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.
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?
One of the questions that we get asked in support all the time at WooThemes is “Are credit cards stored in my store?”.
At WooThemes we have 10,000 tickets a month. That's a lot. Like a lot a lot. When you're talking about numbers this big if we can redesign our products to make them more intuitive and reduce our support load by 5% that's 500 tickets a month! That's an entire ninja!
That's why one of the things I want to start looking into is the user experience of all of our products. If we can do less and make our existing products easier to use that will serve us better than adding yet more products that will increase our support load.
One of our products that I think could use work is Table Rate Shipping. It's one of our most configurable and powerful products. The downside of configuration is that it's also complex. It's not one of our top selling products but it is one of the products that needs the most support. Clear candidate for a redesign.
One of the things that constantly amazes me at my job is the number of ways that people use WooCommerce. There's over 200 extensions available for WooCommerce on the WooThemes.com site and there's demand for thousands more. So what does WooThemes do? Do we go on a massive hiring spree and build thousands of plugins?
I'm sure we could do that but why? No matter how many extensions we create there's just no way to cover every single use case one of our users come up with. There's also no way we can be experts in every single market. There's thousands of substandard services out there that we don't want to integrate, and there will be problems finding the right extension if we offer thousands. The trick here is to encourage other experts to work with you so that you can create an exceptional product for 90% of your audience and other developers can cover the last 10%. Let your open source project encourage diversity.
One of the questions we hear all of the time doing support for WooCommerce is “what payment gateway do you recommend?” There's a lot of payment gateways out there – currently there's 111 available for WooCommerce – so picking one can be intimidating. I've used several payment gateways both for myself and doing work for clients and have had to jump over a few hurdles. Now that I've had to painfully learn the flaws of other gateways I'm a huge fan of Stripe. At this point I doubt I would use anything else.
I'm a big advocate of lean plugins and I think we've done a stellar job removing unnecessary bloat from WooCommerce 2.1. The brilliance of having multiple plugins to add only the functionality you need reduces the number of bugs, keeps everything separated for easy updates, and perhaps most importantly creates a clean & intuitive admin interface.
There is of course a huge demand for customizing the behavior of WooCommerce (or any plugin). So where do you put that functionality? Do you put them in settings pages, extra plugins, snippets, tutorials, or something else? There's a few options to choose from and while none of them are perfect there are a couple of clear winners.
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.