Tag Archives: WooCommerce

I’ve built e-commerce sites for clients, I’ve developed e-commerce software, and I’ve lead 3 WooCommerce releases. So it’s safe to say I’m pretty into e-commerce & WooCommerce.

WooCommerce has a great welcome wizard that helps you setup all of the basic settings. But then where do you go from there? I like to help store owners get customers by maximizing acquisition channels (Google, Facebook, email marketing, trade shows, etc).

And once you start getting customers to your site it’s time to start improving your conversion rates. I have posts about social proof, video marketing, membership sites, and all sorts of things.

Once you get customers it’s time to retain those customers. That means offering loyalty programs & getting them on a newsletter so you can continue to provide value to them and you stay top of mind.

WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup

One of the cool things about writing a blog is that you get instant feedback. Usually people ask for my help customizing plugins but sometimes the feedback can spin up a new project. That's what happened with a blog post I wrote back in December. I mentioned that it would be possible to open the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions in a popup and I got email after email asking me how to do it.

After a dozen emails I decided to dig into this and came up with the WooCommerce Terms & Conditions Popup extension.

Continue Reading…

Keeping a Hawkeye on WooCommerce

Patrick as Hawkeye

Four months ago I joined the WooCommerce development team and I loved it. Lots of time to program cool extensions like Coupon Campaigns, Give Products, Ninja Forms Product Addons, updating the email functionality in WooCommerce, and auditing all of the extensions that go in the catalog. I loved every second of it. Working with awesome people, learning new things, and creating code that's used by hundreds of thousands of websites. My path however is changing a bit. Instead of a developer I'll be the WooCommerce Product Manager.

Continue Reading…

How to Use WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping

Map

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.

Continue Reading…

WooCommerce 2.2 Automatic Refunds

WooCommerce 2.2 was released today! There's a lot of improvements like the new Simplify Commerce payment gateway and extra functionality in the REST API, but by far, the improvement I'm most excited about is the refunds. The order detail page itself has improved and we've added an API to allow payment gateways to automatically refund customers instead of forcing store owners to manually refund the customer through the payment gateway. This is a huge time saver for store owners and since it's my favorite feature for this release I wanted to make a video to show you exactly how the slick new refunds work.

Continue Reading…

Advanced WooCommerce Reports

Reading Paper

I'm a big fan of podcasts. They're just so handy when it's late at night or early in the morning and I want to take the dog on a walk. Why not learn something while I do that? Just yesterday I heard a WooCommerce question on the WPCast.fm podcast and I thought I'd take a crack at answering it.

Hi guys, my name is Travis and I'm interested in finding out what you think about the reporting options with WooCommerce. I have several clients who are running WooCommerce and are having issues with the way the reports are laid out. There's a couple paid options and I wanted to know if you knew of anyone with in-depth reporting experience & WooCommerce.

The good news is that the reporting that comes bundled with WooCommerce is actually pretty solid. It has all of the basics that any store would need. If you need more there are some pretty awesome free plugins and even a couple premium ones to take care of those needs.

Continue Reading…

When You Should Capture a Charge in E-Commerce

If you run an e-commerce store you're well aware that chargebacks on credit card transactions can be costly. You may also occasionally have upset customers if you charge a card right away and take a few days to ship the order. One of the strategies you can use to avoid these problems is to capture the payment when you ship the order instead of automatically capturing it during checkout.

Continue Reading…

How to Add a WooCommerce Settings Tab

WooCommerce Settings Page

In my new role as a WooCommerce Developer I've been spending a good chunk of time auditing 3rd party extensions. One of the surprising parts about the audit process is seeing where developers put their settings. Some developers put them under Settings, some put them under a custom menu item, and some just shimmy it in wherever they can.

If you're building a WooCommerce extension the easiest thing you can do to improve your UI is to put all WooCommerce settings where users can find them – on a new WooCommerce settings tab. Sounds pretty easy but you'd be surprised how many people don't do that.

Continue Reading…

Why WooCommerce Order Numbers Are out of Order

Out of Order WooCommerce Order Numbers

22, 23, 25, 39, 40 – What!? Why are my order numbers out of order? If you've used WordPress before you might know that posts, pages, and media files have IDs that aren't necessarily in order. The first one might be 20 and the next might be 43. WooCommerce uses the same ID system to create the order number which is why they're out of order.

For your average marketing website this isn't a big deal since you rarely need that number. In the e-commerce world with accounting software, drop shippers, & reports it makes a lot more sense to have consecutive order numbers. The good news is that this is really easy to do with a plugin.

Why The Order Numbers Are out of Order

First it's important to know why all of these IDs are out of order in the first place. WordPress saves everything as a post. So pages are posts, media files are posts, products are posts, orders are posts, and posts are posts. This makes it really easy for developers to interact with the database since everything uses a similar format. All of these posts (media, pages, posts, etc) use the same database table and because of that they can't share the same ID. If you want to have a consecutive order number then you have to save a bit of extra data in the database.

The design pattern behind WooCommerce is to try to stay as lean as possible and give people the ability to extend or add onto the existing functionality. If you don't need sequential order numbers then there's no point in storing all of this extra information. WooCommerce leaves this up to store manager to decide if it's necessary.

How to Make the Order Numbers Sequential

Any plugin developer can add a bit of extra data to the orders to make sure they're in order. In fact there's already an excellent plugin, WooCommerce Sequential Order Numbers, by the SkyVerge team available for free on WordPress.org. They even have a premium version with a few extra features like the ability to add a prefix ex. MyStore so your order numbers would look like MyStore001, MyStore002, etc.

Happy sequential order numbers!

More Commonly Asked WooCommerce Questions in My Book

If you want to learn more about the commonly asked WooCommerce questions I suggest you take a look at my book. It isn't out yet but you can signup for the mailing list and get a discount when it comes out.

How to Create a Pricing Table for WooCommerce

Right out of the box WooCommerce creates a shop page and displays a grid of products which works quite nicely for stores with dozens of products. But what about the stores that only have one or two products? Or just one product with a couple different levels? Sometimes it's best to have a single page that lays out the pros and cons of each product rather than a grid of products. You can easily add a pricing table to WooCommerce with Easy Pricing Tables freely available on WordPress.org.

Continue Reading…