If you have the “Redirect to the cart page after successful addition” setting active when you add a product to the cart you should be taken to the cart page.
Continue Shopping -link-on-cart-page
When you're on that page you'll probably notice a little button that say's “Continue Shopping”. Now by default this button takes you back to the product you were on. You can, of course, change this to any destination you want with a filter.
Product Category Permalinks in WooCommerce – pfew that's a mouthful. And it sounds so boring and technical. I do occasionally get asked some questions about WooCommerce permalinks and a little understanding of how permalinks work in WooCommerce should explain why we create them that way.
I got an email today from a local developer who was asking me some questions about the recent WooCommerce 2.1 update. When she updated she got an error related to her shipping methods. With a quick search she was able to discover our recently created WooCommerce 2.1 Issues page which mentions a fix for that error:
…You can delete that specific file from your theme until this issue has been patched by your theme developer for a temporary fix.
The problem is that in this case she's the developer. She created a custom theme for her client and she has to figure out exactly which template has changed and how to change it back. The question is how? What is a more permanent fix?
I'm constantly amazed at the sheer number of ways that WooCommerce can be used. As soon as you think you have all of the possible use cases our customers come up with a new idea that they suggest and we get to implement! How fun! But unfortunately this isn't all that well documented on the WooThemes.com website. It would be really great if there was a way we could share all of these really cool solutions so that our customers don't have to figure it all out on their own. With that I wanted to present one of my favorite WooCommerce solutions which is an invoicing system.
One of the extensions that I love working with at WooThemes is the Subscriptions extension for WooCommerce. It's probably the most complex extension we have which can make troubleshooting issues challenging but that's offset because the developer also has the best documentation bar none.
The number of possibilities with Subscriptions are really endless. One of my favorite examples is HDPiano.com which sells virtual memberships to learn how to play piano. There's also plenty of users who sell tangible products each month. I just ran into a user who creates fancy shipping labels in Photoshop and uses those labels to ship her products.
The only problem in her case was that she creates the shipping label before the new order comes in so she needed a way to be notified of a customer changing their address before the actual order came in. This is where some of those awesome WooCommerce hooks come in.
One of the best things about WooCommerce is the slick one page checkout. It's really fast since you don't need to reload any pages and it's smart enough to know when you don't need shipping information when you're only purchasing virtual/downloadable products. We like to make sure the site manager has all of the data available to them so if you have a free download available on your site WooCommerce still asks the user for all of their billing address fields which works great for most users.
One of the most powerful plugins for WooCommerce is Table Rate Shipping because it's so configurable. You can create your own rules for bulk shipping, weight based shipping, or set up shipping zones and charge different rates for each zone. When someone requests their existing shipping method only support certain zones, or charge extra for specific zones we usually point them to Table Rate Shipping because that extension can do just about anything.
It would be nice if we could take some of the functionality of that plugin out and apply it to other shipping methods (like UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc.) but at WooThemes we're very aware of feature creep and if we added these other feature the existing shipping methods would be bloated to the point of being unusable. So without adding a whole bunch of options that most users don't want the best way to do this is to write a snippet of code to do this.
For something as seemingly simple as setting up a terms & conditions page you would think that we wouldn't get many questions about it but we actually get quite a few questions.
One of the requests I hear all the time is how to remove the WooCommerce “From: $$” price on the variable product page. Some people feel that it adds unnecessary clutter to the page. The good news here is that WooCommerce is incredibly flexible. With a simple filter you can modify that price however you want or remove it entirely.
Shipping is one of the most complex aspects of e-commerce. You have to worry about shipping provider regulations, large products that have awkward dimensions & box sizes, small products that the shipping calculators incorrectly estimate and you over charge, or you could have a mix match of product sizes and it's hard to come up with a fair flat rate shipping fee.
One of the approaches many store owners take is to mark up their products a little more and then offer free shipping. I think this is brilliant idea, but what happens if you have many small items and one large item that throws off the flat rate fee? If you're using WooCommerce there's a filter you can use to disable free shipping when a specific product is in the cart.