WooCommerce Blog: Tips, PHP Snippets, Q&A, Plugin & Theme Reviews

WooCommerce: Switch Shop Columns Responsively

Ok, I may need an English language refresher… But the point I was trying to make was that yes, there is a way to switch the number of columns in the WooCommerce shop page, however that’s static.

What if I wanted to show 5 columns of products on large desktops, 4 columns on desktops, 3 on tablets and 2 on smaller devices? Well, this “dynamic” behavior is – this time around – managed by CSS. Let’s see how it’s done!

WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today.

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation.

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions.

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability.

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

WooCommerce: Get List Of All Customers

Today’s snippet is a helpful shortcut for getting the list of customers in your WooCommerce website. This may be necessary during customization, especially if you need tailor-made features for administrators and shop managers in the backend or frontend.

How did I find out about the solution below? Well, our job is mainly copy/paste from online forums or read thoroughly the WooCommerce core files on a daily basis – so it must’ve been one of the two. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How To Enable Stripe Payments

Providing payment options on your WooCommerce store that your customers trust and meet their needs is the key to ensuring a satisfied customer journey and eliminating cart abandonments.

According to the Baymard Institute’s research, the average cart abandonment rate amongst buyers is 69.8%, and 6 out of 10 times, it’s because of issues related to payments.

While some shoppers abandon carts because of long checkout processes and the lack of simple payment options, others don’t find the payment site legitimate enough to provide their credit card information. Thus, the payment method plays a huge role in customers’ buying decisions.

Stripe is a great option. It’s simple-to-use, flexible, and one of the most popular payment solutions for WooCommerce. It makes accepting and processing credit card payments a breeze and leaves your customers with a fast checkout process.

This article takes you through some of the best free and premium WooCommerce Stripe plugins for your store. But first, let’s learn more about the advantages of using Stripe as a payment option for WooCommerce.

WooCommerce: Order Again Button @ My Account > Orders

The WooCommerce “Order Again” button displays for ‘completed’ orders on the Thank You page and View Order page. That’s a pity, because it would be useful to show it on the My Account > Orders page as well, as a custom “action”, same as the “View”, “Pay” (if pending), “Cancel” (if subscription), “Edit” (custom snippet), “Confirm” (custom snippet) buttons.

The good news is that we can code it ourselves! And just reuse most of the code we already wrote, as well as rely on the WooCommerce “listener” for the existing “Order Again” button. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: 10 Crucial Issues That Should Be Fixed Right Now

I just spent the last 3 days in Porto with another 2,300 WordPressers at the first in-person WordCamp Europe since Berlin 2019. I had a blast, held a nice (yet long) workshop, spoke to many, but got tired too soon.

Later on, I realized that that tiredness was something more serious – in fact I tested positive against COVID for the first time in my life, and I’m now in self-isolation hoping it won’t last long… Another 7 days without my kid – send help!

Anyhow, what really struck me at WCEU 2022, and based on various chats and some data that I’ll share below, is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is in trouble.

A nicer way to put that? WooCommerce is not moving forward as fast as it should, and unless some key issues are addressed right now, in a few years time we all may pay the consequences.

Please note, this is not a rant. It’s a proper analysis, full of actionable information.

@ WooCommerce team - if you're reading this - my plan is to give you constructive feedback and tell you what the community (really) thinks, needs and wants, so that you can get a better picture of the current situation. I know you've already started working on this, so this is just a recap/reminder and a way to get the whole community realigned.

In this post, I will share my worries, my fears, the current WooCommerce issues, some data I collected at WCEU 2022 and then a list of actionable solutions that may be implemented in order to clear the backlog and get back on track – asap. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Add a Top Bar to Storefront Theme

The Storefront theme is one of the most popular WooCommerce themes. As of today, it has 200,000 active installations and 4.5/5 ratings, as well as a great overall performance.

But sure, you can’t win them all. Storefront is missing an important feature: the top bar. That’s a pity, because most ecommerce themes have either a dedicated widget area or somewhere you can add content in the theme options.

So, let’s go fix that. Here’s how to add a top bar with a background to your Storefront theme. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Search Orders By SKU @ Admin

Exactly. By default, when you search for orders in the WordPress > WooCommerce > Orders backend, using a SKU will give you 0 results. Which is pretty poor for a store manager.

Let’s change this. Despite the code is a little complex, all you need is a simple copy & paste. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Reorder My Account Tabs

When you add a custom My Account tab, or when you’re not happy with the default My Account tabs order (Dashboard – Orders – Downloads – Addresses – Payment methods – Account details – Logout), you may need to change things around.

Here are two super simple snippets to achieve just that: reorder the My Account tabs, so your customers never miss that super important My Account section. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: 10 Most Popular Free Plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to launch your online business, build high-functionality online stores for your clients, or take your brick-and-mortar store online.

Powering over 28.19% of all online stores, WooCommerce’s versatility and open-source nature allow businesses to build their dream store, add unlimited products and consumers, take orders, and increase sales.

The core WooCommerce plugin holds 68% of the usage distribution – the highest on the internet. However, despite its popularity, the official WooCommerce plugin lacks several features you might need for your eCommerce store. But to make up for that, it offers several plugins that allow you to enhance your store’s functionality and improve customer experience.

But choosing from over 4228 WooCommerce plugins from WordPress.org can get overwhelming. So, to make your job easier, we’ve hand-picked the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use on your store to take it to the next level. Let’s dive in!

WooCommerce: “Sale” Category (Automatic)

You can use a shortcode or block in order to display the WooCommerce products on sale. However, what if you wanted a proper “product category” called “Sale” – and where you didn’t need to manually assign this category to each product?

Basically, how do we display all the discounted products in a custom category called “Sale”, without doing any manual work?

Here’s a super quick tutorial. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Enable WooCommerce Payments

Payments on your eCommerce store are the most important touchpoint between your customers and business sales. Hence, an optimum payment solution that’s seamless, quick, and secure plays a critical role in ensuring a quality customer experience.

Over 17% of customers abandon their carts because of concerns with payment security, and 13% abandon them because the price is in a foreign currency. Thus, it’s vital to choose a payment method that accepts global currencies and ensures a secure checkout – while making the checkout process easy for your customers.

However, from including digital wallets to third-party payment solutions and managing transactions – choosing a suitable payment solution that facilitates this process for your WooCommerce store can get challenging. This is where WooCommerce Payments comes into the picture.

In early May 2020, WooCommerce released its new version WooCommerce 4.1, with two new features – including WooCommerce Payments, which provides a simplified way to accept and manage payments in your store.

This article shares more about WooCommerce Payments, their pros and cons, and an easy way to enable them on your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce: How to Split Variable Products Into Simple Products

If you sell simple products with no variations like books or software – the standard WooCommerce product page is enough and an ideal solution for your WooCommerce store. However, it isn’t the best solution for stores that sell variable products with multiple product variations.

A variable product comes in different variations. A simple example is clothing items, including a shirt – with multiple variation attributes like size, color, and pattern. So, if a shirt is a variable product – a medium-sized shirt, small-sized yellow shirt, or large-sized printed shirt are its product variations.

Thus, a product variation is the final product choice of the customer once they select multiple attributes belonging to a variable product.

By default, WooCommerce displays all your variable products as just that – products with multiple different variations on its shop page. However, you might need a way to display each product variation as an individual product on your WooCommerce shop page to improve customer experience, search functionality and increase overall sales.

So, in this article, we’ll see different ways through which you can split your variable products to show them as a single variation product on your WooCommerce store. But first, let’s see how this process can help your store’s bottom line.

WooCommerce: Display Product Categories @ Shop

We already saw how to show product categories in the Cart, how to display a category in the Shop page, but we never talked about showing ALL the product’s categories in the Shop / Category / Tag / Loop pages.

On top of that, we’ll also study the wc_get_product_category_list() function again, which is a super useful shortcut to get all the categories for a given product. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Let Customers Complete a Processing Order

An order can be marked as “completed” only by the WooCommerce store manager – manually. In certain cases, this operation may be automatic i.e. for downloadable orders.

However, what if we want our customers to complete (confirm) their processing order instead? Well, this is quite easy: we display a “CONFIRM ORDER” button under My Account > Orders, and on click some code triggers the status change. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Why Use A Product Configurator Instead of Variations

One of the biggest marketing trends in recent years is the increasing shift towards delivering customized and personalized product experiences to customers.

Customers are increasingly looking for online and eCommerce stores that provide order customization options for gifting purposes and the ability to add their personal and unique touch to their orders. While 90% of the U.S. customers find the idea of personalization appealing – impersonal shopping experiences frustrate 71% of customers.

Thus, as a WooCommerce store owner – it’s important to strive and meet the increasing consumer demands to prevent dissatisfaction, improve their shopping experiences and increase the overall sales.

This article will see some easy yet impactful ways to deliver a personalized customer experience and order customization. But first, let’s see how it can benefit your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce: Enable Advanced Coupon Features

While as a WooCommerce store owner, you keep looking for ways to increase your store’s sales and revenue – the same way, your customers also consistently look for opportunities to save money when purchasing online.

And in this situation, offering coupons and discounts acts as a win-win for your business and customers.

Statistics suggest that 51% of U.S. buyers search for coupons online before making an online purchase, and over 80% of millennials use coupon codes when shopping online.

Every online shopper loves a good deal. You can tap into this consumer behavior to attract buyers and increase sales through coupons on your WooCommerce store.

So, in this article, we see the top WooCommerce coupon plugins you can use. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of offering coupons to your customers.

WooCommerce: Check If Product Is A Subscription

We’ve already found out how to check if a WooCommerce product is simple, variable, grouped… Today we add more conditional tags as we study which WooCommerce “product types” are included within the official WooCommerce Subscriptions extension.

There are two new product types in such case: “Simple Subscription” and “Variable Subscription”, with the difference being you can offer multiple billing periods within the same product page (choice between daily, monthly and yearly for example) with the latter.

So, how do we know if a given product ID is a subscription, and also whether it’s a simple or variable one? Here’s the quick solution – enjoy!

WooCommerce: Retain Field Values @ Checkout Reload

Go to WooCommerce Checkout as a logged out user. Fill out billing name, surname, address, email and phone. Change your mind and go back to Cart. Return to Checkout. Billing name, surname, email and phone (basically everything but the address) are gone!

But hey, this annoying WooCommerce flaw is about to go away with a few lines of code. Either reload the Checkout page or go back to it later – your info will still be there (as long as you haven’t cleared your cache/cookies and the WooCommerce session hasn’t expired of course).

Enhoy!

WooCommerce: Top Product Filter Plugins For Your Store

As your WooCommerce store grows – so do its product variants. On average, a WooCommerce store owns hundreds of inventory items and product variants for sale.

While your goal might be to offer maximum product options to your visitors, with such a wide range of product variations – it can get challenging for your customers to find the exact product they’re looking for.

This is where product filters come into play. Statista suggests that 61% of buyers consider the ease of finding products the most important aspect of an online shopping experience.

No one has time to browse through the long product listings as it’s easier for customers to switch to another store that facilitates product discovery. Thus, product filter options enable your customers to browse through products of their preferences – positively impacting the user experience and increasing the chances of sales.

This article shares the top product filter solutions for your WooCommerce store. But first, let’s learn more about their benefits and how this simple option can affect your store’s bottom line.

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