Where spreadsheets work well
For a small catalogue and occasional reporting, a spreadsheet is flexible, inexpensive and easy to understand. You can maintain product weights and aggregate them manually.
Where manual maintenance becomes fragile
Problems arise when product values change without effective dates, shipping packaging is selected separately, refunds need to be reflected and multiple people edit the same source file.
Order-linked records reduce reconstruction work
If packaging calculations are posted from the actual WooCommerce order, the order itself becomes the anchor for the record. Historical snapshots retain the assumptions used at that moment.
Append-only corrections improve explainability
Instead of changing a cell and losing the previous value, a ledger can preserve the original entry and add an explicit correction or reversal.
Keep Excel for analysis
Moving the source record into WooCommerce does not mean abandoning spreadsheets. CSV exports let you continue using Excel or another analysis tool without making that file responsible for historical integrity.