WooCommerce: How To Flip Product Images On Hover

Product images on your WooCommerce website play a significant role in increasing clicks and conversions. In fact, research suggests that 87.6% of customers consider the product image as the key component of their shopping experience.      

Naturally, any consumer who clicks on the product card first sees and goes through the product image. After that, they check for the size availability and read the product description, customer ratings, reviews, or technical specifications. 

While installing WooCommerce will help you with the basic setup of your eCommerce store – with minimal image settings and a simple product gallery, you’ll need to look for better ways to boost your product images. 

So, considering the effective role product images play in eCommerce sales, the question is – how can you maximize their potential and deliver an excellent customer experience? 

One way to do this is through the WooCommerce image swap / flip plugins. These plugins let you add a hover effect on your product images to flip or change them. By doing this, you’ll be able to display additional variations of your products, allow customers to preview products right from the category page and keep customers in your store longer by offering them an enjoyable browsing experience.

The product image swap/flip plugins for WooCommerce help stores in several other ways. But first, let’s understand their importance and get a clear picture of their functionality. 

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WooCommerce: How to Leverage Instagram to Get More Sales

Once you’ve got your WooCommerce store up and running, the next important step is to promote it – so you can reach your target group and maximize your sales and revenue. 

And Instagram is an excellent platform for businesses like you to showcase their products, different use cases, and customer reviews. 

That’s not it. Whether you’re planning to start an Instagram page for your store or already have one, you can increase the impact of your Instagram content – by using social media feed plugins

Allowing you to display Instagram posts on your website, these plugins take Instagram’s power to highlight your store and products to boost your sales up a notch. 

This article will explore five such plugins that will help you add content from Instagram to your website and use it to its full potential. But first, let’s understand what social media feed plugins do and how they can help you. 

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WooCommerce: How To Sell Restaurant Food Online

The COVID-19 pandemic has made millions of restaurants around the globe shut their doors and adapt to a different and much more convenient way of doing business – accelerating the online restaurant ordering system. 

Several third-party services like Uber Eats and Grubhub can help you get your restaurant menu online and take online food orders. However, their downside is that they come with a huge cost – and cut 20-30% from your earnings. Plus, they also come with a lack of control and access over your listing, user-friendliness, and menu design. 

Enter WooCommerce restaurant plugins. 

While the process of setting up your own online food delivery system may seem taxing – WooCommerce restaurant plugins make it easy and affordable with their quick setup, ease of management, and high versatility and customizability.  

Ciao Italia Ristorante, an Italian restaurant in the US, made the most out of WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Plugin in the pandemic to let their customers order food from their homes and leverage curbside pickup. The plugin allowed them to design a one-page food ordering form – making food ordering and checkout quick and easy for their customers. 

Adam Tracksler, who developed the website, said they launched on day one, and the plugin allowed them to focus on the design and get their restaurant going and website running quickly amidst the pandemic – boosting revenue and saving infrastructure costs. 

Several other restaurants around the globe today use WooCommerce restaurant plugins to offer a comfortable and fast order and checkout process for customers and eliminate the need to pay a major chunk of their hard-earned money to third-party services

Let’s explore some of the best WooCommerce restaurant plugins to help you get 100% of your revenue straight from the customers and boost your business revenue. 

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WooCommerce: How to Sell Online Courses

eLearning has become the “new normal” since the pandemic, as the number of course creators has increased and the demand for online learning has expanded.

Compared to one-on-one tutoring, which has an 8-10% retention rate, eLearning has an exceptional retention rate of  25-60%. A significant reason behind this is the control and flexibility it offers people over where, when, how, and what they want to learn. 

If you’re someone who owns an eLearning website, one thing that can make you significantly stand out, get more customers, and drive referrals is – offering the best learning experience to your audience.  

However, it’s not that easy. From building effective courses, and updating modules and lessons to ensuring an excellent and user-friendly interface with round-the-clock customer support – handling everything manually is challenging. 

Enter WooCommerce Learning Management System (LMS) plugins. 

These plugins help you design courses professionally and improve the learning experience through advanced features, functionalities, and customizations that best suit your course and your audience’s needs.

We’ve done the legwork for you and compiled a list of the top four WooCommerce LMS plugins that will help you build and manage your online courses seamlessly, offering a truly immersive learning experience to your audience. But first, let’s quickly understand what WooCommerce LMS plugins are and how they work.

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WooCommerce Product Search Plugins to Enhance Customer Experience

Say you’re at a clothing store. You know exactly what you want to buy but have to go through the store’s entire catalog to find the product. Sounds like a pointless hassle, right?

Now imagine you had a salesperson to assist you. They’d ask you a few questions – What are you looking for? What’s your budget? What size and color do you want? – and voila, you’ll get just what you wanted. 

This is exactly what a product search feature on your store can do for your customers. 

Product search allows customers to find items they’re looking for faster, improving their experience at your store and increasing the chances of a sale. 

Now, if you have a small WooCommerce store with a handful of products, navigating your website and finding products will be fairly easy. 

But if you offer a wide variety of products spread across categories, product search becomes an essential feature. 

Given its importance, WooCommerce comes with a default search form, which is great for getting started with this feature on your store. However, this form offers only basic features, letting customers search for products mainly by their names. 

For more advanced features – like live search, autocorrection, and providing more relevant results – Woo Product Search plugins can prove to be helpful. 

We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of some of the best WooCommerce Product Search plugins that can enhance your customers’ shopping experience. Let’s explore them!

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WooCommerce: How to Build a One-Product Website

Crocs started by selling just foam clogs, and now they’re a billion-dollar company. Casper earned millions selling only mattresses, while Sara Blakely became one of the youngest self-made female billionaires with Spanx, which sold only underclothes initially. 

Can you guess what all these brands have in common? It’s that they started off by selling just one product, built their entire brand around it, and yet became successful. 

Today, most eCommerce businesses sell multiple products – because of the presumption that the more products you offer, the higher chances of converting visitors and making a sale. But from managing operations to inventory, a store with many products comes with its own problems.

On the other hand, selling just one product can streamline your store’s operations and make inventory management and handling orders easy. 

It allows you to focus all your energy and resources on creating, marketing and improving a single product. If done correctly, this can help you build a significant brand value – as people will start associating your store with your flagship product, making you an expert in your market and helping you stand out from your competitors. 

Given its benefits, creating a one-product store is an excellent idea – all you practically need is the right product for your customer’s needs and a solid, easy-to-navigate website. 

Lucky for you, this article will help you with the latter, taking you through all the steps of creating a fantastic WooCommerce website for your one-product store

Let’s begin!

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WooCommerce: Top Quick View Plugins

Imagine if your customers didn’t have to visit a separate product page every time they wanted to check out a product. They could see product details right from the page they’re on and avoid going back and forth between the store and product pages

Sounds convenient, right?

This is exactly what a quick view feature on your WooCommerce store can do. 

It allows shoppers to view product images, features, and prices from the shop page through a popup window. This way, they can see if they like the product and add it to their cart or simply close the popup and continue browsing items. 

That’s not it. By making product surfing and shopping fast and hassle-free, the quick view feature can also help you improve customer experience and increase your store sales and revenue. 

Although a pretty useful feature, WooCommerce doesn’t have any default settings to enable a quick view button in your store. 

The good news is that there are some great quick view plugins you can use to add this functionality to your shop and optimize it for sales. 

We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of seven of the best WooCommerce quick view plugins you can use for your online store. Let’s dive in!

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WooCommerce: Why Enable Sliding Cart?

Cart abandonments are a WooCommerce store owner’s worst nemesis – research suggests a whopping 69.8% of customers abandon shopping carts, causing a massive dip in sales and revenue. The same study also revealed that high and unexpected shipping charges, complicated checkout processes, and inability to see the order total are some major reasons behind cart abandonment. 

But what if there were ways you could overcome these problems and increase conversions? 

Well, we already covered a possible solution here, so we’ll add to that today by looking at floating cart plugins. 

These tools can help your customers view their shopping cart on any page of your WooCommerce store, saving them the back and forth between the page they’re currently on and the WooCommerce cart page. 

Customers can see the items they’ve added to the cart, the order total, shipping costs, and even check out – all without going to another page. This can help smoothen their experience at your store and fasten the buying process, translating into more sales and profits for you.

This article will explore some popular WooCommerce floating cart plugins you can use to leverage this feature on your store. But first, let’s understand how floating carts work and help your online store generate more sales. 

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WooCommerce + Elementor 3.5 = Enhanced Building

WooCommerce website builders are under increasing pressure to design the most user-friendly, engaging, and convenient ecommerce experiences for customers.

WooCommerce ranks among the top most popular ecommerce tools for the WordPress ecosystem, with more than 4.4 million live websites using the plugin today. However, the technology can be somewhat restrictive on its own, which is why so many designers turn to third-party tools, like Elementor.

A well-known website creation platform, Elementor first introduced its WooCommerce integration in August of 2018. Back then, the goal of many designers was on creating the most aesthetically appealing product and archive pages. Now, the priorities of ecommerce shoppers and website developers have evolved. 

Adapting to the new focus on unified visual branding and enhanced user experiences, Elementor is now introducing a selection of new updates to its WooCommerce functionality. The new features of Elementor Release 3.5 could transform the way you design ecommerce sites

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WooCommerce: Top Multilingual Plugins

I have spoken about the need to internationalize your WooCommerce store before. There are all-in-one, country-based plugins that let you ensure your store is ready for a specific country’s audience (e.g. Germany, Japan, Brazil, Italy and the Czech Republic). 

But this isn’t exactly the right type of plugin for the merchant who is trying to service a truly international audience spread across various countries or continents. For this type of merchant, the first two steps are to add multi-currency and multilingual support.

Fortunately, just as there are many multi-currency plugins out there, there are quite a few WooCommerce-dedicated multilingual plugins to choose from. One of the plugins mentioned below even lets you do both!

In this listicle, we are going to compare the most popular multi-language plugins available for WooCommerce stores. Let’s jump right in.

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WooCommerce: How to Drive Sales With Opt-ins

One of the hardest aspects of running a WooCommerce store is lead generation. Whether you want to convert visitors into subscribers or encourage them to make purchases, you may be looking for effective ways to convince users to take desired actions. 

This is where opt-in campaigns come in handy. When executed correctly, opt-ins can encourage visitors to engage with your brand in a variety of ways. 

This strategy is typically used in email marketing. You can add a pop-up on your site that encourages users to sign up to your newsletter to receive offers and deals in their inboxes. 

However, you can also use these pop-ups to drive more sales. For example, users who make orders on your website may get messages that prompt them to purchase an additional item to qualify for a discount or free shipping. 

While this process may seem a little complicated, it’s actually quite simple. All you need to get started is a powerful plugin that will enable you to create high-converting, automated campaigns easily. 

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at opt-in campaigns and how they can help you boost your sales. We’ll then show you how to set up three effective campaigns for your WooCommerce store. Let’s get started!

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WooCommerce: Waiting List for Out-Of-Stock Products

There’s no better feeling than “selling out” and still having more customers who want to buy your products. But while this image looks exciting, it comes with a considerable downside. 

Sold-out products put you at risk of losing customers – simply because they wouldn’t know when a product is back in stock to purchase it. They can also frustrate your customers and make them buy from your competitors instead, leading to business and customer loss.

But what if there was a way to avoid this?

By enabling waitlists for your online store, you can keep customers updated about their favorite product’s availability and immediately notify them when it’s back in stock

This will not only help you keep customers engaged but also prevent you from losing valuable sales. You don’t have to take our word for it – research suggests notifying customers when products come back in stock turns 10-15% of requests into actual purchases. 

Creating and managing waiting lists online can be pretty taxing with all the back-and-forth. Good thing you have WooCommerce waitlist plugins to make the job easy for you. These plugins help you manage your stock, add customers to waitlists, and automatically send alerts about their desired products. 

This article will take you through six of the best WooCommerce waitlist plugins that can help you recover missed sales. But first, let’s understand how these plugins work and can help your bottom line. 

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WooCommerce: Why & How to Bundle Products

Maximizing sales and revenue is every eCommerce store’s top priority. And a time-tested strategy to achieve this is – creating product bundles.

Bundling happens when you combine complementary products and sell them as a package – often at discounted rates. This helps you sell more items, increase your average order value (AOV), and thus, earn more profits. It’s also a smart way to clear surplus stock and increase sales of slow-moving items. 

The success stories of product bundles are proof of this. Sock retailer Soxy, for instance, raised their AOV by 358% after introducing product bundles. 

And that’s not it. Bundles benefit customers as well – they get more value by purchasing multiple products and save time and extra shipping charges, which further helps improve their experience at your store. 

But you don’t have to do this manually, you can easily start selling bundles using product bundle plugins. And given their extensive grouping and customization features, WooCommerce plugins remain a top choice for bundling products. 

We’ve done the legwork for you and compiled a list of the best WooCommerce product bundle plugins to help you create, sell, and leverage product packages on your store. 

Let’s begin!

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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: Top Variation Swatches Plugins

Variation swatches are kind of a no-brainer. While this type of plugin is not typically classified as essential, I would argue that it is if you’re trying to build a world-class online store.

I am assuming, of course, that you don’t want to go through the work that these developers have gone through smoothing out the folds and wrinkles that inevitably arise when building even the most innocuous extension to WooCommerce.

The fact of the matter is that colors and images are a lot more compelling than text on a screen, so – whether it’s your own store or a client’s – why pass up the chance to increase the likelihood of a conversion? 

All of these plugins let you get started briskly, easily, and freely; are available in premium and free versions; and, trust me when I say, there is a good reason for each and every one of them to appear on this list, whether it’s because of the feature base, price, or aesthetic preferences. 

So without further ado, drum roll please…

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WooCommerce: The Rise of the Biggest eCommerce Platform

Paul Maiorana, CEO at WooCommerce, began his post about the platform’s ten year anniversary by sharing the first line of WooCommerce code ever written:

add_action( 'wp', 'woocommerce_init', 0 );

I found it highly fitting – the first line of a pastiche poem that continues to be written to this day. Like any pastiche, WooCommerce, by virtue of its open-source philosophy, draws from a wide variety of sources and, like any inchoate piece of art, it is a long way from perfect.

But, despite that, or perhaps because of it, WooCommerce has a lot to be proud of. Its shining asset is a highly prolific, tight-knit yet widely dispersed developer community, which now presides over the largest population of online merchants ever assembled by a single content management system.

More merchants call WooCommerce home than any other platform, and that simply would not be possible without its developers. I know I’m starting to sound like Steve Ballmer, but it’s true. 

But how did WooCommerce get to this point? Like Maiorana, I think some reflection is in order. 

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WooCommerce: Top Multi-Currency Plugins

Look around you.

The world we live in is a thoroughly globalized and interconnected one. Limiting factors such as space and time have been compressed by intercontinental supply chains and information technology. In short, we have inherited a smaller world. So I implore you, merchants of WooCommerce, to take your inheritance in hand and make the world your oyster. Begin selling your goods and services to an international audience as swiftly as you can. 

One of the first things you will require is a multi-currency plugin because, despite the fact that WooCommerce lets you choose between 100+ currencies, you can only enable one base currency at a time. To sell to an international audience successfully, you will need to do better than this. You will need to display the appropriate currency based on who is looking at your products or where they are looking at your products from. Multi-currency plugins, some of which are referred to as currency switchers, let you do that. 

So without further ado, let’s take a look at our top picks for multi-currency plugins. 

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WordPress: Growing Your Plugin (Part 1: Website + SEO)

If you build it, they may come – but not in as great a number as they would otherwise. 

I have seen WordPress developers reach as many as 10,000 active installations without spending a single minute on dime marketing. However, on every occasion that I hear such a story, I pause to wonder: how big would this theme or plugin be if the developer behind it thought about distribution?

Maybe their product spawns a company and they become the next YITH or Yoast, toasting after a major acquisition not thought possible in their wildest dreams

The first hurdle to overcome as a developer is the fallacy that your product is tainted by even the slightest speck of marketing, as if it was a glass of unadulterated, pure spring water sourced from the streams of Mount Olympus.

The WordPress ecosystem is not the plains of Dion – it’s more like the dregs of Romulus. More and more, it is guaranteed that you will face competition from the optimates, the big guys who come in the form of hosting providers, prolific WordPress development companies, super plugins, site builders, etc. 

The best themes and plugins don’t always win in the face of superior brands and warchests. In fact, the more disillusioned among us would say that they rarely do these days.

The good news is that the best themes and plugins can win, even if their developers are unknown and resource-constrained. But it all begins by bringing the horse to water. After that, if the product is good enough, the horse will drink. If it does not drink, there is more development to do. 

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WooCommerce: How To Change The Permalink Structure

WooCommerce permalink structure may appear unusual for newcomers. Those /product/ and /product-category/ parts of the URL are well-known distinctive features, but some experts don’t agree that this is the most convenient way to handle permalinks SEO-wise. 

A popular thought is to always keep URL structure as simple as possible and remove any unnecessary parts of it. You don’t have to take the word of those experts or me since the official guideline from Google suggest to avoid lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters. 

So, what does that exactly mean for WooCommerce store builders? 

First of all, URL bases like /shop/, /product-category/ and /product/ can be considered unnecessary as Google knows how to define shop and product pages without the need of specifying that inside the URL. 

And probably you don’t want to create a false perception of site depth for crawlers so they don’t rate those pages lower than they should be. Again, a well-known precept – pages closer to the main folder (domain) are more meaningful for search engines. 

If you agree with such statements, it would be helpful to understand how to redesign the permalink structure in WooCommerce. So read ahead to find out about that. 

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WordPressopoly: WordPress Acquisitions Are Not a Game Anymore

wordpressopoly

Is there a Monopoly version of WordPress yet?” – Cory Miller.

There is now, Cory, at least in png form. 

The WordPress ecosystem, and the unwalled WooCommerce garden contained within it, is experiencing a wave of consolidation, so much so that a webpage dedicated to tracking acquisitions now exists. 

Yesterday, LiquidWeb/StellarWP acqui-hired LearnDash LMS.

A few days ago, WooCommerce acqui-hired SomewhereWarm, the team behind some of the most popular WooCommerce marketplace plugins.

On September 8, 2021, Jetpack acquired Social Image Generator, which is a WordPress plugin that does what it says on the tin.

On August 30, 2021, Automattic acqui-hired Frontity, to further develop Gutenberg and full site editing.

The list of acquisitions is never-ending. And this wave won’t stop.

So, what’s really happening, and why?

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