WooCommerce Bites Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce Needs More Noise (The Right Kind)

WooCommerce has never lacked talent. What it’s lacked—at least up until recently—is noise.

I’m not talking about marketing, but real, human, day-to-day signals from the people actually building the plugin. We’ve seen some of it over the past couple of years, and when it happens, it changes everything: clarity improves, trust grows, and the community gathers together.

The problem? It’s still too rare.

At a time when AI is flooding the internet with generated content and competitors are getting louder, silence is risky. If we don’t hear what Woo is working on, thinking about, and struggling with, we’re left in a limbo. And guesswork is where attention drifts.

This isn’t a criticism. It’s a call to action.

We Need To Talk About WooCommerce (More Than Ever)

If we look at competitors, I don’t think we talk enough about WooCommerce. Not nearly enough, at least.

For an ecosystem this big (7+ million active installs according to WP.org, 4 million websites according to StoreLeads, and 6,5 million websites according to BuiltWith), there are few places where developers, agencies, and merchants can come together and have real conversations.

I mean actual “conversations”… and not tweets (which Woo has definitely embraced in the last couple of years) or support threads.

Because if we keep talking, we can move forward as “one”. As a community.

Talking is alignment. It’s knowing what’s coming before it’s announced. It’s understanding the challenges merchants face, what developers are building, and where agencies are focusing their energy.

When we spend time together—sharing ideas, testing new approaches, debating best practices—we’re not just individuals. We become one entity. We make the most of this beautiful open-source project.

We’re one ecosystem that can shape the future of WooCommerce, instead of reacting to it.

Conversations spark innovation. They uncover opportunities. They help us all move faster, smarter, and with purpose. And that’s exactly why creating spaces to talk—online or in person—matters more than ever.

Are We Losing WooCommerce Merchants Because of WP Admin?

If you ask a WooCommerce merchant about the WordPress admin today, you’ll likely get a frustrated reply.

The WP backend has been around forever, and WooCommerce relies on it for everything: orders, products, payments, settings, taxonomies, reports. Once you add the various plugins and themes most stores require, that dashboard quickly becomes a messy screen. Hard to navigate, and hard to focus on what really matters: running the business.

Meanwhile, competitors are moving fast. Their dashboards are clean, intuitive, and actually enjoyable to use. Everything is logical, everything is quick.

And us? We still need to deal with bloated sidebars, random widgets (I usually hide them all to keep my wp-admin clean), and notifications that feel more like spam than helpful insights.

Does this admin fatigue drive store owners away? Well, that’s the big question.

But before we look for an answer, we have to admit we haven’t done enough to modernize the experience. If we don’t fix the backend soon, it’ll be a dealbreaker.

WooCommerce Devs: WordPress Drama Won’t Stop Us

After a relatively quieter stretch (likely due to the ongoing lawsuits), the WordPress ecosystem is noisy again. We’re back to social media spats, endless threads about contributions, and who’s a “cancer” to the project.

It’s exhausting. And it’s distracting millions of us who just want to build.

So if it bugs you the same way it bugs me—simply unfollow the madness, mute the drama, and get back to shipping.

Plugins keep launching, stores keep converting, extensions keep selling, and the WooCommerce community keeps quietly powering real businesses every single day.

WordPress drama won’t stop us. It never has, and it never will.

How the WooCommerce Community Surprised Me This Week

Over the past few days, I’ve been running a little experiment with the WooCommerce community—and let’s just say, it’s been incredible. What started as a simple idea quickly turned into something much bigger than I expected.

I’ve been keeping notes, tracking milestones, and seeing the energy and creativity this community brings to the table. The results so far have been both encouraging and, honestly, quite surprising.

In this post, I’ll take you behind the scenes, share some unexpected moments along the way, and explain why I believe this experiment could serve as an example for anyone in the WordPress ecosystem, and beyond.

Community Is Still the Best WooCommerce Feature

There are so many reasons why WooCommerce continues to power millions of stores around the world. It’s flexible. It’s open source. It’s customizable. But none of those explain its success on their own.

What truly makes WooCommerce thrive is… us. The community behind it.

For almost 15 years, developers, freelancers, agencies, makers, and merchants have shaped WooCommerce in public. They’ve shared code, answered questions, written tutorials, organized events, built extensions, and helped strangers solve problems at midnight on a Sunday on a random forum thread. That effort has done more than improve the software—it has moved it forward.

In this post, I want to reflect on why WooCommerce continues to stand out in a crowded ecommerce landscape, why community is still its strongest advantage, and why that human layer it’s the real deal (also including a live case study!).

My Honest Take on WooCommerce Checkout Block Adoption

The WooCommerce checkout block has been around since November 2023, yet most merchants are still sticking with the classic shortcode checkout.

So what’s going on?

After talking with clients, developers, and people across the ecosystem, I keep seeing the same pattern: curiosity mixed with hesitation. Not because the block is bad—but because switching checkout systems is a big deal, and nobody wants to mess with something that already works.

In this post, I’m sharing my honest take on the WooCommerce checkout block usage—what it actually is, how it differs from the legacy checkout, and why adoption hasn’t moved as fast as some expected.

If you’ve been wondering whether it’s worth paying attention to, the answer is yes. But maybe not for the reasons you think.

When Big Brands Enter WooCommerce

When an established company decides to enter the WooCommerce ecosystem, it’s not just another product launch—it’s a reputation gamble.

Take Wise as an example. Founded in 2011 to solve real-world currency exchange frustrations, it grew into a global financial platform serving millions (including me).

Yet, despite its scale and technical expertise, it had never built for WordPress or its commerce layer until… now. With a new payment gateway for WooCommerce on the horizon, it’s clear they’re approaching this market intentionally rather than casually.

And that’s rare. Most brands underestimate what it takes to succeed in the WooCommerce world, assuming development alone, plus a recognized logo, are enough. They are not.

Entering this space requires research, positioning, and community awareness—otherwise even the biggest names risk launching to silence, criticism, or worse: broken stores.

What fascinates me isn’t just that a major company is entering the space. It’s how they do it—and how different that approach is compared to the typical plugin launch we see every week.

So, if you’re a big brand (but the same applies if you’re a new company) entering the WP space, read on and see what research and positioning is required before writing your first line of code!

Shopify WordPress Plugin vs WooCommerce: Full Demo

In a recent test, I tried the brand-new Shopify WordPress plugin, which many claim could compete with WooCommerce. As someone with over 13 years of WooCommerce experience, I felt both curious and cautious — could Shopify really challenge Woo on its own turf?

To find out, I signed up for Shopify’s trial, installed the plugin on WordPress, went through the setup, and even made a first purchase, so you don’t have to pay for the trial yourself.

This post recaps everything from that video — from installation to my final thoughts — and includes the full embedded demo below, in case you’d rather watch it in action.

WooCommerce Store Credit With Shipping, Taxes & Expiry

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member raised a tricky use case involving store credit.

They needed to assign fixed credit amounts (e.g. €1000) to registered customers via the admin panel, ensure it covered both products and shipping, and allow mixed payments (partial credit, partial card). Additionally, the credit had to expire on a specific date and be editable after order creation.

They tested various plugins from the WooCommerce marketplace but ran into common issues: some didn’t deduct shipping from the credit, others failed when taxes were involved, and most were incompatible with existing coupons.

This sparked a deeper conversation about existing solutions, and a plugin developer chimed in with valuable insight: they’re rebuilding the Store Credit experience to address these gaps, and will be rolling it out under the “Account Funds” architecture — which avoids the limitations of coupon-based store credit.

Here’s a summary of the requirements and plugin roadmap.

WooCommerce Admin Order Creation Has Tax Pitfalls

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member shared their frustrations with manually creating orders in WooCommerce from the backend — and the surprisingly different behavior compared to placing orders through the frontend checkout.

When an administrator creates an order, the tax calculations behave differently. Specifically, the tax is calculated based on the admin’s country (as defined in their profile or the backend session), rather than the buyer’s billing or shipping address.

In one case, this caused incorrect taxes to be applied and required a workaround to ensure buyer-specific rates were calculated properly.

WooCommerce Server CPU Spikes: WPML, Bots, Or Something Else?

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a member raised concerns about persistent CPU spikes on a VPS running a WooCommerce site.

Despite solid specs (16 cores, 32GB RAM), aggressive caching (WP Rocket, Redis, Varnish), and Cloudflare firewall rules in place, the site was still experiencing major slowdowns and outages. The suspicion fell on a mix of slow database queries from WPML and ongoing bot attacks.

This sparked a familiar discussion among Club members: how do you actually determine the root cause of performance issues, especially when WooCommerce is paired with heavy plugins like WPML? And more importantly, what’s the right sequence of actions when a production site is under pressure?

WooCommerce Plugin Trademark Violations

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a concerning situation was shared involving the unexpected and immediate closure of a plugin on the WordPress.org repository due to trademark violations related to WooCommerce.

The author of the affected plugin explained that the plugin was removed without prior warning, a surprising move given that past violations typically resulted in a remediation email with time to address the issue.

This raised questions among community members about consistency in the enforcement of WordPress plugin guidelines and the fairness of immediate takedown actions.

WooCommerce: How Developers Are Actually Using AI

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, members shared their personal experiences with using AI in WooCommerce development.

Despite the increasing number of AI-powered tools, the consensus is that AI is currently most useful for small tasks, quick prototypes, and convenience-based coding assistance, while full-scale development remains firmly in the hands of experienced developers.

This conversation shows a practical, honest view of what’s working — and where AI still falls short — in real-world WooCommerce projects.

WooCommerce: Safely Sync Live Orders And Subs To A Dev Site

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In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, the discussion focused on a common challenge during WooCommerce rebuilds: how to sync a live store with a development version, especially when it comes to orders, customers, and subscriptions.

There are two main scenarios here. One involves rebuilding a WooCommerce store and needing to migrate recent transactional data (e.g. orders placed after a staging site was cloned). The other is syncing a fresh WooCommerce site with a copy of an existing store — without duplicating live payment authorizations or triggering emails.

This can be tricky and risky. Subscriptions in particular are sensitive, as duplicating them could result in revoked payment tokens or even failed renewals. Fortunately, both tools and real-life experiences were shared in the thread, providing a useful reference for developers quoting similar Woo projects.

Category: WooCommerce Bites