I wanted to name this article How to Change Your Shopify Order Numbers. Unfortunately it just isn't possible. I'll show you what you can change, how to do it, and why you'd want to make that change.
Yesterday I wrote a post about how you can add an announcement bar to WooCommerce. Today I want to show how you can do the same thing in Shopify. The Shopify Announcement Bar isn't built in which is a little annoying. But the free app is really configurable. You can set it up in a few minutes and have it match your theme perfectly.
There are a few different WooCommerce Facebook groups and all of them have great discussions. Earlier today there was a question about selling videos with WooCommerce:
If I have video files in a cloud storage independent from my WordPress site can I link those videos and sell them as digital, downloadable products? I don't want to store videos in my WordPress site.
The short answer is yes – WooCommerce can sell downloadable videos (or any sort of downloadable product).
I've spent most of this week talking about business. But today I really wanted to share a cool tool with you. If you're a fan of using Git on the command line you'll love this. I'm going to show you how to use git bisect to find bugs. It will help you narrow down when exactly a bug was created.
You'll find this very helpful when you start working on repositories that have hundreds of contributors (WooCommerce has more than 300!). Many times it's hard to figure out exactly when a bug was created and with hundreds of commits between releases it's critical you know how to go through them quickly.
Just over a year ago I wrote a post which shows how to disable free shipping on a per product basis. That's really useful for stores that like offering free shipping on just about everything everything and want to disable it one or two items. But what about people in the opposite situation? You might have one or two really tiny items like bookmarks don't want to charge people $5 for flat rate shipping.
I figured it was time to revisit this and write a snippet that helps these people out. We can use the shipping classes built into WooCommerce combined with just a couple lines of code to make it really easy to mark any number of products eligible for free shipping.
To date I've written 160 posts and in all of those posts I can't remember recommending a product on Code Canyon or ThemeForest. It's not because they don't have good products but because it's the wild west of programming. When you walk into town you don't know if you're going to walk out with supplies or a bullet in your gut. There's a plugin on Code Canyon I've been meaning to look into for over a year and I finally bit the bullet and gave it a go. All in all – it's actually pretty good.
You can find a gazillion social media sharing plugins for WordPress. Unfortunately not all of them work very well with WooCommerce. Some of them don't work at all, others put the icons in the wrong part of the page, or they put them on the page multiple times. As a store owner this can be a bit frustrating. Luckily one of my favorite plugins, Jetpack, has some pretty great social media sharing built it and with a little tweak we can make it look beautiful on product pages.
It's Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving and three days before Black Friday when stores all over the US both online and brick and mortar stores have massive sales. If you're a store owner you've most likely been planning promotions for weeks. One of the logistical issues that a new store owner might run into is how you're going to schedule sales ahead of time so that you don't have to wake up at 4am to change all of your prices.
Here it is Black Friday and Cyber Monday approaching. I want to run a sale. But I can't do it in advance without starting the sale the day I set it up. So instead of a 3 day sale, I have to run a week or a two week sale (I'm going to be gone over Thanksgiving!) which basically defeats the whole idea of a Black Friday Cyber Monday sale.
I received this feedback from a customer and thought it was worth highlighting one of those little features in WooCommerce that make it truly awesome.
One of my favorite side projects are my Ninja Form plugins. I love challenging myself with new coding techniques. One of the features that I really enjoyed working on is the template system I put into my Ninja Forms PDF Form Submissions plugin. It allows you to copy a template file to your theme and then customize it. This way you can totally customize the PDF without knowing any programming.
One of the most complex parts about writing e-commerce software is creating shipping options that are configurable enough that people can create the shipping costs they want but the functionality isn't too complex that people are confused. That's why with WooCommerce we include Flat Rate Shipping because it's perfect for people just getting started and isn't so complex that you can't launch your store.
If people want even more shipping options after having set up the rest of WooCommerce then it may be time to look at Table Rate Shipping. It is by far one of the most configurable extensions and it allows you create a table of shipping rates in hundreds of different combinations. You can create zones to target your shipping costs for a particular geographic region, you can group products by similar shipping sizes, you can use the product weight to determine costs, and you can create a table of rates where depending on where the order appears in the table determines the rate. Let's jump in.