Connect your store

Connecting your shop is what turns this from a mailing tool into something that knows your customers. Once it is done we can see who bought what, who left something in a basket, and who ticked the box at checkout.

Nothing in your shop is changed. We only read.

There are two separate pieces, and they do different jobs:

• Connecting lets us read your customers, orders and products.
• The plugin adds the live things: abandoned carts, and the marketing tick-box at checkout.

You want both, but they are done separately and either can wait.

Part one: connect the store

This happens on setup screen two. If you skipped it, go to Integrations in the sidebar, or press Connect your store on the Home checklist.

1. In the box labelled "Your shop's web address", type your shop address — just yourstore.com is fine.
2. Press Connect my store. The button changes to "Taking you to WordPress…".
3. You land on your own WordPress, on WordPress's own permission screen. It asks "Would you like to give Amino Engine access to your site?"
4. Press Yes, I approve. You come straight back.

That is it. We never ask for your password and we never sign in as you — WordPress hands us its own limited key, and you can take it away at any time from Users → Profile → Application Passwords.

When it works, the screen shows a green Connected chip and a sentence with your real numbers in it:

We found 4,821 customers · 1,204 with marketing permission · 8,410 orders. Nothing has been changed in your shop. We only read.

If you press No on WordPress, nothing happens and the screen says so: "You said no on your WordPress — nothing was changed. Press Connect my store when you are ready to try again."

The link we send you on is good for ten minutes and can only be used once. If you leave it and come back later, just press Connect my store again.

Part two: install the plugin

The plugin card on the same screen is headed "Install the plugin" — "Needed for abandoned carts and the consent checkbox at checkout."

Without it, everything else still works. With it, you get abandoned cart flows and a proper opt-in box on your checkout.

If you see "Install from WordPress.org"

1. Press Install from WordPress.org. It opens the install box on your own WordPress.
2. Press Install, then Activate. "It finds this account by itself."

Otherwise, download it

1. Press Download the plugin. You get a file that is already tied to your account.
2. In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the file you just downloaded and press Install Now.
4. Press Activate. It finds this account on its own — there is nothing to paste.

After activating, a notice appears at the top of your WordPress dashboard: "Amino Engine — One click connects this store. Nothing is sent until you do." with a Connect to Amino Engine button. Press it. There is no key to copy and nothing to paste.

The plugin is called Amino Engine for WooCommerce. It needs WordPress 6.0 or newer, WooCommerce 8.0 or newer, and PHP 8.1 or newer.

Only an owner or admin can download the plugin file. Anybody else gets "You do not have permission to download the plugin."

"Connected" and "Plugin installed" are different things

You will see two separate green chips, and they mean two different things.

Chip	What it actually means
Connected	Your WordPress has given us a live key. We can read customers, orders and products.
Installed	The plugin has said hello. Open baskets are coming through and the checkout tick-box is live.

You can have one without the other. Connected with no plugin is normal and useful — you just will not get abandoned cart flows. Plugin installed with no connection is unusual and normally means the WordPress key was removed.

When the plugin is in, the card says: "Your open baskets are coming through, and new customers can tick a box at checkout to hear from you."

What syncs

Read once, when you connect:

• Your store name, currency, time zone and postal address
• How many customers you have — the exact number, from WordPress itself
• Marketing permission on those customers, as far as it can be found (see below)
• How many orders you have had in the last 90 days
• Your products, and your five best sellers

Sent to us from then on, automatically:

• Orders created, updated, paid, fulfilled, cancelled and refunded
• Customers created and updated
• Carts updated and emptied, and checkouts started (plugin only)
• Products viewed, and coupons used (plugin only)
• Consent — every time somebody ticks the box

The plugin sends events after your shopper's page has already loaded, so it never slows your shop down. If something cannot be delivered it is queued and retried — after a minute, five minutes, half an hour, two hours, then twelve hours — and it is never silently dropped. You can see the queue yourself under WooCommerce → Amino Engine → Queue.

The plugin's settings

In WordPress, go to WooCommerce → Amino Engine. There are five tabs: Connection, Events, Consent, Diagnostics and Queue.

The one worth looking at is Consent:

• Show a marketing opt-in checkbox at checkout, on registration, and on the signup form. On by default.
• Wording — what the box actually says. It starts as "Yes, email me news and offers. You can unsubscribe at any time." Change it if you like. The wording is stored with every single consent record, so people who ticked the old wording keep the old wording. That is the difference between evidence and a claim.
• Where it sits on the checkout — Contact information, Address, or Order notes.

The box is never pre-ticked, and there is no setting for that. A pre-ticked box is not consent in any country that has looked at the question.

Under Events you can switch off any individual kind of event. They all start switched on.

How permission is decided

This is the part most people get wrong, and getting it wrong is what ends brands.

WooCommerce has no marketing permission field. None. It does not exist in WooCommerce itself. So there are three different situations.

1. Customers you already had, before you met us

When you connect, we read the customer records looking for a marketing tick left behind by whatever you used before — Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Brevo, Omnisend and a few others all store it in their own way, and we check all of them.

• A clear yes (1, true, yes, subscribed) means we can email them.
• Anything else means "we do not know" — never "they said no." A blank field is not an unticked box.

That distinction is not academic. Reading a blank as a refusal is exactly how one brand ended up with 34,825 people wrongly blocked, of whom only about 3,860 had actually opted out. We will not repeat it.

We show you the number we found and we never estimate. If we have checked 2,000 of your 8,000 customers so far, the screen says so.

2. New customers arriving from your shop

We never invent permission from an order. A new customer arriving by order comes in as "we do not know", full stop. Buying something is not the same as asking for marketing.

3. Somebody who ticks the box at checkout

This is the good one, and it is the whole reason for the plugin. There are exactly three outcomes:

• They ticked it. We record consent — who, when, and the exact wording they were shown. They are mailable.
• They saw it and left it unticked. We note that they declined. Nothing on the sending side ever reads it, and they are not mailed.
• The box was never shown — an Apple Pay or Google Pay express checkout, for instance. We record nothing at all. Silence is not a refusal.

There is no way, anywhere in the plugin, to record somebody as having said no when they never saw a box.

If it didn't work

• "That doesn't look like a WordPress site with WooCommerce yet." Check the address. Use the address your shop actually loads at, including www if that is what you use.
• "Your store address redirects somewhere else." Give us the address it ends up at — the message tells you what that is.
• "Your store has no WooCommerce API" or "Your store answered with something that is not JSON." A security plugin or firewall is blocking WordPress's own interface. Wordfence and similar plugins do this. Allow it, or ask your host.
• "That connection link has expired or was already used." They last ten minutes and work once. Press Connect my store again.
• "WordPress refused our login." The permission was removed on your WordPress. Look in Users → Profile → Application Passwords, then connect again.
• "Your store took longer than 20 seconds to answer." Your shop is slow or was under load. Try again in a few minutes.
• You approved on the wrong site. The message names both. Start again from the shop you actually meant.
• The plugin is active but nothing arrives. Open WooCommerce → Amino Engine → Diagnostics and press Send a test event, then look at the result underneath. The most common cause is Action Scheduler being missing, which the same screen flags as "MISSING — retries will not run."
• The checkout box does not appear. Diagnostics tells you which checkout you are on. If it says "Neither marker was found" you are on a custom or third-party checkout, and the box needs placing by hand — email us and we will help.
• The customer count looks too low. We read up to 2,000 customers when scanning for permission, but the total count comes from WordPress itself and is exact.
• Open baskets show nothing. WooCommerce does not record open carts on its own. That number only appears once the plugin is in.

Still stuck? Email support@aminoengine.com — we answer within one business day.