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.
Imagine it's the week before Xmas and you realize you forget to get a present for someone. You start looking for the perfect gift and you manage to find it. It's exactly what this special someone would love.
You add it to your cart and as you start looking at the shipping options you realize you don't know if it will arrive in time. There's “free shipping” – who knows how long that will take. And there's “expedited shipping” which will probably get there on time but you don't know if it's worth the extra $20.
You start googling rates, prices, and shipping times and you go down a rabbit hole and might never come back to that site.
It's the holidays and we're approaching the cut off date to get presents on time. As a store owner you want to let your customers know the last day they can order and still get presents. This does two things:
Reading business books is one of the best things I've done for my personal growth & my business. I've avoided countless mistakes having first read about someone else making that mistake. But to get the most out of a business book you can't just read it and understand it perfectly. You have to retain that information before you can do anything with it. I take notes with audiobooks all the time – even while walking the dog. And now my retention is better for audiobooks than physical books.
I'm a big fan of transparency. One of my favorite companies, Buffer, is completely transparent with compensation which is amazing. And there's ConvertKit who share their revenue numbers. And then there's MakerBot who shared their 3d printer designs. Until they didn't.
WordCamps are always educational. You hear about time-saving plugins, you see beautiful themes, and you learn about the latest SEO techniques. WordCamp US was no exception.
I plan to write up some of my favorite SEO techniques from WordCamp US but today I wanted to talk a little bit about the non-technical talks. Knowing the best plugin to promote your latest blog post is great. But if you can't work up the courage to write your first post then what good is the plugin?
In October I was in the very privileged position to write the “How I Left My Job” post. And it felt really good.
I talked about the smart decisions I made before leaving my job. I forecasted financials, set up client work, and padded my savings account. It felt good talking about all of my smart decisions.
And I wish I could share another smart decision. But I actually did something really dumb. And I thought if I'm documenting my experience that I shouldn't just share the good parts. I should share my mistakes too.
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).
Most e-commerce platforms let you create orders manually. That way even if you're at a conference or a potential customer calls you you can capture those orders.
While many systems let you create orders manually they don't always let you charge a credit card which kind of defeats the purpose. But even if your e-commerce platform doesn't let you process credit cards if you use Stripe you're in luck. They make processing credit cards really easy.
There I was – minding my own business buying some stock photos to make my blog posts a bit prettier. And as I went to the checkout I noticed that there was a question:
Do you have a coupon code?
Well, I didn't but the fact that they asked the question means that they exist. So I did what any person does when they see an opportunity to save a little money. I went to google and I typed in:
Shutterstock coupon code
Hoping to find a site that would give me a discount. And I did actually in the very first search result.
Two years ago I wrote a post about how hard it was to setup a membership website with WooCommerce. It took twenty two steps and it required two plugins.
Not ideal.
At the time we thought it best to integrate with an existing solution that already had some users. Sounds smart but it forces users to go through the extra steps to make the integration work. And as someone who has to setup his own site & his own accounts I hate when someone drags me through extra steps.
End users don't care what powers their technology. They just want to solve their problem. Which is why we set out to build an entirely new system.