WooCommerce: Populate Checkout Fields From URL

On top of adding products to cart via URL and redirect to checkout, there is a way to also fill out the Checkout page input fields within the same link.

This could be super handy when you know the billing/shipping details of a registered or guest customer and want to speed up the order process.

It’s important to note that the URL will need to contain personal data e.g. email address, billing address, phone number, and so on; you need to make sure the URL is only shared with the specific customer (in an email, for example, as content is tailored to the subscriber; or only when the WooCommerce customer is logged in if you’re using the URL behind a website button).

Once that’s clear, let’s go ahead, and let’s see how my WooCommerce snippet works. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Flatsome Theme Review

A remarkable and flawless user experience is the key to building a successful online presence for eCommerce businesses. How often do your customers enter your website, get distracted from running other errands, or abandon your store because of confusing age layouts?  

According to the statistics, 38% of site visitors stop engaging with websites due to unattractive content and page layout. Thus, attracting customers’ attention and offering a quality experience through an appealing and intuitive page design is important to ensure customer retention and increase sales.  

And your store’s theme is one important element that helps hold visitors’ interest and assist their page navigation. While you can choose from multiple themes for your WooCommerce website, choosing a multipurpose theme that delivers great performance, offers high customization abilities, and facilitates user experience is what you need to deliver a quality experience. 

This article reviews one such important theme – the Flatsome WordPress theme. We’ll start with its brief overview and see its interface, features, benefits, and cost to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your eCommerce store. Let’s go!

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WooCommerce: How to Send Newsletters to Your Customers

Sending emails (newsletters, broadcasts or similar) to customers is an integral part of a WooCommerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is an outstanding tool that allows you to connect with your customers, keep them informed about your products, services, or discounts, get them to return to your site, and drive new sales. 

Unlike other popular channels, like social media – emails provide a personal touch and let you reach your target consumers directly in their inboxes. Statistics suggest that while 87% of B2B marketers leverage email as a distribution channel – 79% of B2C marketers use emails to promote their new blog posts and articles. 

And one such critical email marketing solution is email newsletters. They are extremely beneficial to stay in touch and build trustworthy relationships with existing and potential customers. 

So, if you’re looking for solutions to send automated newsletters to your WooCommerce customers – you’re at the right place. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of actually sending newsletters. 

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WooCommerce: File Upload Plugins For Order Personalization

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a WooCommerce store owner is offering limited product customization abilities. Product personalization is a critical component of online shopping that helps provide a better customer experience and results in a high retention rate.

75% of customers appreciate businesses that offer personalized offerings, and a Deloitte consumer review suggests that 1 in every 5 customers are willing to pay 20% more for a custom-designed and personalized product. 

A great way to do this is by offering an image upload solution for products for your customers to improve customer satisfaction and generate more revenue for your store. 

This article shows the top solutions that make uploading images for products for customers a breeze and enhance their customization abilities. But before we get into them, let’s look at more benefits of offering this capability in your store and how it affects your business bottom line. 

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WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today. 

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation. 

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions. 

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability. 

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

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WooCommerce: 10 Most Popular Free Plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to launch your online business, build high-functionality online stores for your clients, or take your brick-and-mortar store online.  

Powering over 28.19% of all online stores, WooCommerce’s versatility and open-source nature allow businesses to build their dream store, add unlimited products and consumers, take orders, and increase sales.

The core WooCommerce plugin holds 68% of the usage distribution – the highest on the internet. However, despite its popularity, the official WooCommerce plugin lacks several features you might need for your eCommerce store. But to make up for that, it offers several plugins that allow you to enhance your store’s functionality and improve customer experience. 

But choosing from over 4228 WooCommerce plugins from WordPress.org can get overwhelming. So, to make your job easier, we’ve hand-picked the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use on your store to take it to the next level. Let’s dive in!

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WooCommerce: Enable Advanced Coupon Features

While as a WooCommerce store owner, you keep looking for ways to increase your store’s sales and revenue – the same way, your customers also consistently look for opportunities to save money when purchasing online.  

And in this situation, offering coupons and discounts acts as a win-win for your business and customers. 

Statistics suggest that 51% of U.S. buyers search for coupons online before making an online purchase, and over 80% of millennials use coupon codes when shopping online. 

Every online shopper loves a good deal. You can tap into this consumer behavior to attract buyers and increase sales through coupons on your WooCommerce store. 

So, in this article, we see the top WooCommerce coupon plugins you can use. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of offering coupons to your customers. 

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WooCommerce: How to Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay

Not offering different payment options for your customers on your WooCommerce store is a call for a high cart abandonment rate and lost sales and customers. 

Your store’s payment gateway has a direct impact on the customers’ buying decisions. Don’t take our word for it – statistics suggest missing payment methods is the reason for 7% of cart abandonments in eCommerce stores. 

As a result, the more payment options you offer to your customers – the more sales you can win for your store. 

Besides PayPal and credit cards – digital and UPI mobile payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay are amongst the most popular and widely adopted payment methods by customers. Statistics anticipate that from 2021 to 2025 – the number of mobile proximity payment users in the United States to grow from 100 million to a whopping 125 million.

Thus, as customers become increasingly reliant on mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay and Google Pay – it’s important to integrate these payment options in your WooCommerce store to ensure high customer satisfaction.

So, in this article, we share the top ways to configure Google Pay and Apple Pay in WooCommerce. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of this configuration for your store. 

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WooCommerce: Which PayPal Gateway Plugin is Better?

As a WooCommerce store owner, providing multiple payment gateway options to your customers is more than necessary to ensure high customer satisfaction. And one of the most widely accepted payment systems is PayPal. 

You don’t have to take our word for it – research suggests customers are 54% more likely to purchase your products and services if you accept PayPal payments in your store. So, the potential loss of customers and sales is significant if you don’t accept PayPal payments in your online store. 

PayPal lets you accept debit cards, credit cards, and even money through the wallet. Many businesses rely on it as customers have a lot of trust in the PayPal brand.

However, despite being an excellent payment gateway, enabling PayPal on your WooCommerce store and making it work as intended isn’t always easy, considering frequent PayPal checkout errors and the fact that the most popular WooCommerce PayPal plugin is no longer supported

To tackle these issues, we share the top WooCommerce PayPal plugins you can use in this article. These plugins will eliminate checkout errors and ensure high customer satisfaction. But first, let’s understand why using the official WooCommerce PayPal plugin is no longer the right choice. 

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WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Shopify and WooCommerce are top of mind for any business owner considering ecommerce for the first time. These ecommerce platforms are convenient and easy to use; however, each comes with its own pros and cons.  

While Shopify offers ecommerce infrastructure as a service, powering 1% of all websites, WooCommerce is open-source and grants users more flexibility, powering 4.9% of all websites

So, while each platform comes with its own strengths and limitations, choosing the one that suits your needs and provides the features you require is important. Here are some of the key factors you need to consider when determining the right platform for your business: 

  • Ease of use 
  • Budget
  • Payment methods & checkout experience
  • Scalability 
  • Integration options

In this article, we’ll cover the essential factors mentioned above to help you determine which ecommerce solution is best suited for your business requirements. But first, let’s begin with a quick overview of both ecommerce platforms.

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WooCommerce: How to Enable Distraction-free Checkout

It’s always a sign of success when customers show interest in your products, add them to their carts, and proceed to checkout. But what’s the point if they drop off and leave your site in the middle of the checkout process? Unfortunately, cart abandonment is common, and one of the major reasons behind incomplete purchases is a complicated and distractive checkout procedure. 

According to the Baymard Institute research, 26% of online shoppers abandon the carts because of too complicated or too long of a checkout process, significantly impacting the eCommerce sales and revenue – losing $18 billion annually, to be precise. 

Losing valuable customers and such a tremendous amount of revenue is no joke – and one of the best ways to prevent this situation is by redesigning the WooCommerce checkout.     

The idea is to remove as much clutter and distractions through the checkout procedure – so customers can focus on completing the checkout entirely and end up buying your products. 

But first, let’s understand the use of these plugins and how they help your WooCommerce store and eCommerce business. 

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WooCommerce: How to Add Breadcrumbs

Ensuring a positive customer experience has become the top priority of eCommerce businesses in 2022 – even overtaking product price and quality as a key brand differentiator according to some analysts.

And one of the most important factors that ensure a positive customer experience is intuitive and seamless website navigation. According to Top Design Firm’s 2021 findings, 38% of customers look for the page’s navigational links and layout when visiting the site for the first time.   

So, if your WooCommerce store has a confusing layout or difficult-to-find navigation links and menus, visitors may abandon your store even if you have exactly what they are looking for.

This is when breadcrumbs come into play. Breadcrumbs are website navigational links that appear at the top of your WooCommerce store, product pages, and blog posts. Enabling breadcrumbs makes it easier and quicker for your customers to move around and navigate through your WooCommerce store and find the page or products they’re looking for. 

This article shares how you can add breadcrumbs to your WooCommerce store. But before getting into it, let’s see how your store can benefit by adding breadcrumbs. 

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WooCommerce: How To Migrate From Shopify

WooCommerce and Shopify are two of the greatest and most popular eCommerce platforms that allow you to create your online store and generate significant income. 

However, as businesses grow – the need for a customizable, flexible, and feature-packed eCommerce platform that offers better control arises. And this is why some entrepreneurs migrate their online store from Shopify to WooCommerce. 

Approximately 29% of all online stores use WooCommerce, signifying the sheer popularity of WooCommerce. However, there are still many merchants out there who are not using WooCommerce but have every reason to. The only problem is that switching eCommerce platforms and migrating your store’s products, orders, and customers requires the utmost care and precision to prevent data losses and ensure a smooth migrating process. 

So, if you wish to switch your eCommerce platform and sell your products through WooCommerce – this article is for you. In this article, we share some plugins you can use to migrate your store from Shopify to WooCommerce with ease. 

But first, let’s look at some reasons and benefits behind considering Shopify to WooCommerce migration. 

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WooCommerce: How to Create A Private Store

WooCommerce powers over 26% of global eCommerce websites and is an excellent and convenient way to create your online shop without writing a single line of code.  

But besides its convenience – another factor that makes WooCommerce a popular choice is its flexibility. While the core WooCommerce installation helps you create a basic online store with ease – specific paid WooCommerce plugins make it easy to create a customized and ideal business model of your choice. 

For instance, several businesses prefer a private WooCommerce store model to grant access or sell products and services to specific customers and hide from the others. This is where a private store for WooCommerce plugins comes into the picture. 

A great example is Oriflame – a direct sales leading beauty company that sells products for everyone and reserves some for specific VIP members on their website. They offer benefits like exclusive discounts, access to a complete range of products, and fast delivery to these VIP members. 

There can be multiple other reasons behind creating a private WooCommerce store. In this article, we’ll briefly touch on those reasons and share some of the best WooCommerce private store plugins you can use for your WooCommerce store. Let’s go!

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WooCommerce: How to Get Started with WooCommerce Blocks – PART 2

WooCommerce is one of the leading eCommerce platforms marking its territory in the eCommerce industry one website at a time – with over 5 million downloads. It offers a complete online store solution for small and medium-sized businesses and web professionals.       

And now, the development team is working at making WooCommerce fully compatible with Gutenberg. And the first phase is about building custom WooCommerce Blocks that can be used in the new WordPress editor.

These blocks come free of cost and let you customize and change the complete look and feel of your WooCommerce store – without typing a single line of code. With a simple drag and drop tool – you can place your store products wherever on the website in whichever desired format.

In part 1 of this article we saw ten WooCommerce blocks and their significance. In this article, we’ll talk about ten more blocks you can use for an interactive online store. But first, let’s learn about adding and editing these blocks on your store. 

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WooCommerce: How to Get Started with WooCommerce Blocks – PART 1

Since WordPress 5.0, the default page/post editor has been completely redeveloped. Surely, you’ve heard about Gutenberg.

Bad news is that WooCommerce joined the new editing experience much more slowly, and there are still major things to develop in order to make it Gutenberg-friendly.

The compatibility progress can be tracked via the WooCommerce Blocks official plugin, which states “You can use this plugin if you want access to all the available blocks for WooCommerce – including experimental ones. Our current “stable” blocks are bundled into WooCommerce, and can be added from the “WooCommerce” section in the block inserter“, because you can find their “beta” blocks in there, those they call “experimental” and that will be officially released into WooCommerce once they are approved.

In this article, we’ll specifically dive deep into WooCommerce Blocks – what they are, why they’re important, how many blocks are available, and how you can use them. 

Since this is a huge topic – we have twenty WooCommerce Blocks to cover – we’re dividing it into two parts. This article will evaluate the first ten Blocks you can use in your store. But first, let’s identify what WooCommerce blocks are and investigate why they are so important.

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WooCommerce: Recover $$$ With a Cart Abandonment Plugin

Imagine having a customer who spends ages looking through your online store, adds several products to their cart – only to abandon the order at the last step. Frustrating, right?

Abandoned carts are a significant problem for eCommerce store owners. In fact, research suggests the average cart abandonment rate is nearly 70%. This means that 7 in 10 customers abandon shopping carts, leading to a loss in sales and revenue for businesses. 

But what if there was a way around this? 

Using WooCommerce abandoned cart recovery plugins, you can engage visitors even after they’ve abandoned their carts and left your store to convert them into customers.

In this article, we’ll explore the best plugins for abandoned cart recovery. But first, let’s understand how these plugins work and why you should use them. 

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WooCommerce: Save $$$ With Plugin Bundles

When creating and designing an ecommerce store, WooCommerce plugins are an excellent way to add new features and functionalities. But the struggle to find the right, suitable, and affordable plugins can be taxing and time-consuming – especially when there are so many to choose from. 

With such an overwhelming choice of plugins, purchasing and using them individually can get expensive as they often come with subscription fees.

On top of that, using too many plugins from different vendors can cause compatibility issues; not all WooCommerce extensions work flawlessly together, especially from different plugin developers. 

Besides, too many (bloated) plugins can slow down your website and have a negative impact on search engine rankings.

To avoid these issues altogether, some vendors offer “plugin bundles” or “club subscriptions”: with a single subscription you can get access to several, distinct WooCommerce plugins all at once – without compromising your store’s performance and safety or burning a hole in your pocket. 

So, let’s look at the top WooCommerce plugin bundles vendors and see if you can create a fully-functioning ecommerce store with a single purchase.

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