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 Info (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. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Bulk Edit Products?

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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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: 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?

Continue reading WooCommerce: Top Wishlist Plugins (Screenshots + Features)

WooCommerce: How to Show Product Search Suggestions?

“Ajax Search” (displaying product search suggestions while a WooCommerce user is typing something in the search bar), is a brilliant idea for all of you ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Saving time to a potential customer is your number one goal. Besides, if your website has a lot of traffic, search should be one of your sales propositions (look at Amazon and eBay to see how prominent the search bar is).

Enabling “Ajax Search” in WooCommerce is actually pretty easy. This time, there is no snippet, but a good combination of free and premium plugins that do the job.

Please note – in this article we will be covering the “Ajax Search” plugins and not the product filtering ones, which are fairly different in regard to the functionality they provide.

So, what are the most reliable “Search Suggestion” plugins for WooCommerce?

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WooCommerce: Multi-Vendor / Marketplace Solutions

Building the next Amazon is everyone’s dream.

Allowing sellers to use your online platform to reach wider audiences without holding stock, investing in shipping and warehousing and – let’s be honest – with a few dollars budget… is actually possible in WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce Multi-Vendor/Marketplace scenarios are many – not a surprise. And sometimes, a plugin is all you need to build an Etsy-alike website. Not bad for a small investment – you can focus on the marketing while the WooCommerce plugin does the rest.

However, building a full website, no matter its project specifications, is never easy. Many WooCommerce and ecommerce entrepreneurs underestimate how much work, caution, attention, patience and money are needed to develop an online marketplace.

Nothing is free – if something looks doable with a $79 plugin you also need to consider the cost of time, outsourcing, marketing and third parties (such as picking a reliable hosting).

Anyway, today we’ll take a look at some of the best plugins for turning a WooCommerce website into a multi-vendor marketplace, as well as a simple PHP snippet that might just be enough for you. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How do You Sell Gift Cards / Vouchers?

Let’s be honest – if you run a B2C WooCommerce store and you don’t currently sell gift cards, this is the right time to get started.

If you do a quick Google search about “Gift Card Statistics”, you will probably notice a huge trend: gift card sales are on the rise (we’re talking billions), as well as the percentage of customers spending more money than the redeemed amount.

The good news is – you can enable gift cards with a simple click of a button or, alternatively, purchase a premium plugin to get a more efficient, automated, integrated system.

Either way, there is really no excuse: you should start selling gift cards (or “vouchers”) from today, or at least test it away. Sometimes – trust me – ecommerce marketing is pretty simple: see what works (specifically on Amazon and Alibaba), and copy it.

In this post we will analyze different solutions. We’ll see how to use a simple coupon code (oh yes, you can do that), as well as taking a look at the best free and paid plugins out there.

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WooCommerce: Automatically Update Cart on Quantity Change

There is a lot of literature online that solves this UX problem – so in this article let’s see if I can give you a simplified, working, updated version.

So, do you hate the “Update Cart” button too? Yes, the one you have to click after you update the quantity of a product in the cart…

Well, you’re in the right place: a simple PHP function, two lines of JQuery, one line of CSS (or a mini-plugin) and the result is pretty straight forward!

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WooCommerce: How to Get Customers to Request a Quote?

Not all WooCommerce websites are born equal. Sometimes a price and an add to cart button are just not enough.

B2B platforms, wholesalers and high-ticket businesses are usually quite flexible with their pricing and might need to give customers the freedom to request a quote.

Correct, WooCommerce can be used as a quoting engine as opposed to a standard ecommerce website (or both can be enabled at the same time if there are two different audiences).

As usual, there are different solutions. In this article, we’ll see how to use a simple code snippet to show a contact form on the single product page, we’ll see which free plugins are available on WordPress.org and – of course – we will also take a look at more advanced, premium extensions.

Either way, the beauty about WooCommerce is that with the click of a button you can customize the way it behaves!

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Get Customers to Request a Quote?

WooCommerce: “Is This a Gift?” Checkbox @ Single Product Page

A client of mine asked me to code a checkbox on the single product page called “Is this a gift?”. They noticed that their customers who want to gift the product to a friend get confused with the “Shipping to a different address” form in the WooCommerce checkout.

So, what about renaming “Shipping to a different address” into “Who is this gift for?” if a “gift” is in the cart? Well, this snippet does just that and you can adapt it / customize it to your specific case. Continue reading WooCommerce: “Is This a Gift?” Checkbox @ Single Product Page

WooCommerce: How to Display Variations with Color / Size Buttons?

Displaying product pages nicely is the entrepreneur’s dream.

Good UX means a much higher probability the interested customer is going to add to cart and complete the checkout.

However, WooCommerce variable products come with annoying dropdowns for each attribute (color, size, style, etc. depending on what options you have set up). And as you’ve already got a hint of my personal opinion, dropdowns are UX-killers.

Today, we take a look at handy plugins you can use to display product options (variations) in a user-friendly way. I’ve used these on many websites and they’re pretty reliable. As usual, it’s just the click of a button!

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Display Variations with Color / Size Buttons?

WooCommerce: How to Edit Product Prices in Bulk?

I’m pretty sure that during one of those Black Friday sales all you wanted to do was to apply a bulk discount to your WooCommerce products without having to generate a coupon code.

Let’s not forget that despite coupons are trackable and you can assess your marketing efforts with their usage statistics, requiring the user to take one additional step at checkout (entering the correct coupon code) reduces your sales conversion rate (the same applies with useless checkout fields by the way – less work to do, higher conversion rate).

In today’s post, we’ll see what are the 3 options I recommend in order to apply bulk store discounts. It pretty much depends on your product types (simple vs variable for example) and whether you want to do this via the settings or with a little bit of PHP.

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WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?

Well, get ready for a 2,700+ words article: becoming a WooCommerce expert won’t take you just a couple of days.

A few months won’t be enough either.

If you want to join that very small group of advanced freelancers and agencies that exclusively work with WooCommerce clients and charge top dollar, if you want to become a WooCommerce authority and build a successful career, if you want clients to come to you as opposed to you chasing them, well – you need to digest and assimilate what I’m about to tell you.

In this (long) article I will help you understand what is advanced WooCommerce, and then break this down into 5 simple steps.

Five makes-a-lot-of-sense steps you should follow in order to complete your journey.

So, want to become a WooCommerce ninja? A WooCommerce wrangler? A WooCommerce guru?

Well, despite I dislike all those ninja-like “terms”, let me tell you a thing or two. Then, join me in the comments and let’s keep the conversation going.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?