WooCommerce: Product Add-Ons (Without a Plugin!)

WooCommerce product add-ons are custom input fields that show on the single product page. They’re called “add-ons” as you can add a product personalization or an upsell (at a cost of course).

For example, you can display a text input to print something on the product. Or radio buttons to select different kinds of product upgrades. Or a checkbox to upsell gift wrapping.

Either way, and of course, there are plugins for that. But first, I want to give you a tutorial to code this by yourself (case study: global custom input text field and no surcharge), so that you can learn something new. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: 10 Easy Snippets to Increase Your Sales

I had the pleasure to speak at WordCamp Prague 2019. I spoke about “10 PHP Snippets to Increase WooCommerce Sales” and managed to show some simple coding to the audience. Trust me – increasing your WooCommerce sales can also be done with a free, short, easy PHP snippet.

So, given that I want to share all the snippets I talked about, this is a quick recap. Copy them, test them (a must!) and then use them. And let me know if your conversion rate and/or AOV (average order value) increased!

At the bottom of the page you also find my talk slides. Enjoy:)

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WooCommerce: Which Subscriptions Plugin Should You Buy?

Setting up a recurring revenue stream is one of the hottest ecommerce money-making strategies. And there is no doubt that, no matter whether you sell cakes, audio books, services, rentals, there is always room for a “subscription” product.

Think about selling a product once, and then seeing automatic renewal orders come through. And where the customers’ credit card is automatically charged. Yes, this can be done with a “WooCommerce Subscriptions” plugin.

Though, it comes at a cost (besides, it’s a subscription you have to purchase from a WooCommerce plugin developer to guarantee on-going bug fixing, support and maintenance!), with the reason being you can’t really code such a delicate functionality on your own (with a snippet for example). Subscription plugins are about money, revenue, automatic charge operations, tokens, error handling, retrials and other complex things – at this stage you have no other choice than purchasing an out-of-the-box solution: a reliable WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin.

The hard part here is deciding which subscription plugin is the best fit for you as a user and for your WooCommerce store. You also need to consider things such as integration, compatibility, UX, payment gateways, support (my favorite), code quality, functionality roadmap, maintenance, long-term reliability and – also – price.

This ultimate review guide goes through my top 3 choices. From $49 to $199, you have a full range of products, and each one offers the same exact thing: recurring payments.

So, what’s the difference? Which one should you pick?

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WooCommerce: How to Blacklist Scammers, Emails, IP, Phones?

A WooCommerce email notifications pops up – yet another new order, money, revenue, happiness. However, hold on a second – money is not technically in your bank account until you’re forced to give a refund. Even worse, until you realize not only you had to give a refund, but also getting the item back costs you a fortune. And who knows how many times this is going to happen, mostly when you ship physical products.

Fortunately, there are ways in WooCommerce to blacklist customers, deny purchasing from specific countries, block certain IP addresses and do whatever you can to save money.

In the era of Amazon and online shopping we constantly hear of scams and frauds, so this is definitely a topic that shouldn’t be underestimated. A small plugin investment or a few lines of code could actually make a big difference.

Besides, choosing the correct online payment methods (which should give you some sort of anti-fraud out of the box) and avoiding offline payments (bank transfer, cash on delivery, check) are important measures you should already have in place.

So, moving beyond the actual online payments, there is something else we could do to stop scammers placing an order (yes, even before paying or trying to pay). Prevention is better (and more affordable) than cure, right?

I’ve put together a list of WooCommerce plugins and settings you should look into from today on. And sooner rather than later. Enjoy 🙂 Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Blacklist Scammers, Emails, IP, Phones?

WooCommerce: How to Increase Average Order Value?

AOV a.k.a. Average Order Value is one of the most important ecommerce metrics. It describes the average order total in a given period of time. If this year your WooCommerce website converted 150 orders and made $30,000 in revenue, your AOV for this year is $30,000/150 = $200 (i.e. on average, you can expect each order to be $200).

FYI, the meaning of AOV is the same for any ecommerce platform, but in this article we’ll talk just about WooCommerce. In our opinion WooCommerce is a better, more cost-effective solution than Shopify or other counterparts.

If you don’t know what your WooCommerce store AOV is, immediately go to WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Reports > Orders > Sales by Date > Year and divide “net sales in this period” by the number of “orders placed”. But be careful – those reports are sometimes not correct (I know WooCommerce is working on this at the moment). Mine is giving me AOV = €2… and I know that’s not right.

Your best bet is your Google Analytics account (as long as you’re using the official WooCommerce – Google Analytics integration) and/or your Metorik reports (here’s an article you should read if you need to know how to install reliable WooCommerce tracking, reporting, filtering and segmentinghttps://businessbloomer.com/advanced-woocommerce-tracking-analytics-reports-exports-segmentation/). My Metorik dashboard tells me my WooCommerce website AOV for this year is €233 so far – I can trust this one for sure.

So the question is: how can we get our WooCommerce customers to spend more? Well, here’s a list of WooCommerce plugin alternatives you can install right now to boost your AOV.

In fairness, who wouldn’t want some extra revenue? 🙂

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WooCommerce: Disable Tracking if Order Failed @ Thank You Page

The “woocommerce_thankyouhook fires on the Thank You page once an order is placed. Most tracking functions like Google Analytics, affiliate commission plugins and other WooCommerce extensions rely on “woocommerce_thankyou” to run their code.

Problem is – “woocommerce_thankyou” is ALSO called if an order fails (i.e. payment did not go through). Now, unless the plugin is smart enough in its own functions to exclude failed orders, which doesn’t happen often I’m afraid, we need to find a way NOT to run “woocommerce_thankyou” if an order fails. Case study: a client uses a third party affiliate plugin, this plugin hooks into “woocommerce_thankyou“, but they don’t want to calculate conversions when an order fails.

So here you go!

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WooCommerce: Disable Theme’s WooCommerce Template Overrides

A client purchased a premium “WooCommerce-ready” WordPress theme. Unfortunately, this theme comes with a /woocommerce folder, which means theme developers completely override WooCommerce template files by copying them to the folder, and customizing each of them by hand to match their design and functionality needs.

As you know from my “How To Become an Advanced WooCommerce Developer?” article, however, themes should NOT come with a /woocommerce folder – instead they should use “hooks” (actions and filters) to amend default WooCommerce plugin layouts and behavior. This is a huge problem for best seller themes and their legacy coding – and also a reason most themes break when you update WooCommerce…

So the question I asked myself was: how can I disable the entire /woocommerce folder (i.e. ALL WooCommerce template overrides) in a given theme or a single template, so that I can use the default WooCommerce ones instead?

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WooCommerce: 5 Ways To Increase B2B Conversions

This is a guest post by Matthew Abdalah of Rumbleship – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

Customers live in a world of digital distractions and the last place you want your customers to be distracted is during checkout.

Consumer ecommerce (B2C, business-to-consumer) has taught the B2B (business-to-business) world a lot about what a distraction-free, conversion-friendly checkout looks like: we should reference these lessons for best practices.

Due to its ubiquity, your wholesale buyers are conditioned to expect a comparable level of service to what they experience on B2C websites such as Amazon and eBay.

Tactics like 30-day terms, free shipping and bulk discounts are some of the techniques referenced in this article but we’ve compiled a few extra ones.

Here are 5 creative ways to reduce wholesale WooCommerce shopping cart abandonment, increase your sales conversion rate and grow your profits. Continue reading WooCommerce: 5 Ways To Increase B2B Conversions

WooCommerce: Exclude Hidden Products from Mini-Cart Counter

When you add a hidden product to Cart, either manually or programmatically, this will be displayed in the Cart, Checkout and Order details pages (I’m not sure why a hidden product behaves like that… but thankfully you can hide hidden products from the Cart/Checkout/Order page with this snippet).

Problem is, even if you hide hidden products from the Cart page, the “Mini-Cart” product counter icon or text (it depends on your theme) will still count them as products (see the screenshot below). So the question is: in conjunction with the snippet aforementioned, how do I exclude hidden products from being counted in the “menu cart” (also called Mini-Cart Widget)? Continue reading WooCommerce: Exclude Hidden Products from Mini-Cart Counter

WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

The most efficient way to turn your restaurant / food business into a money-making machine is to cater to your customer’s needs better than you do now. Supposing you have a modern interior design, tasty food, friendly atmosphere, professional personnel, etc… what else can you do for your business?

You need a bombastic online presence. You need to – maybe – rebuild your restaurant website. Thankfully, if you don’t know much about web design, it’s not a big deal. No need to do anything from scratch nowadays (we entrepreneurs value our time and effort, right?).

If you want to enable online food ordering, sell restaurant gift cards, turn your takeaway into an optimized online booking system, or give online users the freedom to build their custom pizza, it’s time to switch to a WooCommerce theme.

By picking one of the 15 themes described in this article (oh, by the way – here’s the full list of 50+ restaurant WooCommerce themes you can pick), you can immediately take advantage of the most popular ecommerce plugin (WooCommerce) and its free or premium extensions to increase your food business sales and profitability. Continue reading WooCommerce: 15 Best Food & Restaurant Themes

WooCommerce: Remove Mini-Cart Widget Dropdown

Less is more (sometimes). On this same website, I’m already forcing max 1 product in the Cart and automatically redirecting users to Checkout upon add to Cart. On top of that, I’ve disabled WooCommerce cart fragments for performance reasons.

As a result, I definitely don’t need the whole “Mini-Cart Widget Dropdown Content”. To test, try to “hover” onto the shopping cart icon on the top right, and you’ll notice there is no cart dropdown.

Well, this is how it’s done – I love when a complex thing is fixed with one simple line of PHP!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Remove Mini-Cart Widget Dropdown

WooCommerce: Add Product to Cart When Visiting a Specific Page

We’ve already seen how to add a product to cart automatically when a user enters your website. However, I needed a different functionality on this same website, and specifically I wanted a product added to cart only when a user like you visits a specific WordPress page ID.

If you wish to test, go to my free video tutorial page called “How to Customize the WooCommerce Single Product Page“. As soon as the page loads a product is magically added to cart, so that the WooCommerce Checkout on that same page is populated with the hidden item. If you go to my Cart page right after visiting that landing page, you can verify there is a product in there.

So, how did I do it? Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Product to Cart When Visiting a Specific Page

WooCommerce: How to Hide “Shipping Calculator” Fields @ Cart

The “Shipping Calculator” can be enabled via the WooCommerce settings in order to give the user a way to calculate their shipping fees before getting to the Checkout Page. Usually they fill out the country, state, city and postcode form fields and click on “Update Totals” in order to calculate the shipping.

However, what if you only calculate shipping based on country? Or what if you only charge by zip code / postcode? In this case, you will need to hide the input fields you don’t need, and make UX better.

Well, here are some WooCommerce filters you can use from WooCommerce version 3.4 onwards to hide the fields you like (apart from country, which is mandatory).

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WooCommerce: How to Enable Catalog Mode?

One of the most common WooCommerce questions is: can I use WooCommerce to build a catalog of products (without add to cart, price… basically a product gallery)? Using WooCommerce for this case scenario is indeed very helpful – you can make the most of all the inbuilt features such as single product gallery and carousel, image zoom, product description tabs, attributes, categories, tags and related products. Basically a much better version than a standard image gallery.

Another question might be: can I disable the WooCommerce add to cart / cart / checkout functionality until the time I am able to sell my products? This is another common scenario that many WooCommerce store owners require.

Besides, certain products in your WooCommerce website might be for sale and others might not. In this case, you’d want to disable the add to cart functionality from specific categories or products.

Finally, you might want to restrict the cart / checkout functions to logged in, registered users only. This is if you run a wholesale business for example, and wish to hide your prices to the public.

Either way, when the “Add to Cart” button gets hidden, a contact form might be required – this is what I call a “Product Inquiry” form.

Good news is there are snippets and 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.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Enable Catalog Mode?

WooCommerce: Get Order Data (total, items, etc) From $order Object

As a WooCommerce development freelancer, every day I repeat many coding operations that make me waste time. One of them is: “How to get ____ if I have the $order variable/object?“.

For example, “How can I get the order total“? Or “How can I get the order items“? Or maybe the order dates, customer ID, billing info, payment method, order status, and so on… hopefully this article will help you save time as well!

As we’ve seen in other articles, get product info from $product object and get cart info from $cart object, not always you can have direct access to the $order variable.

Sometimes, you may have the $order_id available for example. In that scenario, you can “get” the order object with the wc_get_order WooCommerce function.

It’s also possible to gain $order information if you are in an email template. This can be helpful to show additional $order information in your transactional communications or trigger custom functions. Either way, enjoy!

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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.

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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.

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