Let’s say you have Woocommerce WooCommerce – Sell Online With The eCommerce Platform for WordPress the awesome plugin for handling E-Commerce features for your WordPress website. Now you got a customer or your client or your requirements are in need of data export features. Now Woocommerce itself has a feature that graphs out the revenue of sales, I’m pretty sure they also have a basic data export.
Now since you can export data in its basic form then we can likely hook up some snippets to it so it gets more relevant data to you. Now if we do this manually then we are in for hell, If you get paid to do this(don’t want 3rd party plugins) then, by all means, go ahead. Seriously coming from me making snippets for Woocommerce can take a while and as someone who is under constant time restraint to get back to my clients/customers fast it’s almost impossible.
So what do I do? Simple, recommend them a plugin that does such a thing. I had clients come to me asking if they are able to export certain data and exclude others but also have the export only collect data in a specific timeframe. This is a very large request and it really pushes the boundaries of customer support.
The next big thing is to Research Possible Plugins and I did. It didn’t even take 10 minutes to find the appropriate plugin, probably cuz I’ve been using WordPress for such a long time that testing out plugins is pretty simple. You might take longer but trust me it works.
Worst case scenario if you are handling a client that doesn’t want 3rd party plugins and constantly bugs you, then ask your team or company’s next move if you want to humor them or not. Most likely not cuz it takes too much manpower for a one-off request. In this case, you can just ask them to hire a 3rd party developer and explain why you cant do such things.
Being a Technical Support Engineer you likely say to yourself but I gotta answer them or do my best to help them. And that you are, do you want to waste their time putting false hopes on creating the feature? Plus it’s a hassle for the development team. Help them by guiding them to the next move to accomplish their requirements.