Here is a collection of tips, snippets, customizations, plugin reviews and how-to tutorials to answer your biggest WooCommerce questions, curated by Rodolfo Melogli.
Please remember feedback is vital and that your social media shares, blog comments and WooWeekly newsletter sign ups help me understand which WooCommerce content works and which not, so that I can fine-tune my writing :)
If a WooCommerce product comes with weight and/or height / length / width values, these will be displayed by default in the Single Product page, under the “Additional Information” tab.
Should you need to hide them completely from the frontend while keeping the list of attributes below them, thankfully there’s a PHP one-liner you can use. Enjoy!
Are you looking to build a marketplace where multiple vendors advertise and sell their own products?
Would you like to build the next eBay, or perhaps Etsy, while earning commissions or fees for each vendor or marketplace transaction?
In this article we’ll take a look at the main features, challenges and advantages of building a multivendor platform based on WooCommerce.
Is WooCommerce a good choice for marketplaces?
There are a lot of tools, platforms and services that can serve as a base for your upcoming multivendor site. The main options you will have to choose from are:
Custom development from scratch
Developing a marketplace from scratch through proprietary code may be the right choice for an enterprise or large-budget project. The main advantage is customizability, allowing you to develop everything exactly as you need it, while the biggest disadvantage is a high cost for security, maintenance, and development.
Using a dedicated service, script, or platform
There are a number of scripts or services that promise to deliver you a ready-made white-labeled solution or even a fully hosted platform solution, such as X-Cart, Zeew, etc. The main problem with using such a solution is that not only is there a high setup and deployment cost, but there are often ongoing costs as well, such as maintenance costs or transaction commissions. Another issue is being dependent on a particular provider, meaning the site will also be difficult to customize and it may be hard or impossible to add new features and options in the future.
Using an open-source platform such as WooCommerce
There are several open-source e-commerce solutions, but in recent years WooCommerce has become the biggest and most powerful of them all. With hundreds of thousands of plugins, themes, and code snippets, it is incredibly versatile, allowing you to set up almost anything, and do it quickly based on existing, open-source, secure code. WooCommerce is also completely free and only carries limited costs if you decide to use premium plugins.
WooCommerce therefore offers the best of both worlds: it enables powerful customization, quick development, and low costs, while also allowing you to take advantage of an incredible ecosystem of existing plugins and code.
How does a multivendor store differ from a typical store?
While the core mechanics of traditional shops and multi vendor shops are the same (cart system, products, pricing, discounts, etc), there are also important differences.
First of all, a key difference has to do with how the cart works and how orders are processed. When a customer shops and places an order containing products from multiple stores, several things must happen:
Prices, fees, taxes and commissions must be calculated separately for each store
A separate independent order must be sent to each shop owner
Secondly, an important difference has to do with store management. Since multiple sellers must manage their own products, there must be a separate interface that allows them to manage products, orders, refunds, etc in a private way, without being able to see other stores’ orders or data.
Finally, another key difference has to do with the role of the admin (marketplace owner / manager). While for a typical shop the owner is also the seller, in a multi vendor marketplace this changes, and the owner becomes a manager that must communicate with vendors, handle issues, charge commissions, while also offering services to sellers. Therefore the admin side of the store and the backend must cater not only to customers, but also to vendors.
What are the main challenges of developing a marketplace?
WooCommerce is a powerful and versatile e-commerce solution but it was not built with multi-vendor commerce in mind, so a lot of necessary elements are missing and have to be built.
On the admin side, you will need a messaging solution to communicate with vendors, a way to set up commissions, and a way to track withdrawals and payouts. Furthermore, a vendor registration solution has to be implemented, as well as a way to verify vendors and their documents, and approve or reject account requests.
On the seller side, a dedicated frontend dashboard is needed, so each vendor can manage their own products, orders and settings without having access to the admin backend. Sellers must also be able to add and manage coupons, receive and respond to customer inquiries, handle customer refund requests, have team members that can manage part of the store, etc.
There are many other features and options that can make a marketplace stand out such as SEO for vendor stores, reports that allow vendors to track their performance, or a system of badges and achievements that promotes and distinguishes the best sellers.
Most effective way to set up a WooCommerce marketplace
While you can use code snippets and build it all by yourself, the fastest and easiest way of setting this up will be to use a dedicated multivendor marketplace plugin such as MarketKing.
MarketKing was built from the ground up to suit the unique needs of multi vendor platforms, seamlessly enabling dozens of complex features:
Vendor Registration Module with Custom Configurable Fields
Premium Vendor Dashboard
Vendor Verification and Approval
Wholesale and B2B Integration
Vendor Staff & Teams
Product, Coupon and Order management
Refund management
Unique highly converting split-cart
Commission, Withdrawals and Payouts
Announcements
Store SEO
Invoicing Integration
Store Reviews
Vendor Groups & Memberships
Product and Vendor Inquiries with Messaging System
Product Import & Export
and so much more.
MarketKing is a new and modern multivendor solution that delivers a high performance, feature-rich, and visually stunning experience. It bundles a beautiful and powerful vendor dashboard, with dozens of complex features, in a single easy-to-use marketplace package. You can use MarketKing’s free version, or if you need more features, there is also a premium, lifetime-license version.
What are the most important multivendor marketplace features?
Let’s take a look at some of the key features of a marketplace, as well as some other features that can make a marketplace stand out from its competitors.
1. Front-end Vendor Dashboard
An essential part of the store is the seller’s dashboard. This is the area that vendors and businesses interact with when managing their products and orders, so it’s important that this makes a great first impression. MarketKing offers a premium, dedicated vendor dashboard screen with its own private login page:
Separate Login Panel for Sellers
Once the vendor has logged in, they gain access to the dashboard, and all of its features and panels. The dashboard overview shows recent orders, as well as several important statistics, allowing the seller to see what’s going on with their shop at a glance.
Vendor Dashboard Overview
2. Product, Order and Coupon Management
The dashboard allows vendors to manage their own items and orders, as well as create and manage coupons.
When editing products, vendors have access to the native WooCommerce product management UI, with all of its options. They can configure everything from product SKU, to price, product up-sells, stock quantities, attributes, etc.
Product Edit Screen, Using Native WooCommerce UI
Similarly, vendors can add and edit coupons through the same native WooCommerce interface. When it comes to orders, vendors can view billing and shipping data necessary to fulfill orders, change order status and add order notes. Vendors can also view their earnings after commissions, and generate PDF invoices based on configurable invoice settings.
3. Vendor Registration
Through the registration module, a dedicated vendor registration page can be created. Multiple custom registration fields can be added and configured based on marketplace needs. Registration fields can be text fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, or even file attachments for things such as licenses and company documents.
Vendor Registration Page with Storefront Theme
4. Ordering From Multiple Vendors – Split Orders
Another important feature that almost all modern marketplaces have today is the ability to split the cart and show items and totals by vendor. This kind of system is also implemented by MarketKing, and it is quite unique among multivendor plugins.
Cart Split by Vendor
Once the order has been placed, the system then automatically splits it into multiple sub-orders, sending each individual sub-order to their vendor. The customer can also see each sub-order as separate, being able to track order status and the progression of each sub-order.
5. Product and Vendor Inquiries (Messaging)
Communication is important for any e-commerce shop, but even more so for a marketplace, as there are multiple layers of participants. MarketKing implements a messaging system that everyone can access: vendors, admin, and customers.
Customers can send inquiries about specific products directly to vendors, and vendors can respond. Similarly, vendors can send inquiries to the marketplace admin, or vice versa. Configurable email notifications keep all participants up to date with what’s happening.
6. Wholesale or B2B Marketplace
Another highly sought-after capability for marketplaces is the ability to support business customers and B2B e-commerce. Through its integration with the popular B2BKing wholesale plugin, MarketKing enables several capabilities for vendors:
Vendors can receive and respond to quote requests
Set up wholesale prices by customer group
Set up tiered pricing for their products
Configure product visibility, hiding or showing products
Setting up minimum order quantities or box quantities
Hiding prices for specific products or customers
Offering special discounts on specific products
7. Single Product Multiple Vendors
A situation that is quite common on marketplaces is when multiple vendors sell the same products. In this case, MarketKing has a powerful feature that allows showing multiple offers under each product.
Multiple Product Offers
These offers can be sorted by vendor rating, by offer price, stock quantity or all. On the shop itself, only the highest ranking offer will show, so that marketplace listings do not show the same product twice. Furthermore, a smart cache system automatically refreshes which offer shows on the shop – for example when an item goes out of stock, that item will be hidden, and the next best offer will be displayed.
8. Vendor Verification
Once a vendor has registered, other documents or files may still be needed, so it’s necessary to have a secure upload area where vendors can verify their data. In MarketKing this is implemented through a dedicated seller verification module.
Verification Panel In Dashboard
A dedicated verification panel is added to the vendor dashboard. Any documents uploaded can be viewed and verified by the admin in the backend. A documents log permanently saves all files, so these can also be re-checked in the future.
9. Vendor Staff
A common problem for sellers on marketplaces is the necessity to have multiple staff members that can manage store operations. This is particularly important as stores grow larger and need more and more staff to manage products, handle orders, respond to requests, etc.
MarketKing has a dedicated Team & Staff module that was built to meet this challenge. Each seller can create team members and configure permissions and access to specific panels or specific functions only.
Team Member Permissions
10. Earnings & Reports
No marketplace can be complete without a reports feature. Both vendors and the marketplace admin need a quick and easy way to visualize sales and performance across time.
On the admin side, a dedicated panel shows orders, sales and commissions, by marketplace, or by store, between specific dates:
Admin Reports Panel
This is doubled by another earnings panel on the vendor side, where each vendor can visualize their earnings by month, as well as each transaction in a configurable table.
In Conclusion
We looked at a few of the main elements of setting up a multivendor marketplace store with WooCommerce. As you have seen, while many features work as in a traditional store, many also have their own unique challenges. From the necessity to split the cart, to the need to have a dedicated seller dashboard, multi vendor sites often involve a lot of complexity.
You can jump past a lot of these challenges and develop quickly by using a dedicated multivendor plugin. In that case, MarketKing is a powerful package that brings to the table not just a large number of features, but also stunning designs, unique capabilities, and attention to detail.
Since… today, Business Bloomer online courses are affordable for everyone.
It’s unfortunate that digital products (such as our WooCommerce online courses) are priced in USD dollars but there is no adjustment for less privileged countries.
This is a pity because content should be accessible to ALL WooCommerce developers around the world, no matter their income level. I receive dozens of emails per month from amazing people who can’t really afford a USD 397 course because they make that amount of money in 4 months if they’re lucky.
So, let’s change this. Here comes Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to the rescue.
PPP is a special metric that tells us the real “purchasing power” of a given country. Take a basket of identical goods, pay in your local currency in your own country; purchase the same items in USD in the United States. Compare that difference to the actual exchange rate. Now you really have an idea of how much a country can afford to pay for that basket of goods.
Let’s talk in plain English. Are you from India? You may get up to 75% off our online courses. Are you from South Africa? Maybe a 59% discount! Are you from Argentina? 61% off on average. Are you from Norway? No discount, sorry (it seems you do better than the US). And so on…
In this post, I’ll go through a quick PPP math example to give you some context, and then I’ll tell you how I implemented PPP discounts in this same WooCommerce website.
Want to help me test the PPP discount functionality which is currently in beta? Add a course to cart e.g. CustomizeWoo PRO, select your billing country at checkout, and leave a comment below with the discount you got, if any.
As you know, once you log in and go to My Account, WooCommerce displays the “Dashboard” tab content (also called the Dashboard “endpoint”). The Dashboard tab features the default “Hello Rodolfo Melogli (not Rodolfo Melogli? Log out) From your account dashboard you can view your recent orders, manage your shipping and billing addresses, and edit your password and account details.” message.
Now, what if we want to set another My Account tab as the default one upon login, for example the “Orders” one, or the “Downloads” one for a digital downloads WooCommerce business? Well, there are a couple of quick and not-so-quick solutions, enjoy!
Do you want to tweak and design your WordPress website without hiring a developer? Good news: it’s completely possible with WordPress page builder plugins.
A WordPress page builder plugin comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to create beautiful custom pages and websites. Thus, regardless of your skillset or technical know-how, page builder plugins make designing your ideal website a breeze without writing a single line of code.
Now, if you’re wondering which WordPress page builder plugin you should consider, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll review one of the most popular options: Elementor, which is considered the gold standard. Elementor is the second most-installed WordPress plugin with 2 million active installations – used by around 15.9% of WordPress websites.
We’ll start with Elementor’s brief overview and further review the plugin’s interface, features, and pricing to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your site. Let’s go!
Digital asset management software is vital if you have a website, whether you are an e-commerce store owner or a content producer.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) software is a solution for organizing, storing, and managing digital resources like documents, images, videos, audio, infographics, etc.
Nowadays, almost everything is digital, so digital assets are precious to organizations and individuals.
If you own a WooCommerce shop, you need a robust DAM system that can help boost your sales. But before looking at some reasons why it’s a great add-on to your business, let’s see what a DAM system is.
We covered a lot of WooCommerce Checkout customization in the past – it’s evident that the Checkout is the most important page of any WooCommerce website!
Today we’ll code a nice UX add-on: how do we show product quantity inputs beside each product in the Checkout order table? This is great if people need to adjust their quantities on the checkout before completing their order; also, it’s helpful when you have no Cart page and want to send people straight to Checkout and skip yet another click.
In this post, we’ll see how to add a quantity input beside each product on the Checkout page, and then we’ll code a “listener” to make sure we actually refresh the Checkout and update totals after a quantity change. Enjoy!
Do you intend to create an online store? Cannot pick between self-hosted WooCommerce and cloud-powered BigCommerce? Don’t worry, you are not on your own.
The only way to truly determine which of these two eCommerce solutions is more suitable, is to compare them side by side – we will take a look at their features, price, convenience of use, cost, support, security, customization, and many other factors.
In this article, we’ll help you determine which ecommerce solution more appropriate for your business requirements. Self-hosted or cloud? Subscription or free in theory? Customization or integrations? Huge or small community? There are lots of questions you may have.
So, are you ready for the battle of WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce? Let’s get started.
This is an interesting WooCommerce customization – as you know WordPress menus and widgets read whatever product category name and display it in the frontend.
Let’s say your product category title is “Tables”. This will show up in the navigation menu if you have set it up that way, in te breadcrumbs if you have any, in the sidebar category widgets, and as a title on the single product category page.
This is great and all, but what if your product category name is “Red Round Tables By Whatever Brandname“? As you can imagine, displaying this in a sidebar or navigation menu may be a little too much, while it’s fine to use it as a H1 on the single product category page for SEO reasons and enhanced readability.
So, the question is – how do we define an “alternative” product category name, so that this can be used on the product category page as custom title, while using the default one for other smaller locations such as menus and widgets?
Sending emails (newsletters, broadcasts or similar) to customers is an integral part of a WooCommerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is an outstanding tool that allows you to connect with your customers, keep them informed about your products, services, or discounts, get them to return to your site, and drive new sales.
Unlike other popular channels, like social media – emails provide a personal touch and let you reach your target consumers directly in their inboxes. Statistics suggest that while 87% of B2B marketers leverage email as a distribution channel – 79% of B2C marketers use emails to promote their new blog posts and articles.
And one such critical email marketing solution is email newsletters. They are extremely beneficial to stay in touch and build trustworthy relationships with existing and potential customers.
So, if you’re looking for solutions to send automated newsletters to your WooCommerce customers – you’re at the right place. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of actually sending newsletters.
Ok, we all know that Stripe, PayPal and all successful online payment orders go to “processing” order status, BACS and cheque go to “on-hold”, and so on. Each payment gateway has its own default paid status.
Now, what if you use custom order statuses, or what if you wish to change Stripe orders to “completed”, BACS orders to “pending” and PayPal orders to “on-hold”? Thankfully, this is super easy with a handy PHP snippet. Enjoy!
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a WooCommerce store owner is offering limited product customization abilities. Product personalization is a critical component of online shopping that helps provide a better customer experience and results in a high retention rate.
75% of customers appreciate businesses that offer personalized offerings, and a Deloitte consumer review suggests that 1 in every 5 customers are willing to pay 20% more for a custom-designed and personalized product.
A great way to do this is by offering an image upload solution for products for your customers to improve customer satisfaction and generate more revenue for your store.
This article shows the top solutions that make uploading images for products for customers a breeze and enhance their customization abilities. But before we get into them, let’s look at more benefits of offering this capability in your store and how it affects your business bottom line.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
With 100,000 (and growing) monthly organic sessions, Business Bloomer is the most consistent, most active and most complete WooCommerce development/customization blog.
Of course this website itself uses the WooCommerce plugin, the Storefront theme and runs on a WooCommerce-friendly hosting.