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

WooCommerce: Save “Terms & Conditions” Acceptance @ Checkout

When going legal… you need proof. Accepting the “Terms and Conditions” on the checkout is required in order to place an order – but how can you, WooCommerce store admin, “prove” that the Terms and Conditions were actually ticked by the customer?

One of the solutions might be to save such acceptance in the database and print the acceptance on the order admin (and maybe on the customer invoice as well). So, here’s a quick PHP snippet you can simply copy and paste in your child theme’s functions.php file in order to (1) save and (2) print the choice on the Single Order Admin page. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: How to Bulk Edit Products?

You want your website visitors to checkout fast, pay you faster and receive their item quickly. However, speed matters for us WooCommerce store owners as well.

By looking at this year’s time-sheets for my own business, about 50% of the time was spent between marketing and admin – and the “admin” part is the one we’re tackling today.

If you run a busy WooCommerce shop with hundreds of products, you probably noticed how annoying it is to edit products one by one.

Yes, the WooCommerce admin dashboard allows us to do certain bulk edits a la WordPress, however you must play with the “screen options” and also the filtering is not good enough.

On the other end, as WooCommerce managers we’re probably more familiar with Excel-alike spreadsheets where all our products are editable with a single click in a specific cell.

Good news is there are plugins that can make your life easier, your admin time more efficient and your product management simpler. And today we’re taking a look at the best options.

WooCommerce: How To Re-install Missing Pages

Do you need to re-create missing WooCommerce default pages in your WooCommerce online store? If so, this tutorial is for you.

During installation, WooCommerce creates the Shop, Cart, Checkout and My Account pages automatically via the Setup Wizard. Sometimes users skip that part or maybe accidentally delete the pages after creation.

WooCommerce: Change Autofocus Field @ Checkout

If you decide to delete or reorder checkout fields, you probably also need to change the checkout field with “autofocus”. In plain English, this is the checkout field where the keyboard cursor goes automatically to on checkout page load (by default, this is the Billing First Name).

As usual, changing this default behavior is very easy, even if you’re not familiar with PHP. In the example below, I’m removing the autofocus from Billing First Name and assigning it to the Billing Email field instead.

Copy the snippet, test it on your development environment and only then push it to your live website. Enjoy! Continue reading WooCommerce: Change Autofocus Field @ Checkout

WooCommerce: How to Run an Affiliate / Referral Program?

There is no doubt – one of the fastest, most affordable and easiest ways to increase your WooCommerce sales is to “hire your own customers”.

You’ve probably heard of affiliate commissions, referral programs, influencer marketing, brand ambassadors and so on. Online brands are doing all they can to promote this strategy and tap into their fans’ communities.

As a WooCommerce store owner, no matter whether you sell digital or physical products, you should definitely give an affiliate program a go. Besides, what if I told you enabling such a complex system was actually super easy?

With a simple plugin you can immediately add an affiliate marketing program to your WooCommerce website, give registered affiliates their own dashboard with statistics and revenue, pay them via PayPal or Stripe either manually, immediately or monthly and basically do absolutely no coding or complex set up.

Decide your referral commission (e.g. $10 per product, or 15% per order), install the affiliate plugin, contact all your existing customers, subscribers, fans, followers and see your sales grow.

For such a little investment, your returns might be reasonable enough and there is really nothing stopping you from implementing this today.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most reliable WooCommerce Affiliate plugins. They all do the trick, so it’s up to you to make that final choice.

WooCommerce: Rename “Add to Cart” Button if Product Already @ Cart

When talking about UX, or for very specific WooCommerce shops, you might need to tell the user a product is already in the Cart before re-adding it or increasing its quantity from the Shop/Category/Loop and Single Product pages.

The “Add to Cart” button label comes with a filter (actually 2 filters, one for the Single Product page and another for the other pages such as Shop), so all we need to do is targeting those two hooks. We will “filter” the label text in case the product is already in the Cart, and return that back to WooCommerce. If this sounds like Japanese to you (hey, unless you’re from Japan!) don’t worry – simply copy/paste the snippet below as per below instructions.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Sort Cart Items Alphabetically A>Z

Your WooCommerce shopping cart might look messy when it contains many products. Your specific business, besides, might require you buy “Part 1” first and “Part 2” after.

A way to tidy up the WooCommerce shopping basket is – for example – to sort products based on their title, from A to Z. As usual, this can be done with a few lines of PHP, even if you have no clue about coding… feel free to copy, paste, and enjoy the snippet 🙂

WooCommerce Workshop: DCU 2018 Slides

I had the pleasure to speak at the Dublin City University Business School in April 2018. I was kindly invited by Grace Fox, a lecturer who looks after the Masters in Digital Marketing.

The workshop title was “WooCommerce Workshop. INSTALL. SET UP. PUBLISH. SELL.”, aimed at helping students build an ecommerce enabled website with WordPress and WooCommerce.

During the 4 hours workshop we covered the following topics:

1. Introduction: Things You Should Know Before Installing WC
2. DEMO: How to Install WC
3. DEMO: Walk-Through of the Most Important Settings & Payment Gateways
4. DEMO: How to Publish Your Products & Test Checkout
5. WooCommerce A.M.A. & Intro to Customisation

Here are the slides of the live demonstration I held.

Continue reading WooCommerce Workshop: DCU 2018 Slides

WooCommerce: How To Make A Website GDPR Compliant? (12 Steps)

Ok, we all know that the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force on the 25th May 2018.

So the main question is: what changes do we need to make on our WooCommerce website to become compliant? And another important query might be: how does GDPR affect non-European WooCommerce websites?

In this article, I will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do. There are a million articles and plugins on WordPress GDPR compliance, but there is no “ultimate” blog that tells you what you should be doing.

If you don’t know what GDPR is or need a good refresher, read Wikipedia’s GDPR page or the “Introduction to GDPR Compliance for WooCommerce Stores” on the official WooCommerce blog.

Many blogs I’ve read and WordCamp events I’ve attended didn’t really give me the answers I needed. I don’t particularly care about GDPR itself, I just want to know what I need to do on my WooCommerce website.

So, let’s see what changes you’re required to make.

Please note: I’m not a lawyer and cannot guarantee this article is going to make you 100% compliant – make sure to assess your GDPR compliance with a qualified consultant.

WooCommerce: Add Content Under “Place Order” Button @ Checkout

Adding content to the WooCommerce Classic Checkout page is very easy. First, identify the desired position for your content using my WooCommerce Checkout Visual Hook Guide) and then create a short PHP function to output the necessary content.

Adding content to the WooCommerce Checkout Block is even simpler. You can directly insert a paragraph block at your chosen location.

In this example, we’ll demonstrate how to add content below the “Place Order” button on both the WooCommerce Classic Checkout page and the WooCommerce Checkout Block. This can be particularly useful for displaying testimonials, badges, or reassuring text to reinforce customers’ purchasing decisions.

WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

If your WooCommerce store already generates a few orders per month, then it’s probably the right time to step up and start analyzing your ecommerce data.

Despite the “WooCommerce > Reports” tab within the WordPress dashboard can give you sales figures, stock takes and customer lists – we all know that’s a very basic, limited functionality. It gives you CSV export but no automation. There are no filters and no segments. It’s accurate but still not enough.

Data plays a vital role on your WooCommerce website. If you can get access to a wider range of figures, reports, screens, calculations, exports, filters, integrations, then it’s very likely you can understand how to increase your profits.

Data can help you identify problems (hello, cart abandonment – biggest responsible for low conversion rates), can help you select popular products for your cross-sell and up-sell strategy, can give you a hint on how to improve the user experience and have them check out faster – as well as giving you a hand analyzing patterns, performances and customer behavior.

In this (very long) post, we’ll take a look at ways to gather ecommerce data beyond the default “Reports” section, generate email digests, print advanced reports, filter and segment orders and customers, and much more. I will be referring to the two biggest tracking software for WooCommerce: Google Analytics and Metorik. Continue reading WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

WooCommerce: Hide Related Products @ Single Product Page

Adding content to the WooCommerce Single Product Page is super easy – but what if you wish to remove / hide a default element?

Well, in this case it gets even easier. All you need to know is the default hook used by WooCommerce – so that you can remove it with one line of PHP in your functions.php. You can find a list of default hooks here: (https://businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-visual-hook-guide-single-product-page/)

For example, how do we hide the Related Products? Well, here’s one line of code that will help you! Continue reading WooCommerce: Hide Related Products @ Single Product Page

WooCommerce: How to Customize the My Account Page?

Customizing the WooCommerce “My Account” page is one of the most requested features by designers and developers.

The “My Account” page of an ecommerce website is absolutely vital to the smooth running of its operations, should be well designed in order to allow users to fully make the most of account management and – of course – can be customized in order to convert more sales and or entice for return business.

The “My Account” page is an actual WordPress page (you can find it under “Pages”) which contains a WooCommerce shortcode. Such shortcode outputs the default account management tabs and their unique content.

In order to customize the look, feel, layout, content and design of the “My Account” page (and all its subpages of course, such as the “Edit Address” page), you have two different choices. If you’re familiar with PHP customization, almost anything can be achieved with simple snippets: add a custom tab, remove a tab, change the content of a tab, sort tabs, and so on. We’ve seen this already on Business Bloomer but I’ll link to a few articles and tutorials below as a reminder.

The other sleek alternative is to use a plugin. Sometimes, this might be a quick and error-free way to achieve what you need without the need of having to code. It’s up to you – so in this article we will see both methods!

WooCommerce: Top Wishlist Plugins (Screenshots + Features)

1% is a relatively average ecommerce sales conversion rate. In other words, every 100 website visitors, 99 are not going to purchase anything from your shop – and maybe never will.

Increasing that conversion rate is everyone’s dream. Yet, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is one of the toughest sections of ecommerce marketing. Given the same amount of traffic, how can you convert more sales?

Well, adding a wishlist functionality to WooCommerce is what I consider a vital CRO test. It might or might not work for your specific business (that’s why CRO is tough, no business is born equal), but it’s worth a 12 months trial at least. The good news is that there are great, free, reliable WooCommerce Wishlist plugins available (as well as premium of course), so this is a no-brainer really.

If you never heard of wishlists before, remember those 99 users who had no intention of buying anything on your shop right now? Well, the point I’m trying to make is that they might like to “save” a few products in a wishlist and come back later (even after months) to add those product to cart and complete the checkout.

This is very simple. You’re basically helping users with a functionality not many WooCommerce shops provide. You’re giving those 99 people at least one reason to come back to your store at a later date and – as we will see later – you can even give them magic powers such as sharing their wishlists with friends and using them publicly or privately.

Ok, let’s get started. What are the most reliable “Wishlist” plugins for WooCommerce?

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