Most customer-intelligence tools greet fresh installs with an empty table and a “data will accumulate as you trade” note. Useless for a shop that’s already been running for a year with ten thousand orders of history sitting in WooCommerce.
HQ pulls in your existing data on the way in, so it’s useful from the moment you finish setup. Your existing customers turn up with their order count, lifetime value, first order date, and the tags they’ve earned, all populated.
How the import works
After installing HQ, a notice appears at the top of your admin: “You have N existing orders that haven’t been imported. Import now.” Click through to Tracksies > Import Orders and hit Start Import.
From there, the importer works in the background:
- Walks through your existing WooCommerce orders in batches.
- For each customer (matched by email), creates a Tracksies profile or updates an existing one.
- Populates lifetime value, order count, first order date, average order value.
- Runs the automatic tag rules against the customer’s order history, so they land with the right tags already applied.
- Stitches guest orders to a customer record by email, so someone who started as a guest and later registered still has their full history attached.
You can navigate away while it runs. A progress bar on the import page shows how far through it is. The import is batched via WordPress cron so your admin stays responsive. On a small shop the import takes seconds; on a ten-thousand-order shop it can take most of an hour.
Real-time sync from then on
Once HQ is active, new WooCommerce orders, refunds, and coupon uses update Tracksies profiles immediately through WC hooks. You don’t re-run the import. New customers get a profile the moment their first order places.
Recalculating tags
Tag thresholds change sometimes (you might tighten what counts as VIP, or adjust the tenure bands). A Recalculate tags button in Tracksies > Customers re-runs the tag rules across every customer without touching their other data. Useful after a settings change, or after a bulk order import from another system.
If something was off at import time
The import is idempotent: running it again updates rather than duplicates. If a customer was a guest at import time and has since registered, running the import again picks up the connection. If WooCommerce data changed (a legacy order added or removed), re-running picks that up too.
If you’re weighing this up against Jetpack CRM or FluentCRM
Jetpack CRM and FluentCRM are full CRM platforms. You connect WooCommerce to the CRM, map fields manually, and decide what syncs where. Campaigns, pipelines, tasks, and segmentation all live in the CRM.
HQ does one import run, no field mapping; existing WooCommerce data becomes Tracksies profiles automatically. The scope is narrower (this is customer intelligence for WooCommerce, not a general CRM) but the path from “install” to “every customer has a profile” is a few clicks rather than a field-mapping session.
If you need the broader CRM toolkit (campaigns, deals, tasks), a dedicated CRM is the right call, and HQ can run alongside it without conflict. If you want the customer-intelligence layer without adopting a CRM, HQ is designed for that.
Why shops run it once and forget about it
The import is a setup task, not an ongoing tool. Run it once after install; from there, HQ keeps up with WooCommerce in the background. The Import Orders page is usually empty after the first run. That’s the whole point.