MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce
In the same way that the MyWorks team works to help automate your business and save you time, we take pride in hearing directly from our users to learn more about how our sync has helped their business – and can continue saving even more time. Our primary focus is creating a flexible integration that can cater to any business, and feedback from our users helps improve our platform – and continue innovating! We sat down with James Carroll, IT Manager at The Gun Dealer, a Canadian firearms retailer, to talk about how he found MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce – helping keep their ECommerce Gun Store for WooCommerce in sync with QuickBooks POS!
The Gun Dealer is the largest firearms retailer in Atlantic Canada. Situated in New Brunswick, the store “is a family-owned and operated” business. ”We’ve been doing this since 1977,” James says “so we know what we’re doing!” The Gun Dealer has a physical store and an online store that specializes in selling new and used firearms throughout Canada. They can’t sell to the USA, unfortunately, because of rules and regulations. Though they’ve operated for more than thirty years, they only set up an eCommerce store in 2018. Before that, James says, they “had a website but it was basically just a product catalog. If you saw something, you couldn’t buy it directly off the website. You’d have to give us a call, and we’d ship it to you and take all your information manually.” This stopped being a viable solution because that system only allowed The Gun Dealer to trade within standard office hours when someone could operate a phone line. On switching to an eCommerce store, James says “I think it was the best decision we’ve ever made. Now we’re basically open 24/7, and the sales are coming in all the time.”
To start their eCommerce journey, The Gun Dealer’s team began shopping around for options to streamline their setup. Due to the nature of their inventory, they encountered some difficulties. “Since we are a firearm company, it was a little bit hard to find solutions that support us.” Shopify had “pulled the plug” on firearm retailers entirely. After a while, they found their store’s home in WooCommerce. The Gun Dealer’s team was, at the time, working with a group of developers to get their site running. This team suggested they opt for a site structure in which their store page formed only part of it and was hosted using a plugin. James decided against that. He “really didn’t like that idea because it means that if the internet ever went out here, we can’t make a sale in the store because we don’t have access to a point of sale.” Eventually, after searching, the solution to this first obstacle presented itself in QuickBooks POS. Because The Gun Dealer sells weapons, they legally need a system that can track sales numbers, which QuickBooks POS offers. “Their layaway programs, their gift cards,” James says of QuickBooks POS, “they had the whole suite that we wanted.” 
The second obstacle The Gun Dealer had to tackle was syncing their WooCommerce sales with their product inventory. With a large and varied inventory due to the pre-owned section of their store, manually entering all their data was incredibly time-consuming. When they tried using software to help, everything they found “was like, really bad and really slow.” That’s when James found MyWorks Sync for QuickBooks POS, which in 2018, was coming out of our beta program. “We gave it a try because it can’t be worse than anything else we’ve tried!” he laughs.
From the start of their relationship with MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce, the team at The Gun Dealer has had a great experience. “I was really surprised at how hands-on the support team was at MyWorks. They were very knowledgeable, and they helped us get started. We worked with each other,” says James. “There was even some custom coding that MyWorks did for us for syncing our serial numbers into QuickBooks,” he says. “It was an amazing first start for both of us, I guess.” As The Gun Dealer’s eCommerce store has grown, so has the technical capabilities of MyWorks Sync. A sync that took The Gun Dealer 20 minutes at the start of our partnership now takes around two minutes because the system is consistently syncing differences in real-time. When it comes to conducting business, “everything happens automatically,” except a few manual approvals that local firearm laws require.
When we asked James to describe what MyWorks has been like to work with, he said:
“Comparing MyWorks to other platforms I use, MyWorks seems to really listen to what their customer needs. They develop based on that. It doesn’t really take time, and you guys have it fixed and resolved questions we’ve brought up. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another company that’s so involved with their customers to try to sort out the kinks.”
The Gun Dealer trusted MyWorks when we started, and we’ve helped the team take their WooCommerce store to the next level of automation and efficiency.
Our focus on building relationships with our customers has allowed us to support The Gun Dealer in the unique ways that they require every step of the way.
Do you think it’s time to give your business that same advantage? And don’t you think you deserve a little more time doing what’s important to you? If so, learn more about MyWorks QuickBooks Sync for WooCommerce here.
