WooCommerce: Top Checkout Field Editor Plugins

If you haven’t thought about checkout page customization before, perhaps it’s time to start doing so. 

There’s no question that it’s a hot topic in the WooCommerce community since, admittedly, the default checkout page leaves a lot to be desired.

You don’t want to be behind the curve. Here at Business Bloomer, Rodolfo has put out 90+ different checkout page snippets that have been eagerly lapped up by the WooCommerce developer and merchant community. Seriously, these are some of our most widely read and engaged posts. 

But in addition to snippets, it’s worth checking out some checkout field editor plugins. Sometimes, instead of a specific tool with a narrow focus, you need a Swiss army knife. Think of snippets as the tools, and checkout field editors as the Swiss army knife.

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WooCommerce: Exploring the Codebase

WooCommerce codebase

WooCommerce is a plugin with a large and complicated codebase.

If you’re a developer, understanding the underlying code in detail is hugely beneficial, and will almost certainly pay dividends in the long term.

If you can write a bit of PHP (most of Business Bloomer is made of PHP Snippets), you definitely need to search the core every now and then. Otherwise, Stackoverflow won’t be sufficient on its own.

If you happened to see and use the WooCommerce Visual Hook Guides such as the one for the Single Product Page, well, those are simply generated (manually…) from the code itself by executing many PHP searches. I personally keep a copy of the latest plugin files in my PC downloads, so that I can always search through it when looking for a hook or a specific function.

So, follow along with me in this article as we explore the WooCommerce codebase, how it’s structured, and some of its inner secrets!

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WooCommerce: Top Product Recommendation Plugins

If you’re running an ecommerce site and haven’t spent any time thinking about the product recommendation experience your customers are having, then it’s incumbent on you to start doing so immediately.

Just think where Amazon would be without its robust recommendation engine. Certainly not where it is today.

You might not be able to make recommendations as precise as those of Amazon (that’s almost a certainty when you lack access to the mountains of data Amazon is harvesting to make ever-relevant suggestions), but you might as well work with what you have.

What you have, after all, as a merchant using the WooCommerce platform, is the fruits of countless hours of labor spent on all manner of tools and plugins, including those focused on (no surprise!) product recommendations. 

Product recommendations can come in many forms. There is upselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is more expensive than that being purchased; there is downselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is cheaper than that being purchased; and there is cross-selling, which involves attempting to sell a product around the same price as that being purchased.

Upsells, downsells, and cross-sells typically take place during the checkout or post-checkout process. It is assumed that one or more items are already in the cart by the time the product recommendation is made. To be sure, there are many plugins that perform this sort of function, most famously CartFlows. However, in this blogpost, we are not so concerned with these kinds of product recommendation tools. Instead, we will focus our attention on those plugins that let merchants make recommendations on product and cart pages, regardless of whether the shopper has loaded the cart with anything. 

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WooCommerce: Top 10+ Bookstore Themes

For book enthusiasts, a bookstore is a fantastic business concept. Thanks to technological advancements, you can establish your bookstore online. This implies that your shop will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As a result, you will be able to contact individuals who live outside of your local area. Today we are going to speak about 10+ bookstore WooCommerce themes that might assist you in this challenge.

There are multiple steps to go through before launching a bookstore on the Internet. These include learning more about your target audience, listing your books, choosing fulfillment services, and others. Another aspect that requires special attention is identifying the best eCommerce platform for your goals. Why do we think that WooCommerce can become your incredible helper? Let us find out all the reasons to take advantage of this platform.

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WooCommerce: Check If Product Belongs to Category / Tag

We’ve studied “conditional logic” extensively over the previous Business Bloomer posts. In today’s spin-off, I want to clarify how you can check if a given product belongs to a category, tag or custom taxonomy because this is one of the most used conditional logic scenarios.

It’s important to know that a product can be inside the “loop” (e.g. the shop page or a list of products), alternatively you may be on the single product page or have the product unique ID, or even you can check if a product category is inside the Cart. Finally, you can even run the product category check within an Order or an Order Email.

Either way, the function is always the same. You simply need to understand how to use it. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How to Install PeachPay in Minutes

You build your online eCommerce store, optimize it to drive conversions, and manage it exceptionally well to deliver quality performance to your customers. However, despite these efforts – over half of your website visitors don’t complete the checkout process and abandon your store without making a purchase. 

So, when you’re so close to making a sale, what makes customers leave your store? While there can be many reasons, one of the most common is a long checkout process. 

Forter’s statistics suggest that around 50% of customers may abandon their shopping carts if the checkout takes longer than 30 seconds. 

The solution? PeachPay for WooCommerce. 

PeachPay provides a one-click checkout experience – making checkout less cumbersome and increasing conversions to your store. In addition, it allows repeat customers to checkout with a single click – thus enhancing customer convenience. Learn more about PeachPay’s one-click checkout here: WooCommerce: The Elusive Nature of 1-Click Checkout

This article shares a step-by-step process to install PeachPay on your WooCommerce store. But first, let’s take a brief look over its key features. 

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WooCommerce: Show Shipping Rates @ Single Product Page

Here’s a way to print shipping zones and rates on the single product page, so that users know how much they’ll end up spending once they reach the Cart/Checkout and there are no “hidden” fees. Not bad for some transparency = better sales conversion rate!

In this tutorial we will first see how to get the default “WooCommerce Shipping Zones Data” and in a second snippet we will instead see how to get the info for each vendor instead.

Either way, enjoy!

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WooCommerce Database Explained: How It Works and Where To Find Data

The term “database” is widely used and known to millions of people, but the proportion of people who have it in their vocabulary without understanding what it describes is sizable.

Databases are at the core of so many digital services today that it is easy to overlook them entirely, but whether you run a shopping site or a business server, building an understanding of them is worthwhile regardless of whether or not you are directly responsible for administration duties.

Having a grasp of the underpinnings of what a database is and how it works is sensible, especially if you run a WooCommerce site and you want to make optimal use of all that this platform has to offer.

To that end, here is an overview of the database fundamentals to bring you up to speed.

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WooCommerce: Exclude Product From Discount Coupons

WooCommerce coupon settings allow you to define allowed products (or product categories). What’s missing, however, is the other way around: how to set up a product so that it can never be discounted?

Thankfully, a handy WooCommerce filter comes to the rescue (“woocommerce_coupon_is_valid_for_product“) and we can therefore make all coupons “invalid” when a given product is in the cart. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: The Elusive Nature of 1-Click Checkout

Increasing sales and conversion rates is one of the major goals of every eCommerce store owner. However, it’s no secret that you can only achieve it by attaining a peak level of user and customer experience. 

While at the beginning of the dot com online shopping era, customers were elated with the mere fact that they could buy anything they desired from the comfort of their homes – no matter the payment method or how long the delivery takes. Customers today are very particular about their preferences and expectations – especially when it comes to checkout. 

Checkout is an essential factor in improving customer experience as it’s where your customers finalize their sales and pay for the products or services you offer. For example, Amazon – one of the biggest eCommerce giants, provides an optimal and one-click checkout experience to its customers. 

While many eCommerce companies still cling to the multi-step checkout process – one-click checkout delivers simplicity and speed in the customer checkout process. The key is to make checkouts smooth and quick – eliminating the hassle of entering card details repeatedly for your customers. Out of 69.80% of cart abandonment rate – 18% of customers abandon their carts because of a long and complicated checkout process. 

The solution? PeachPay, the one-stop-shop checkout & payment plugin for WooCommerce

An instant and less complicated checkout process significantly impacts conversion rates and boosts your sales. So, in this article, we’ll see how you can use and enable PeachPay – an excellent WooCommerce-funded checkout & payment plugin, to boost conversions and sales. 

But first, let’s quickly see how a one-click checkout solution will benefit your WooCommerce store. 

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WooCommerce: Move Email Field to Top @ Checkout

This tutorial is a spin-off of a previous article (WooCommerce: Move / Reorder Checkout Fields) as I feel there is a huge boost of requests for this task alone.

Moving the billing email field to the top of the WooCommerce checkout gives you many benefits: because it’s the first field customers need to fill out, you can capture their email address (upon marketing permission) and send them cart reminders, feedback requests and similar if they do not complete the checkout.

Also, having the email first can make you save time in case the user is already registered, and you could save them time while checking this against the list of customers, so a prompt can be displayed to load all their billing/shipping details for example.

Either way, it’s super easy to move the email field to the top. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Multiple Stripe Accounts (Solved)

The WooCommerce plugin fully integrates with the WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway plugin, developed by Automattic itself. With this free plugin, Stripe payment gateway can be enabled via the WooCommerce settings and once your Stripe “Live Publishable Key” and “Live Secret Key” are set, your WooCommerce shop is ready to take credit card payments powered by Stripe.

Now, there is some documentation online which explains, with a little bit of code, how to switch Stripe account programmatically and conditionally i.e. for a given product ID or product category slug – same as what we’ve seen recently with PayPal Standard (here’s the tutorial for using different PayPal accounts inside a single WooCommerce installation). For example, you may want to use a Stripe account for digital sales and a different one for physical products.

Unlike PayPal Standard, however, online documentation and snippets are quite out of date and require, often, to create a custom Class which is always a difficult task in PHP programming. Thankfully, there are new WooCommerce Stripe hooks and therefore it’s possible to use different / multiple Stripe accounts in a single WooCommerce installation.

Please read the disclaimer below and – only then – enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Get Total Spent By Customer

Enabling WooCommerce functionalities only if a “user spent more than X” is not unusual. For example, you may want to display banners, special offers, discounted prices, conditional content to customers who have purchased more than a given dollar threshold.

While coding a function that could get the total spent by a user ID, I stumbled upon a WooCommerce function that already achieves that, out of the box: wc_get_customer_total_spent( $user_id ).

You can use it as a conditional tag and run a function only when such threshold is reached. So, let’s see how to use it. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Hide Product Price & Stock From Google

The WooCommerce Plugin is also developed with SEO in mind and provides your website with the schema markup for products (as well as other microdata useful for search engines).

This means by default your products are going to show on Google together with other data such as review stars, stock status, number of reviews and – you saw that coming – the product price.

In certain case scenario, however, you may want to hide WooCommerce product prices from Google search results (and all the other search engines of course). For example, because your prices are only visible to logged in users; or maybe because you don’t want to display your prices until potential customers go to your website and read all the product benefits as opposed to having them make a price-only decision.

Either way, let’s see how it’s done. And once again, it’s one line of code. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Multiple PayPal Accounts (Solved)

The WooCommerce plugin comes with its own free version of PayPal Standard. PayPal can be enabled via the WooCommerce settings and once your PayPal email is entered your WooCommerce shop is ready to take PayPal payments.

Now, there is extensive documentation online which explains, with a little bit of code, how to switch PayPal account programmatically and conditionally i.e. for a given product ID or product category slug. For example, you may want to use a PayPal account for consulting services, another for online courses and another for physical products.

By adding this simple code and hooking into woocommerce_paypal_args is indeed possible to use different / multiple PayPal Standard accounts in a single WooCommerce installation.

However, there is an outstanding problem with “IPN Validation“: once you tell WooCommerce to use a different PayPal email account, the WooCommerce order is correctly placed, but its status goes “on hold” because IPN validation on the PayPal end fails (and that’s because you’re using a different PayPal account).

So, here’s the fully working version, included the IPN validation fix. Please read the disclaimer below and – only then – enjoy!

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WooCommerce Wholesale Prices: Plugins, Setup, Tips and Snippets

If you’re setting up a wholesale store for your business or for your clients, WooCommerce is a great choice! It’s free, open-source, powerful, and growing in popularity.

However, many important wholesale functions are missing, and that’s particularly important when it comes to wholesale pricing. Let’s explore how we can set up complex pricing in WooCommerce, and in detail:

  • Setting up different prices for different users
  • Tiered pricing and pricing table
  • Bulk pricing and discounts
  • Discounts by quantity or order value

Each functionality can be added via a free or premium plugin or, if you’re familiar with PHP, even by code. Either way, this article will feature one of the many options available.

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WooCommerce: 5 Plugins That Will Increase Your Conversions

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to look out for when running an online store. 

Once you have your store all set up and start attracting traffic to your site through SEO and paid advertising, it’s now time to look at how many of your store’s visitors are converting. 

Let’s step back for a moment and take a look at what a conversion is, anyway? Conversion happens when a prospect does what you want them to do. 

If the purpose of a page is to get the email address of the visitor, you’ll have a successful conversion when a visitor lands on your page and drops their email address. 

In terms of eCommerce, conversions usually refer to the event when a visitor buys your products and completes the checkout process. Or simply put, it means a big, fat sale.

If you thought attracting people to your site was enough to persuade them to buy your products, well, you’re seriously mistaken. It turns out that the average conversion rate in eCommerce is only 1-2%. So, even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll be closing the deal only 2% of the time. 

That means every little bit matters. 

In this difficult territory of getting people to convert, comes a list of growth-hacking and optimization plugins for WooCommerce that will put your store’s conversions on fire. 

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WooCommerce: CodeLobster, Probably The Best Code Editor

Codelobster

Ecommerce sites are the most dynamic kind of websites. After the launch of the site, development does not stop and elaboration is ongoing. Many businesses just can’t sell their products without the help of programmers.

If you already have PHP programming skills and an understanding of WordPress principles, this article will give you a head start on how you can optimize your coding flow.

Specifically, we will look at the popular WooCommerce plugin and show you how to code effectively with it in CodeLobster IDE, a code editor that is much more complex than NotePad++ or Atom, and that’s because it’s optimized and developed with WordPress and WooCommerce in mind.

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WooCommerce: How to Customize Checkout For Conversions

I had the honor to speak at WCEU 2020 thanks to WooCommerce, who hosted me in their Sponsor track. It was a short and sweet lightning talk on the first day (Friday), called “Customizing The WooCommerce Checkout To Improve Conversions“, followed by a live coding session on Saturday.

Here’s the video recording of the lightning talk, as well as a few PHP and CSS snippets you can copy/paste to improve your WooCommerce Checkout and immediately expect an increase in conversion rate. So, enjoy the video and then go test the snippets you find below!

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