WooCommerce Request a Quote: Why Choose “Product Enquiry Pro”?

This is a guest post by Saket Paliwal of Wisdmlabs – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

Quality leads are tough to capture in any business. If you think getting traffic is the hardest part, converting it into sales is a whole other challenge. It’s difficult to identify why a lead might not make a purchase – they might not find what they’re looking for, your product might be too expensive or certain items could be out of stock – you’d never know the exact reason until you hear it from the customers themselves.

In a retail store, here’s where a salesperson would come into the picture. If a customer had a question, they’d just walk up to the salesperson and ask their questions.

On a WooCommerce website, however, you have to make use of contact forms or live chat to “talk” to prospective customers like an in-store salesperson would. These pre-sale questions are barriers to sales. You need to make sure every customer query is resolved if you wish to increase the chances of a purchase. Continue reading WooCommerce Request a Quote: Why Choose “Product Enquiry Pro”?

WooCommerce: Add Checkout Fees Based on Custom Radio Button

This is a great WooCommerce snippet (or plugin, if you wish to call it like that) for those who want to provide conditional checkout fees. For example, you might need to display custom checkout radio buttons to pick premium packaging types, gift wrapping options, specific services or whatever can increase your AOV (Average Order Value).

Radio button selection must work with “Ajax” – which means as soon as the radio button is chosen, checkout must refresh in order to display the updated fees and totals.

Something similar (and also more complex, such as offering additional products) is achieved by the WooCommerce Checkout Add-Ons Plugin sold on the official WooCommerce.com marketplace. But in this case, we want to take a look at custom coding so you’ve got something to play with! Enjoy.

Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Checkout Fees Based on Custom Radio Button

WooCommerce: 10 Best Fashion & Clothing Themes

Maybe this is the right time to update your clothing WooCommerce store and give a more professional look to your fashion business…

Maybe you also want to build custom pages without getting into coding, as default WooCommerce is too “boring”…

Still think your online project requires a fresh hand?

Well, if that’s the case, feel free to keep reading and view my favorite 15 WooCommerce clothing themes. Continue reading WooCommerce: 10 Best Fashion & Clothing Themes

WooCommerce: Display Global Short Description When Empty @ Single Product Page

The WooCommerce product short description is that piece of content that appears on the right hand side of the featured image above the add to cart button. This is, of course, unless you forgot to enter the short description under Product > Edit Product > Short Description!

In case you forgot to enter it or you want to display a global short description, here’s a quick PHP snippet for you. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Display Global Short Description When Empty @ Single Product Page

WooCommerce: How to Create a iOS / Android App?

This is a guest post by Saleeh K. of Appmaker – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

If you own a WooCommerce website, this is the best time to creating an app for your existing and potential customers. According to statista, Google Play store had 3.8M applications and Apple store carried about 2 million apps in Q1 2018. The total app download number was 178+ billion and the same study revealed that this figure will grow to 258 billion by 2022.

While making sure your website is 100% responsive and looks great on mobile phones and small devices, a WooCommerce app can allow your customers to benefit from:

  • faster access
  • personalized content
  • optimized user experience
  • push notifications
  • purchase without logging in
  • better user engagement

However, the major issue faced while getting an app done is definitely its development cost. Right now, hiring a development agency to develop a simple app can cost you USD $5,000-10,000. Apps are not cheap.

Besides, the number of app development agencies is constantly increasing (given the potential earnings and the growing market demand) – and unfortunately the chances you might run into a not-so-professional team of developers are also getting bigger.

Well, have you ever thought of creating an app without worrying about anything (including its price)? The great news is that you can now create a WooCommerce app without any coding skills. And this is exactly what we’ll see in this tutorial. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Create a iOS / Android App?

WooCommerce: How to Improve the Speed of my Store?

This is a guest post by Simon Tomkins of CommerceGurus – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

The speed of your WooCommerce store is incredibly important when it comes to converting visitors into customers. Research has shown that even a one second delay can result in 7% of lost orders.

If your WooCommerce site is making $1,000 per day, that one second delay in load time could potentially cost you $25,000 in annual lost sales – not small change! If you are the lucky owner of Amazon, a one second delay in 2017 could have meant a $178 billions * 0,07 = $12.5 billions loss in net revenue…

Once again, a slow WooCommerce website is costing you money.

I spent a great deal of time researching website speed and performance optimization before creating our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme. Some of the statistics are staggering:

  • 73% of mobile users have abandoned a site due to it taking too long
  • 47% of people expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less
  • 79% of people who encounter a performance issue won’t return again to buy

So, a slow WooCommerce site means unhappy visitors and the loss of potential revenue to competitors.

And today we’ll briefly see what you can do to speed up your WooCommerce website – these are proven performance optimization tricks that can have an immediate impact on your sales conversion rate 🙂

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Improve the Speed of my Store?

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: Get Currently Selected Variation ID

We’ve seen a lot of PHP so far on Business Bloomer – WooCommerce after all is a bunch of PHP files! However, sometimes PHP is just not enough, mostly when you need to work with variable products and the “currently selected variation”.

In fact, WooCommerce uses jQuery (a JavaScript Library) to handle variations on the frontend and show conditional content (variation price, description, add to cart) based on the dropdown selection. So, to detect the current variation ID we must use jQuery as well. Here’s how!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Get Currently Selected Variation ID

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!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Get Order Info (total, items, etc) From $order Object

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 Sell ANYTHING with WordPress (WP Dublin 2018)

I had the pleasure to speak at the Dublin WordPress Meetup in March 2018. The presentation title was “How to Sell A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G with WordPress + WooCommerce”, aimed at both beginners and more advanced designers.

Some of those who are only starting with WordPress didn’t know you can transform ANY WordPress install into an Ecommerce website in a matter of minutes.

Those who are pretty familiar with it, on the other end, they’re maybe entrepreneurs who want to set up a Marketplace, a Membership site, a Classified Ads platform or implement some of those Ecommerce features only Amazon and Ebay seem to be able to code with their million dollar budgets. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Sell ANYTHING with WordPress (WP Dublin 2018)

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!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Multi-Vendor / Marketplace Solutions

WooCommerce: Add Custom Field to Product Variations

Adding and displaying custom fields on WooCommerce products is quite simple. For example, you can add a “RRP/MSRP” field to a product, or maybe use ACF and display its value on the single product page.

Easy, yes. Unfortunately, the above only applies to “simple” products without variations (or the parent product if it’s a variable product). So the question is: how do we add, save and display a custom field for each single variation?

Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Custom Field to Product Variations

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.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How do You Sell Gift Cards / Vouchers?