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?

WooCommerce: Add an Icon to the Add to Cart Buttons

Ecommerce is all about user experience, and making it easier for people to add to cart and checkout smoothly. Reducing the number of checkout fields is a great idea for example – as well as graphically communicating your number 1 objective: “please add to cart now!”.

So, how do you add an icon (or an HTML symbol) to the add to cart buttons in WooCommerce? This can be done in two ways – via CSS if you want to show Fontawesome Icons or via PHP if you prefer to use a simple HTML unicode symbol.

Let’s take a look at both methods!

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WooCommerce: How to Enable Multi-Currency?

If you got here it’s because you’re looking to increase your sales conversion rate by enabling “Multi-Currency” in your WooCommerce website.

The concept behind the currency switcher is simple: if I’m based in Europe I’d love paying in Euros, while if I were based in US I wouldn’t fancy the same treatment and I’d prefer paying in US Dollars – and so on. The more currencies, the higher your conversion rate.

Unfortunately you can only pick one currency from the WooCommerce settings, so you’ll need a plugin for enabling Multi-Currency. And despite there are many WooCommerce currency switcher plugins out there, there is one that stands out from the crowd.

A good currency switcher plugin for WooCommerce has many requirements. First of all, great support and clean code – when dealing with online payments you have to be sure everything works perfectly and that online customers don’t abandon the checkout. Second, Multi-Currency should work together with geolocation: manually selecting currencies is ok and all, but displaying automatically the correct currency based on IP address is much better UX. Finally, you should have the option of deciding conversion rates yourself or using reliable automatic database checking for daily exchange rate checking.

Thankfully, you can achieve all that with a single plugin.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Enable Multi-Currency?

WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

As a WooCommerce user, WooCommerce blogger and WooCommerce developer I often hear this question: “What’s the best hosting platform for a WooCommerce website?“.

Well, first and foremost, there is no “best” hosting for WooCommerce (and WordPress in general).

There are so many choices out there that defining the “best” is impossible. Besides, if there were a “best” hosting provider, there would be only one hosting company left in business.

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WooCommerce: How to Customize Storefront Theme in a Few Clicks

If your WooCommerce website runs on Storefront theme (same as Business Bloomer), then you probably know it doesn’t come with a lot of customization options.

For developers like me, Storefront theme is ideal: it comes with many “hooks”, so that it’s easy to remove, move or add layout elements within a few lines of PHP.

But for those who do not develop or have no intention to waste time troubleshooting missing commas or fighting with FTP clients, well, there’s a plugin for that. And it’s developed and maintained by WooCommerce itself, so you can’t go wrong with the purchase and you’re guaranteed to have a fully working, up to date piece of software for the long term.

So, here’s a quick overview of what the plugin does. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Display $0.00 Amount For Free Shipping Rates

In the past, WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages used to show “$0.00” beside each free shipping rate. Now, this is gone and WooCommerce only shows the shipping rate name, without the 0 amount.

But given that many freelance clients requested this customization, today we’re bringing this back to life with just a few lines of PHP. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Display $0.00 Amount For Free Shipping Rates

WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

Recently I was on a coaching call with a client and the “Free Sample” challenge came up. Client has 400+ products on the website and had no intention of adding a free variation to each product manually.

So, I promised to myself I was going to study a different approach. And today you get it for free – nice! Needless to say, a comment and a social media share are much appreciated. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Check if Product ID is in the Cart

Here’s the story: I’m working with one of my freelance clients and I need to show certain content in the Checkout (a product-specific “Terms and Conditions”) if such product is in the Cart.

Now, I’ve always looked for products in the Cart by “looping” through the Cart with a foreach (here, for example: Apply a Coupon Programmatically if a Product is in the Cart). But as I said, after some random research, I found out about another magic WooCommerce function: “find_product_in_cart()“. Which means finding a product in the Cart doesn’t require custom loops or complex PHP… it’s just a “one liner”. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce.com is dropping its 50% extension renewals, and moving to a 100% renewal business model.

I found this out at WCEU 2017 and then via WP Tavern. Unfortunately, this announcement is not on WooCommerce blog, on its social media channels or even Automattic.

And yes, this is retroactive – we are now all paying 100% renewals. So, let’s see what I think about this “still not official” news. Continue reading WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce: Force Cart to Specific Amount (Deposit)

Here’s a very simple snippet that achieves a very complex task – what if you wanted to force your Cart to charge a deposit or a fixed fee, no matter the product price?

Well, thankfully WooCommerce is pretty flexible and a lot of workarounds can be found. In this case, forcing the checkout to a fixed amount (e.g. $100) is as simple as applying a negative “cart fee” to make the total become $100.

Sounds like Japanese? Great – here’s why you’re on Business Bloomer. Copy the snippet, apply it to your test WooCommerce site and see the magic happen – without knowing anything about coding!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Force Cart to Specific Amount (Deposit)

WooCommerce: Hide Hidden Products From Cart, Order, Emails

While working on a workaround for a client, I had to hide a hidden product from the cart, checkout, order received and emails. Hidden products already don’t show on the shop and category pages, but they do show on the cart if they’re added to cart “programmatically”.

A tough task, but as usual here I come with the solution 🙂

Continue reading WooCommerce: Hide Hidden Products From Cart, Order, Emails

WooCommerce: Ship to Predefined “Local Pickup” Addresses

WooCommerce Shipping Zones are quite easy to override / customize. With a simple PHP (and jQuery, sometimes) snippet we can accomplish many advanced shipping rules, such as the one we’ll study today.

This time, I’ve tested a snippet to add a dropdown to the billing section where users go choose the pickup destination. As a result, the shipping address is automatically populated, and so is the shipping method. What do you think?

Continue reading WooCommerce: Ship to Predefined “Local Pickup” Addresses

WooCommerce: Add Different Facebook Pixels to Different Pages

Last week a client who was about to carry a Facebook Advertising campaign asked me something pretty interesting. We already saw in the past how to add conversion tracking to the Thank-you page, however this time was slightly different.

My client’s FB consultant required a code for the whole site, another code for the Checkout page only (“user has initiated checkout”), and another one for the Thank-you page (“user has purchased”). So, here’s how I did it. Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Different Facebook Pixels to Different Pages

WooCommerce: 85 Free Plugins for Every Challenge

free woocommerce plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular WordPress plugin for adding eCommerce or cart functionality to a WordPress website. According to recent research by aheadWorks, WooCommerce now accounts for 26.5% of the total eCommerce market share. And recent acquisition by Automattic indicates that it has a great future ahead.

WooCommerce is well known for its huge flexibility and vast customization options. There are hundreds of WooCommerce plugins or Extensions available for extending the functionality. If you want some recommendations in this direction, check out some of the best free WooCommerce plugins (sorted by number of active install).

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WooCommerce: Enable Holiday / Pause / Vacation Mode

Sometimes, just like physical stores, your WooCommerce website may need a few days off!

Nothing special there, as long as online customers are aware of the fact you will be reopening soon.

In WooCommerce words, this means hiding the add to cart buttons (one line of code) and also show a little notice on every WooCommerce page (one simple setting).

Enjoy!

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