If you ship with Royal Mail and manage your orders in WooCommerce, you already know the workflow: dispatch an order in Click & Drop, get a tracking number, then go back to WooCommerce and paste it into the order, then copy it again into a customer email. Every. Single. Order.
It works. But it's manual, it's repetitive, and it's the kind of thing that falls apart when you're busy — orders slip through without tracking numbers, customers email asking where their parcel is, and you end up chasing tracking numbers in a browser tab you're not sure you still have open.
This guide covers how to make WooCommerce Royal Mail Click & Drop tracking fully automatic — so when you dispatch an order in Click & Drop, the tracking number appears in WooCommerce and goes out to the customer in their dispatch email without you touching anything.
Royal Mail's Click & Drop has a built-in WooCommerce integration. Once connected, it pulls your WooCommerce orders automatically — you don't have to manually enter recipient addresses, weights, or order references. In Click & Drop, go to Settings → WooCommerce, add your store URL, and authenticate with a WooCommerce REST API key. After that, your orders appear in Click & Drop ready to print labels.
Click & Drop also writes a dispatch note back to your WooCommerce order when you dispatch it. That's the note that says "Your order has been dispatched via Royal Mail Tracked 48. Your tracking number is VU032331508GB." — it appears in the order timeline in WP Admin and triggers a "note added" email to the customer.
So far so good. But there's a gap.
Click & Drop writes the tracking number as a plain text note on the order. It doesn't store it in a structured field. Which means:
Customers get the plain "note added" email which is functional but bare — no tracking button, no Royal Mail deep-link, no branded dispatch block. And if a customer visits your Track Order page looking for their parcel, they find nothing.
The core problem: Click & Drop can write tracking numbers to WooCommerce, but it writes them as unstructured text. To actually use the tracking number across your store — in emails, on tracking pages, in the order admin — you need a plugin that extracts it and stores it properly.
The simplest approach is manual entry. Most merchants who've thought about this do something like:
This works for very low order volumes. It doesn't scale, and it introduces human error at every step — wrong order, wrong tracking number, forgotten altogether.
A better version of the manual approach is to use a plugin that adds a proper tracking number field to the order edit screen. You still enter the number yourself, but it stores it correctly and injects it into the dispatch email automatically. This is included in Tracking for Royal Mail Click & Drop — a meta box on every order, a public Track Order page, and a Gutenberg block. Free on WordPress.org, no API key required for the manual path.
The cleaner solution is to automate the entire process using Click & Drop's Integration API. The flow looks like this:
Steps 4–7 happen automatically, within seconds of dispatch. The customer gets an email with their tracking number and a deep-link to the official Royal Mail tracking page before you've even closed the Click & Drop tab.
There's also a backup mechanism: an hourly background sync fetches the Click & Drop order map and backfills tracking numbers for any completed orders that were missed — for example, if the order was marked complete in WooCommerce before you dispatched it in Click & Drop.
All of this is in the free WordPress.org plugin. Auto-fetch, dispatch-note parsing, the cron, and a plain-text tracking line in the dispatch email are unconditional once you've added your Click & Drop API key.
The standard WooCommerce "Order Complete" email is generic — it lists the order contents and says the order is complete. It has no tracking information.
With the free plugin, when a tracking number is found, a simple plain-text line is injected into the Order Complete email:
Your Royal Mail tracking number: VU032331508GB · Track on Royal Mail →
That's enough for most stores — the customer gets the number, a link, and they're on Royal Mail's tracking page in two clicks. No configuration needed.
If you want the polished version — a fully branded HTML block at the top of the email, with your brand colours, your fonts, and a styled "Track on Royal Mail →" button — that's in the optional DJ Royal Mail Pro add-on. The Pro block contains:
Pro's block colours match your brand — set them in WooCommerce → Royal Mail Pro → Branded dispatch email, or override per child-theme with PHP filters (djrmcdpro_email_block_bg, etc.). The Pro add-on also adds Slack/Discord/Teams dispatch webhooks, a "Royal Mail" column on the orders list, stale-dispatch warnings, a bulk "Fetch tracking" action, and CSV bulk import.
Yes. WooCommerce's High Performance Order Storage (HPOS) moves order data from wp_postmeta to dedicated custom tables. The plugin is fully HPOS-compatible — it uses wc_get_order() and $order->get_meta() throughout, not direct wp_postmeta queries. It also declares HPOS compatibility via WooCommerce's FeaturesUtil API so you won't see compatibility warnings in your WooCommerce status.
If you haven't already: in Click & Drop, go to Settings → WooCommerce and add your store URL. In WooCommerce, go to Settings → Advanced → REST API, create a key with read/write permissions, and paste it into Click & Drop. Your orders will start appearing in Click & Drop automatically.
Install Tracking for Royal Mail Click & Drop from WordPress.org. This single plugin gives you API auto-fetch, dispatch-note parsing, hourly backfill, plain-text email injection, the Track Order page, the Gutenberg block, and WP-CLI commands — all free.
In Click & Drop, go to Settings → Integration API and generate an API key. In WooCommerce, go to Royal Mail Tracking and paste it in. The key is stored encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM.
Create a WordPress page and add the [dj_track_order] shortcode. Customers can search by order number + email, email address, or tracking number. Set the page URL in WooCommerce → Royal Mail Tracking → Track page URL.
If you want the styled HTML dispatch email block, Slack/Discord/Teams webhooks, an orders-list tracking column, stale-dispatch warnings, a bulk "Fetch tracking" action, or CSV bulk import, grab DJ Royal Mail Pro. It's a separate plugin that runs alongside the free one and unlocks via Freemius licence.
Dispatch a test order in Click & Drop. Within seconds, the tracking number should appear on the WooCommerce order, and the customer should receive a dispatch email with the tracking link. If you want to verify the setup before dispatching a real order, the plugin's troubleshooting guide walks through how to test each component.
Built on a live store: This plugin was built and battle-tested on a real UK WooCommerce store shipping with Royal Mail before it was packaged for general release. Every edge case — HPOS compatibility, orders dispatched before completion, click-to-track deep links — was discovered and fixed in production.
Free on WordPress.org — full Royal Mail integration including API auto-fetch, dispatch-note parsing, hourly backfill, plain-text email tracking line, public Track Order page, and WP-CLI commands.
Pro add-on (£59/yr) adds branded HTML emails, Slack/Discord/Teams webhooks, orders-list tracking column, stale-dispatch warnings, bulk fetch & CSV import.
About Digitaljunkys — We build WooCommerce plugins that solve real problems, extracted from production code running on live UK stores. View all plugins →