Econt and Speedy on WooCommerce: plugins, COD, N-18 and migration

In short: WooCommerce has no built-in Econt or Speedy shipping. You add each courier with a plugin, from Econt's own GitHub plugin or from independent developers, and then handle cash on delivery reconciliation and the Ordinance N-18 file for the NRA with more plugins or code. CloudCart, the Bulgarian ecommerce platform, has all three built in, and imports a WooCommerce catalog from its standard CSV export.

This guide is for store owners who run WooCommerce, or plan to, and sell to customers in Bulgaria: foreign founders with a Bulgarian company, expats and EU sellers who ship from Bulgaria. It covers what each courier plugin needs, where the manual work stays, what hosting and updates cost you in time, and the step-by-step path if you decide to move the store to a hosted platform.

How do you connect Econt and Speedy to WooCommerce?

You connect Econt and Speedy to WooCommerce through plugins, because WooCommerce core has only generic shipping methods with no Bulgarian courier among them. Econt and Speedy (DPD Bulgaria) are the two main Bulgarian courier networks, and most Bulgarian shoppers expect to pick a courier office or a parcel locker at checkout, with the live rate.

• Econt. A repository under Econt's GitHub organization publishes an Econt WooCommerce plugin. Its listed requirements are WordPress 6.0 or newer, WooCommerce 9.0 or newer, a weight on every product, the cash on delivery method enabled, and a store ID and private key from Econt Delivery. You install it by uploading a ZIP file from the releases page (Econt WooCommerce plugin on GitHub, in Bulgarian).
• Speedy and the other couriers. Speedy, BOX NOW (a locker-only network), Sameday and Evropat come from third-party plugins. A search for "econt" in the WordPress plugin directory returns around 17 plugins, none of them published by Econt itself, and most show a few hundred active installs or fewer.

Before you install a courier plugin, run the same short check every time:

1. Check the "Tested up to" version against your WordPress and WooCommerce versions, and the date of the last update.
2. Check the checkout type. Some courier plugins work only with the classic shortcode checkout and not with the newer block checkout.
3. Get the API credentials from the courier. These are integration keys from your courier contract, separate from the login to the courier's website.
4. Test on a staging copy: an address order, an office order and a locker order, each with cash on delivery.
5. Print a shipping label from the order and confirm the office, the COD amount and the declared value on it.

Important: each courier usually needs its own plugin, often from a different author. Every plugin adds its own settings screen, its own update cycle and its own support channel.

How does cash on delivery reconciliation work on WooCommerce?

On WooCommerce, cash on delivery (COD) is a manual payment method: the order stays "Processing" until the store owner confirms the cash was received and marks it "Complete" (WooCommerce documentation). In Bulgaria, the cash comes from the courier as a bank transfer, so someone matches every courier payout against every order, and finds the parcels that came back unpaid.

With a few orders a day, this is a spreadsheet job once a week. With hundreds of COD parcels a month, it becomes the task that most often falls behind, and an unpaid parcel that nobody noticed is lost revenue. Some courier plugins add a payment status sync; check that before you choose one, because it decides how much of this work stays manual.

In CloudCart, Econt and DPD report back when the customer has paid, and the order is marked as paid automatically. Every check is recorded under Orders, COD sync, so you see when each order was checked and what the courier reported. The number of COD payouts synced per month depends on the plan:

Plan	COD payouts synced automatically per month
Baby Pack	25
Starter Pack	50
CC Pro	500
CC Master	1,000

The trade-offs between COD and card payments are covered in cash on delivery or card payments.

How do you handle Ordinance N-18 on WooCommerce?

On WooCommerce, the Ordinance N-18 sales document and the monthly NRA file come from a plugin or from custom code, because WooCommerce is built for a global market and has no Bulgarian reporting rules. Ordinance N-18 is the Bulgarian regulation on registering and reporting sales, and the NRA (National Revenue Agency) is Bulgaria's tax authority.

An online store that takes card payments without the customer present can use the alternative regime: it registers the store with the NRA, issues a sales document from its own software for every order, and submits a standardized monthly audit file under Annex 38 by the 15th of the following month (NRA, in Bulgarian). Whatever generates that file has to follow the NRA schema and report each order once, including reversals.

In CloudCart, the sales document, the invoice and the credit note are issued from the order. The N18 Audit app builds the monthly XML file from the store's sales and reversals, with cash on delivery reported under its own payment codes. You download the file and upload it to the NRA portal.

Important: whether you use a cash register or the alternative regime depends on your payment methods and your business. Confirm the setup with your accountant before the first sale.

The registration steps are in the guide to Ordinance N-18 and NRA registration.

What do hosting and updates involve on WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is open-source software, so you or your developer run the server, the backups and every update. WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or greater (or MariaDB 10.11 or greater) and HTTPS support (WordPress requirements).

Before each update, WooCommerce recommends a current backup of the database and the wp-content folder, a test on a staging site and a check of the "Tested up to WooCommerce version" value of every extension, theme and payment gateway (WooCommerce documentation). For a Bulgarian store, that list includes every courier plugin and the N-18 plugin.

A typical WooCommerce store for Bulgaria is made of these parts, and each one has an owner, a renewal and an update:

Part	What it does	Who maintains it
Hosting, SSL, backups	Keeps the site online and fast during sales peaks	You and your host
WordPress and WooCommerce	The site and the store	You or your developer
Theme	Design and checkout layout	The theme author
Econt plugin	Offices, lockers, rates, labels	Econt or a third-party developer
Speedy, BOX NOW plugins	The same for each further courier	Third-party developers
COD reconciliation	Marking COD orders as paid	You, or the plugin if it offers a sync
N-18 sales document and file	NRA reporting	A plugin author or custom code
Card payments	Virtual POS or payment provider	The provider's plugin author

Add the hours of a developer to the hosting and plugin fees when you work out the yearly cost. An update that breaks checkout during a campaign costs more than any licence.

WooCommerce with plugins or a hosted platform: how they compare

The choice comes down to control or maintenance: WooCommerce gives you the server and the code, and a hosted platform takes over hosting, security and updates. The table compares the standard setup of each for a store selling in Bulgaria.

Criterion	WooCommerce with plugins	CloudCart
Software	Open source, no licence fee	Hosted (SaaS), monthly plan
Hosting, SSL, updates	You or your developer	Included
Econt, Speedy, BOX NOW	One plugin per courier	Built-in integrations
Offices and lockers at checkout	Depends on the plugin and checkout type	Map or list with the live rate
COD reconciliation	Manual, unless the plugin syncs it	Automatic from Econt and DPD
N-18 sales document and file	Plugin or custom code	Built-in N18 Audit app
Fee on sales	None from the software	0% on every plan
Support	Forums, plugin authors or your developer	CloudCart team, support@cloudcart.com

WooCommerce stays the better fit if you need root access to the server, custom code in the checkout or a WordPress site that the store is only a small part of.

CloudCart: Econt, Speedy, COD and N-18 in one admin

CloudCart is a hosted ecommerce platform made in Bulgaria, with hosting, an SSL certificate and the Bulgarian integrations available in the admin. Each courier needs your own active contract with that courier.

• Shipping: Econt (addresses, offices and Econtomat lockers), Speedy (DPD Bulgaria, with direct shipping to Romania), BOX NOW lockers, Sameday, GLS and DHL. You create the shipping label from the order and print labels for many orders at once.
• Payments: cash on delivery, CloudCart Pay for Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and Google Pay, virtual POS terminals through Borica, ePay, PayPal and Stripe.
• Documents: the sales document, the invoice and the credit note from the order, and the monthly N-18 file.

Plans are priced by revenue over six months. Prices exclude VAT, and the transaction fee is 0% on every plan:

Plan	Billed annually	Billed monthly	Products
Baby Pack	€14/month	€19/month	up to 100
Starter Pack	€33/month	€39/month	up to 2,000
CC Pro	€83/month	€99/month	up to 7,500
CC Master	€249/month	€299/month	unlimited

The trial period is 30 days. All features by plan are on the CloudCart pricing page.

How do you move a WooCommerce store to CloudCart?

You move a WooCommerce store to CloudCart in one of three ways: the CloudCart team moves it for you, you import it yourself with the apps in the admin, or a developer migrates it through the Admin API. In every case, the WooCommerce store keeps selling until you switch the domain.

• Our team. People from CloudCart move the products, customers, blog articles and content, keep the order history and set up 301 redirects from every old address. The move is €0 with a 24-month contract and takes up to 45 days. You request it in the new store's admin, under Services, Migration.
• Yourself. The WooCommerce Importer app reads the standard WooCommerce product CSV. Customers and redirects come from separate CSV imports.
• Your developer. The Admin API creates products, images, categories, customers with addresses, articles and redirects programmatically.

To import the catalog yourself, follow these steps:

1. Export the products from WooCommerce. In WordPress, go to Products, All Products and select Export, keep "Export all columns" and select Generate CSV (WooCommerce documentation). Use this built-in exporter: files from third-party export plugins use a different column order and do not import correctly.
2. Install WooCommerce Importer in CloudCart under Apps, and upload the CSV file in its settings.
3. Check the variants. Variable products become CloudCart products with variants, with up to three variant attributes such as color, size and material, each variant with its own SKU, price, quantity, weight and images.
4. Check categories and images. Nested categories (Cat1 > Cat2) are kept, and images are downloaded into CloudCart, so the old server can be retired later.
5. Import the customers from a CSV file under Customers, Import: name, email and customer group. Address fields are not part of this import.
6. Import the redirects from a CSV file, so every old product and category address answers with a 301.
7. Connect Econt and Speedy with your courier API credentials, place a test COD order and create its shipping label.
8. Switch the domain when the new store is checked. Email stays with your current provider: you add its MX records in the domain settings.

A detailed walk-through is in the WooCommerce migration guide. All the ways to move a store are on the online store migration page.

What moves with each migration path?

The catalog moves on every path; customers, order history and redirects depend on the path you choose. The table shows what each one covers.

Data	WooCommerce Importer and CSV imports	CloudCart team
Products, variants, images	Yes, from the standard product CSV	Yes
Categories	Yes, with nesting	Yes
Customers	Name, email and group, from a separate CSV	Yes
Order history	No, it stays in WooCommerce	Kept at CloudCart
Blog articles	Separate blog import	Yes
301 redirects	From a CSV file	From every old address

Courier settings do not move: you connect Econt, Speedy and BOX NOW in CloudCart with your existing courier contracts. You can send your questions about the move to support@cloudcart.com. A checklist for the switch day is in switching ecommerce platforms.

If you are still choosing a platform, start with what to check in an ecommerce platform for Bulgaria and the guide to starting an online store in Bulgaria.

Frequently asked questions