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

Why WooCommerce Stores Forget Abandoned Cart Emails

Vintage car decaying in a dry desert landscape with mountains in the background.

In a recent conversation on Twitter, I asked the question: Do you know any WooCommerce store owners who have never implemented an abandoned cart email? If yes, why?

The responses I received were enlightening, pointing out a variety of reasons—ranging from a lack of time and knowledge to bad plugin experiences.

While abandoned cart emails are a staple of modern e-commerce, many WooCommerce store owners still fail to set them up. In this post, I’ll explore the reasons behind this hesitation and offer solutions to overcome these barriers.

Choosing the Best WooCommerce Points and Rewards Plugin for Loyalty Programs

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, WooCommerce developers and store owners debated the best Points and Rewards plugins to implement loyalty programs.

Points-based rewards are powerful tools for increasing customer engagement and retention, allowing businesses to incentivize repeat purchases and encourage customer referrals. However, choosing the right plugin involves weighing functionality, ease of customization, and compatibility with WooCommerce.

Below, we’ll review popular recommendations, the pros and cons of each, and insights into custom-coding for more tailored solutions.

Finding a Complete WooCommerce Sample Data Set: 1000s of Products, Customers, and Orders

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, WooCommerce developers and store owners discussed the challenges of sourcing a complete set of sample data for testing purposes.

While WooCommerce provides some basic sample data, it often includes only products, leaving out comprehensive information on customers and orders. For developers looking to conduct realistic performance and functionality tests on larger datasets, this is limiting.

Comprehensive sample data can be valuable for testing workflows, simulating customer interactions, and evaluating site performance under load. In this post, we’ll review existing resources, limitations, and ideas on building or sourcing a complete data set for your WooCommerce needs.

Finding the Right Money-Back Guarantee for WooCommerce Plugins: 10, 14, or 30 Days?

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, WooCommerce developers explored the complexities of setting a money-back guarantee for digital products, weighing options of 10, 14, or 30 days.

Refund policies can be pivotal in customer decisions, especially in eCommerce, where buyers expect flexibility in case a product doesn’t fully meet their needs.

Shorter guarantees like 10 days may ease accounting and offer a tighter refund window, while a 30-day policy can boost customer confidence by providing an extended period to evaluate the purchase.

However, factors like EU consumer regulations, which recommend a 14-day cooling-off period, also play into the decision. Given the nuanced nature of digital product refunds, developers face the challenge of balancing legal obligations with customer satisfaction.

This post dives into each option, discussing the pros, cons, and strategies for choosing an ideal refund duration based on product type, region, and customer expectations.

WooCommerce Devs: Grow Your Plugin Business on WPBay

Creating high-quality plugins is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in gaining visibility for your product, generating traffic, and capturing value in a sustainable way – ideally through recurring, stable revenue. As any developer knows, building an excellent product often isn’t enough without effective marketing behind it.

This challenge is particularly acute for smaller developers who lack a large audience or the resources to invest heavily in marketing and sales infrastructure. Many turn to marketplaces as a solution, only to find these platforms are often uncompetitive, imposing restrictive terms and limitations that can effectively hold developers hostage through one-sided agreements.

That’s why we’ve created WPBay: a developer-first marketplace designed as a genuine alternative. We offer a real solution with low commission rates, flexible licensing and pricing options, non-exclusivity, and powerful developer tools.

With WPBay, you can finally sell your plugins and themes on your own terms, maintaining control while reaching the audience you deserve.

WooCommerce: Allow Guest Checkout For Existing Customers

In a typical WooCommerce setup, if you disable Guest Checkout via the settings, all customers are required to either log into an existing account or register a new one during checkout. This ensures every order is tied to a user account – great for store management, but not always ideal for user experience.

The problem? Returning customers who aren’t logged in will be forced to remember their credentials or manually reset their password, just to place another order. And if they skip login and try to check out with their email, they’ll get the dreaded “An account is already registered with your email address” error – and the order won’t go through.

Thankfully, there’s a way to bypass all that. With a simple PHP snippet, you can allow users to check out as guests if their billing email matches an existing customer. WooCommerce will assign the order to their account – no login required!

Should You Redirect Your WooCommerce Shop Page to Your Only Product Category?

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce store owner raised an interesting question about managing duplicate content on their site. The store features multiple product categories, but the main Shop page only showcases one category.

This creates a situation where both the “Shop” and “Product Category” pages display identical content, potentially impacting SEO by creating duplicate content.

The store owner is considering redirecting the Shop page to the specific Product Category page and indexing only that page.

Let’s explore the pros and cons of this approach and provide some practical recommendations for optimizing the Shop page while maintaining the best SEO practices.

How Many Payment Gateways Is Too Many in WooCommerce?

credit card, bank card, theft, charge card, padlock, identity, thief, data, computer, password, hacking, hacker, stolen, credit card, credit card, credit card, credit card, credit card, theft, thief, hacking, hacker, hacker, hacker

In a Business Bloomer Club Slack thread—wait, this time it was X/Twitter—I asked whether offering multiple payment gateways in WooCommerce is a smart move, especially for international stores.

The discussion quickly turned into a masterclass on conversion optimization, localization, and fallback strategies. There’s a lot to consider when it comes to payment gateways, especially when you’re targeting multiple countries with different payment preferences.

This post dives into the pros and cons of offering a variety of WooCommerce payment methods and how you can optimize your checkout process to cater to different markets.

WooCommerce Coupon Issue: Deducting Shipping Costs when Coupon Exceeds Cart Total

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce user highlighted an issue where coupon codes greater than the cart total fail to cover shipping costs, leaving customers with an unexpected shipping fee.

This behavior can be confusing for customers and store owners alike, especially when they expect the coupon to cover the entire purchase, including shipping.

Here, we explore a workaround for this issue using custom code to deduct shipping fees when a coupon exceeds the total.

Exploring Alternatives to AffiliateWP for WooCommerce Integration

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, WooCommerce store owners shared their thoughts on the flexibility and effectiveness of AffiliateWP.

AffiliateWP has been a long-time favorite for its strong WooCommerce integration and extensive PHP customization capabilities. However, some store owners wonder if there are lighter alternatives that still offer robust integration and customizability.

For those who have been using AffiliateWP for years without exploring other options, this post dives into possible alternatives and considerations.

Displaying Comprehensive Attribution Data in WooCommerce Orders

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a useful code snippet was shared to enhance the WooCommerce order overview table by displaying all available attribution data for each order.

Out of the box, WooCommerce typically shows only the “origin” of a customer’s order, which is a basic detail that lacks critical context for analyzing campaign performance. This snippet goes a step further by pulling in additional details, including the source, medium, and campaign associated with each order.

For WooCommerce merchants and marketing professionals, having this level of insight right in the order overview page can provide a clearer understanding of which campaigns drive sales, how customers are navigating to the store, and overall campaign effectiveness.

WooCommerce: Simplify Free Checkout

If your WooCommerce store occasionally offers free products—whether as part of a promotion, a free trial, or a lead magnet—you may have noticed that the default checkout still displays all billing (and shipping) fields. This creates unnecessary friction for customers who don’t need to enter full address or payment information just to get something for free.

Thankfully, there’s a simple way to customize this behavior and show only the checkout fields you truly need. With a few lines of code, you can conditionally reduce the checkout form when there’s no payment required. This improves the user experience, boosts conversions, and keeps things clean and relevant.

I actually use this exact snippet on Business Bloomer whenever someone “purchases” one of my free WooCommerce mini plugins—just a name and email, no extra hassle.

In this example, we’ll indeed keep just the billing email and billing first name fields when the cart total is zero. You can easily tweak the snippet to include any other fields depending on your needs.

Here’s how to make it happen.

Best Solutions for Protecting Pages for Logged-In Users on WordPress

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WordPress developer sought a straightforward solution for restricting specific pages to logged-in users.

While many plugins offer this feature, some come bundled with unnecessary upsells and excessive features, which can be overwhelming for users who need only basic page protection.

For simple “logged-in only” access, lightweight solutions can be more efficient and user-friendly.

Should There Be a “Classic WooCommerce” Plugin?

A lineup of vintage cars parked outdoors surrounded by palm trees on a sunny day.

In a recent Twitter thread, I asked why no one had yet built a “Classic WooCommerce” plugin — something akin to Classic Editor and Classic Widgets.

After all, those two plugins have over 12 million active installs combined, proving there’s a strong demand for keeping things… well, classic.

The tweet triggered a few replies, so I thought I’d expand on the idea here. What would such a plugin actually do, and more importantly, would it be useful?

Let’s dive into this “just curiosity” thought experiment and explore potential use cases, roadblocks, and community sentiment.

Troubleshooting WooCommerce Sale Price Caching Issue on Single Product Pages

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a WooCommerce developer raised an issue where a client’s expired sale prices were still visible to logged-out users on single product pages.

This unusual behavior didn’t affect cart prices but created confusion on the product page.

Although server-side caching appears to be the main culprit, many WooCommerce users are unfamiliar with managing caching strategies for dynamic content like sales pricing.

WooCommerce product pages often display time-sensitive information, such as sale prices, which updates dynamically. Most cache plugins designed for WooCommerce will bypass product pages to avoid issues. However, server-side caching may not automatically account for this dynamic content, leading to expired sale prices being “stuck” in the cache and visible to users until the cache is purged.

Let's Talk WooCommerce, In Person

Cart reminder?