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.
Last summer I announced that I wanted to write a WooCommerce E-book. Since then Packt Publishing reached out to me and I worked with them to create an outline, write the manuscript, and revise the book several times. Ten months later the book is finally up for sale on both Packt Publishing & Amazon. God it feels good to press the publish button. 🙂
How hard can entering a coupon be? Not so hard right? Well I found out just how complex coupons can be if you don't think it through.
I'm not the biggest fan of shopping but sometimes I do open up my wallet when I find a WooCommerce store. I know they're most likely some small mom and pop shop that setup their own e-commerce store and I like to give something back to them.
Just after Thanksgiving I was doing a bit of shopping and stumbled onto one of those stores and bought a small gift for a friend. The weird thing was that I never received any sort of email receipt. I thought maybe something was broken and I wasn't going to get my order. 🙁
It wasn't until days later when I took a look through my spam folder that I found those receipts. It was unusual that they were in there. I've ordered from plenty of WooCommerce stores before and never had any of these problems. So what was doing it?
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.
Normally I say great things about WooCommerce, not because I have to but because it's really awesome. Today though I found something that wasn't very awesome. Actually that's too nice – it sucks. Have you ever tried to create a membership site with WooCommerce? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard right?
Some people think that support is this giant black hole where you throw money to make sure customers don't hate you. That belief is why so many companies have such crappy support. They do the bare minimum to make sure their customers don't leave. I guess I understand this line of thinking but it rubs me the wrong way. While you can put in the bare minimum you could invest in your support and build resources and useful assets for future projects. With our upcoming WooCommerce 2.3 release we did just that.
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.
I'm just getting back into my groove after a wild time in San Francisco but before jumping back into the inbox I really want to share my thoughts on WooCommerce Conf. We had a wide variety of attendees, impressive speakers, the whole experience had a professional feel, and