later, like “Daily Product Backup.”
3. Choose what to export from the Export Type dropdown.
4. Choose a file format from the Export Format dropdown.
5. Under Export Fields, choose All Fields, Use Template to apply a saved export template, or Saved Selection to reuse the fields you last picked in Quick Export.
6. Click Filters to set any conditions that narrow down what gets exported. Skip this step to export everything of the chosen type.
7. Click Method to choose how the export is delivered. See Delivery methods below for what each option does.
8. Click Scheduling to set how often the export runs. See Cron interval options below for the available frequencies.
9. (Optional) Click Advanced to set the log level and other per-schedule advanced options.
10. Click Create Schedule to save.

Once saved, open the schedule again and click Execute Now to run it immediately and confirm it works.

File and data formatting

Further down the General step, the File & Data Formatting section controls how the exported file itself is put together:

• Column Delimiter (CSV exports only): choose Use global default, Comma, Semicolon, Tab, or Pipe as the character that separates columns. Use Semicolon or Tab if your target system expects one of those instead of a comma, for example, in a region where commas are used as decimal separators.
• Excel Formulas: choose to Allow Excel formulas or Do not allow Excel formulas in the exported file. Leave formulas disallowed unless you specifically need calculated values, since allowing them can expose the file to formula injection if someone else opens it later.
• Header Formatting: choose whether to Include export field column headers or leave them out. Only turn headers off if the system receiving the file expects raw data with no header row.
• Grouped Product Formatting: choose how a grouped product’s child products are represented, as Export as Product ID, Export as Product SKU, or Export as Product Name.
• Product Image Formatting: choose how the main product image is represented, as an Attachment ID, an Image URL, or an Image Filepath.
• Product Gallery Formatting: choose how gallery images are represented, using the same three options as Product Image Formatting.

Filtering what gets exported

The Filters step controls exactly which records the export includes. What you see here depends on the Export Type you chose on the General step. Choosing Products, for example, shows product-specific groups like Product Filters and Inventory Filters, while choosing Orders shows Order Filters instead.

If your export type is Products or Product Variations, a Product Selection section appears at the top of the Filters step. Search for products by name, ID, or SKU, then choose Include selected or Exclude selected from the mode button next to the search field. Leave the search empty to export every matching product.

Below Product Selection, filters are grouped into collapsible sections, each with a badge showing how many filters inside it are currently active. Depending on the individual filter, its control can be a dropdown, a set of pill-style options, a number field, a multi-select list, a comparison (for example, stock quantity greater than a number you enter), a date range with quick presets (Any Time, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, Yesterday, Today, or a Custom Range), or a plain text field.

The exact filters available depend on the Export Type you chose. Product exports offer filters like Categories, Tags, Product Types, Product Status, Brands, and Shipping Class, all grouped under Product Filters. Other export types show their own relevant filter groups instead.

At the bottom of the Filters step, the Sorting section shows one or more sort rules, each with a field and an Ascending or Descending direction control. The export sorts by the field in the first rule only. Additional rules added with Add Another Sort Rule, and the direction control on any rule, don’t affect how the export is sorted.

Delivery methods

The Method step lets you choose where the exported file goes:

• Archive to Media: saves the file to your WordPress Media Library.
• Save to Server: writes the file to a directory on your server.
• Send as Email: attaches the exported file to an email and sends it to one or more recipients.
• POST to URL: sends the file to a remote URL using an HTTP POST request. This suits suppliers or accounting systems that accept incoming file uploads.
• FTP / SFTP: uploads the file to an external FTP or SFTP server. You’ll need the server’s host, port, protocol, username, and password, plus an optional remote directory path and filename.

Full field-by-field setup for FTP/SFTP, email, and the other delivery methods is beyond the scope of this article. The fields on the Method step are labeled clearly, and each shows inline help text as you fill it in.

Cron interval options and timezone

On the Scheduling step, choose how often the export should run from these frequencies:

• Hourly: runs every hour.
• Daily: runs once per day.
• Weekly: runs once per week.
• Monthly: runs on the 1st of each month.
• Custom: runs every set number of minutes that you specify.
• Manual: doesn’t run on a schedule at all. Use this when you only want to trigger the export yourself, either with the Execute Now button or the manual CRON export engine described below.

For Hourly and Daily frequencies, you can also limit the export to specific days of the week using the day pills under the Days section.

For every frequency except Manual, set when the export runs. Under Time, choose the time of day. Hourly schedules have no time of day to pick, only a timezone.

Under Start, choose Start immediately to run the export as soon as you save the schedule. Or choose Schedule start date to pick the date and time of the first run.

Under Time, the Timezone dropdown lets you pick the timezone the schedule runs on, from a full list of time zones with their UTC offset (for example, (UTC +10:00) Australia/Sydney). It defaults to your site’s own timezone, so in most cases you won’t need to change it. The scheduled time you set is based on whichever timezone you select here, not the server’s raw UTC time.

Triggering a scheduled export manually

If you need a scheduled export to run at an exact time, independently of WordPress loading a page, you can trigger it with a direct URL using the manual CRON export engine included with Store Exporter Deluxe.

Find the scheduled export’s ID

1. Open WooCommerce → Store Export → Scheduled Exports.
2. Hover over the name of the scheduled export you want to run. The number at the end of the link, after edit/, is its ID. You’ll need this for the trigger URL below.

If you use WP-CLI, wp store-export list also shows each schedule’s ID in its post_id column. See Managing scheduled exports with WP-CLI below.

Turn on CRON access

1. Open WooCommerce → Store Export → Settings and select the CRON Exports tab.
2. Turn on the Enable CRON toggle.
3. Enter a value in the Export Secret Key field. The key is required. Store Exporter Deluxe refuses CRON export requests while this field is empty.

Build and trigger the URL

Build a trigger URL in this format, replacing each placeholder with your own values:

https://your-site.com/?action=woo_ce-cron&key=YOUR_SECRET_KEY&type=product&response=download&scheduled_export=100

The type and response values are required in the URL but are ignored by the CRON export engine, since it uses the settings saved on the scheduled export itself.

Visit this URL (for example, from a real server-level cron job) to trigger the export immediately. Check the Scheduled Exports screen afterward. A completed run shows up under Recent Activity.

For more details on this trigger and command-line alternatives, see How to export via manual CRON.

Managing scheduled exports with WP-CLI

If you have command-line access to your server, the wp store-export command lets you list and trigger exports without opening wp-admin:

wp store-export list

wp store-export scheduled_export --scheduled_id=100

Replace 100 with the ID of the scheduled export you want to run. There’s also a wp store-export quick_export --export_type=product command for running a one-off export outside of any saved schedule.

Troubleshooting

FAQ

Related articles

• How to export via manual CRON
• How to schedule exports by your local time: for converting your local time to server time when triggering exports through a manual cron job outside the plugin’s own Scheduling step
• How to export users
• Exporting custom product, order, and order item meta

Need more help?

If you’re using Store Exporter Deluxe and run into an issue this article doesn’t cover, open a support ticket and our team will help you get your Scheduled Export running.

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.