You install Tracksies on a fresh WooCommerce shop. Every feature works. Nothing’s there to look at. No customers, no orders, no reviews. You could wait six months for real data to accumulate, or you could click the seeder and have a realistic dataset to explore in under a minute.
That’s what the seeder is for. Pre-populated shop data so the first thing you see when you click around Tracksies is a shop with real-shaped history, not an empty template.
What the seeder creates
Three kinds of data, in order:
- Customers: a mix of profiles across different order-history patterns. Tag rules run against the seeded orders so customers land with realistic tag states (first-time, loyal, high-value, etc.).
- Orders: distributed across the past months with varied values, some with returns, some without.
- Reviews: on your existing products, with a spread of ratings and some with moderation states.
It populates real WordPress users, real WooCommerce orders, real Trustie reviews (or WooCommerce reviews if Trustie isn’t active). Staff logging in or navigating the admin see what a working shop looks like.
When shops run it
Evaluating Tracksies. Deciding whether to adopt it. The seeder gives you 10 minutes of “what would my admin look like” that reading docs can’t match.
Training staff. A new team member learns by clicking around a populated admin, instead of being talked through features against an empty screen.
Development or customisation. You’re writing a rule, a custom tile, or a snippet that needs customers with a particular order shape to test against. Seed a batch; iterate.
Trialling a new feature. You’ve turned on tags, aliases, or priority rules, and want to see them populated immediately rather than waiting for customers to match the rules organically.
Delete and start over
The seeder page has a Delete button that clears the seeded records so you can start fresh. If you want a completely clean slate (removing seeded and any other Tracksies data), there’s also a Nuke option. Read the warning carefully; it’s destructive.
The seeder is designed for evaluation and development environments. If you’re running it on a production shop alongside real customers, be careful with Delete and Nuke. They don’t distinguish between seeded and real data, so the safest pattern is: seed on a staging site, move a tested configuration to production without the seeded records.
Reviews against your real products
The seeder reads your existing product catalogue and attaches reviews to real products. The review distribution you see is against products that exist in your shop. Useful when evaluating review display on product pages.
If you’re weighing this up against WC Smooth Generator or FakerPress
WC Smooth Generator is a developer-oriented data generator for WooCommerce. It creates customers, orders, and products at scale. FakerPress is a general WordPress fake-data tool. Both generate random data without understanding Tracksies-specific features (tags, status, aliases, returns).
Tracksies’ seeder is built to populate Tracksies-aware data: tag channels calculate against the seeded orders, customer status makes sense alongside the order history, the reviews tie into the Trustie workflow you’ve set up. It’s an onboarding and learning tool, not a load-test generator.
If you need dev-scale data generation, WC Smooth Generator is the right tool. If you want to see Tracksies with its cross-feature relationships populated realistically, the seeder is designed for that.
Why shops run it at the start
The gap between “install the plugin” and “understand the plugin” is usually the distance between an empty admin and a lived-in one. Most shops close that gap by trading for a few weeks. The seeder closes it in a minute. Worth running once, taking a look, then clearing before you go live.