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!

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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.

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

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: Turn Checkout Field Into a Drop-down

Talking about UX optimization, the WooCommerce checkout is where you should focus most of your time. Shopping cart abandonment is a huge issue – think about hidden charges, lack of payment methods, checkout bugs and, also, too many checkout fields to fill out manually.

Today, we will see how to turn a checkout text field into a select dropdown. Why not let customers pick from a list instead of typing in? Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Turn Checkout Field Into a Drop-down

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.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Edit Product Prices in Bulk?

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: Assign Free Shipping to a Single Product

Believe it or not, the answer to this very frequent question is inside the WooCommerce settings… so don’t worry too much about coding if you’re not a developer or purchasing yet another premium WooCommerce plugin!

From the WooCommerce shipping rates, you can select “Free Shipping” as a method but that would apply to ALL products – so how do you override the shipping settings and allow a single product to have free shipping, while keeping all the others on a Flat rate?

Continue reading WooCommerce: Assign Free Shipping to a Single Product

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.

Continue reading WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

WooCommerce: Check if Product Category is in the Order

We already saw how to check if a product category is in the cart, if a product ID is in the cart, and if a product ID is in the order… now it’s time to complete the series with the latest addition!

For this client, the scope was to do something on the “Thank You” page if a certain product category was purchased. For example, echo a “Thank you for becoming a member!” image in case the category “membership” was in the order.

Here’s the snippet, together with PHP comments so that you can understand how this is done. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Check if Product Category is in the Order

WooCommerce: Per-Product Terms & Conditions @ Checkout

A freelance client sells two distinct products on the same website: a membership and an online course. Two different audiences, different formats and… different Terms & Conditions.

The goal was therefore to display the “Terms & Conditions” checkbox on the Checkout page based on the product in the cart. Once again, we’re going to use Conditional Logic. With that, the snippet is pretty easy to code!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Per-Product Terms & Conditions @ Checkout

WooCommerce: Get Product Data (ID, SKU, $) From $product Object

I’ve been wanting to publish this guide for a long while. As a WooCommerce development freelancer, every day I repeat many operations that make me waste time… and one of them is indeed “How to get ____ if I have the $product variable/object?“.

For example, “How can I get the product SKU“? Or “How can I get the product short description“? Or maybe the product stock level, shipping class, tax class, price, regular price, sale price, and so on… hopefully this article will save you time.

Of course, not always you have access to the $product global – but you may know the $product_id. In this case, you can use the wc_get_product WooCommerce function to calculate the $product object – you find this case scenario below.

Other examples might be the order or the cart page. Once again, in here you don’t really have a $product available, so you have to loop through the order/cart items and “get” it. After that, you can then calculate and get any piece of information you require out of $product. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce Checkout Fields Customization Guide

Checkout page plays a huge role in your eCommerce success. It is one of the most important part of your conversion funnel. This is the page that brings revenue.

It doesn’t matter how many people are visiting your website if no one makes any purchase. Complicated checkout process is one of the main reason of high shopping cart abandonment.

You should always look for ways to make your checkout process as simple as possible. If you are using WooCommerce as your eCommerce solution you can easily change the checkout page design, remove or change the existing checkout fields order.

Continue reading WooCommerce Checkout Fields Customization Guide

WooCommerce: “Buy One Get One” (BOGO)

Case scenario: if you add a product ID to cart with a specific, you want another product automatically added to cart (Buy One Get One, or “BOGO”).

This second product should have price = 0 if you wish to completely give it away, or maybe a set sale price. It should also be set to “hidden” because maybe you want to hide this free product from the shop and only gift it when the first one is added to Cart.

Also, if you remove product 1, the gifted product should go away from the Cart too. So here follows the PHP snippet of course!

Continue reading WooCommerce: “Buy One Get One” (BOGO)