WooCommerce: Why Use Country-Based Plugins (Germanized, Japanized, …)

What do Germany, Japan, Brazil, and the Czech Republic all have in common?

If you guessed that, in each country’s case, local WooCommerce merchants benefit from a country-specific plugin; I’m talking about Germanized for WooCommerce, Japanized for WooCommerce, Brazilian Market on WooCommerce, and WPify Woo Czech.

If you’re in one of these countries, then you should definitely check the plugin in question out.

We’ve spoken about how WooCommerce is going global in past posts and about what you need to do to internationalize your WooCommerce store.

If you’re charting an expansion to one of the aforementioned countries, then you are also in the target market. 

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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: 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: 6 Membership Plugins To Choose From

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” applies well to business. While customer acquisition is important, what’s even better is to drive repeat sales and increase your business by retaining your existing customers. 

An excellent way to do this is by offering memberships on your online store. By making customers a part of an exclusive club or giving them privileged access to content and offers, you can make them feel valued and enhance their loyalty towards your brand. 

Take it from the 76% of businesses that claim a subscription-based model helps them retain customers and create long-term relationships with them. 

And this is not it – by limiting access to premium content, you can also compel non-members to convert and purchase from you. 

Now, the thought of creating and managing memberships on your online store can seem scary, but WooCommerce membership plugins can make the job simple for you. With their ease of use, features, integrations, pricing, and support, these plugins are some of the most sought-after when it comes to memberships. 

This article will explore 6 WooCommerce plugins you can use to start a membership program in your store from scratch. But first, let’s take a look at the benefits of a membership website. 

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WooCommerce: Top 8 Points and Rewards Plugins

While acquiring new customers is essential for every business, nothing can beat customer retention

Knowing your brand and having tried your products and services, existing customers are much more likely to buy from you after a positive experience.

One way to create a memorable experience for customers and nurture and retain them is to start a points and rewards system. This will not only help increase customer’s interest in your store, but the chances of winning points and exciting rewards will give them another reason to shop from you more often. 

In fact, in a survey, 58.7% of internet users said earning rewards and points was the most valuable aspect of their shopping experience. 

However, managing a rewards system manually and keeping a tab on the points can be pretty taxing – but this is precisely where WooCommerce points and rewards plugins come in handy. 

With their vast features and top-notch support, these plugins can help you create a loyalty program for your online store within a few clicks. Once it’s up and running, you can easily track the success of your program and manage customer points from one single dashboard. 

When it comes to points and rewards plugins, you can be spoilt for choice. But to make things simple for you, we’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of the best WooCommerce points and rewards plugins that can help you increase sales and customer engagement. 

Let’s explore them!

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WooCommerce: WooExpert Roundup

There are currently 28 WooExperts according to WooCommerce, which defines WooExperts as “hand selected high quality experts that understand our products”.

These are web development and design companies with deep ties to the WooCommerce team, enabling them to stay updated on best practices and new trends in order to lavish their clients with a world-class WooCommerce development experience.

This post provides a brief overview of the services that each of these WooExperts specializes in as well as individual company profiles, portfolios, and contact links.

Even though most of these companies have one or more office locations, many are distributed a là Automattic.

Since I know many in the audience are developers, do note that more than a few of these companies are actively hiring. Alternatively, if you already have a dog in the fight, check out the Becoming a WooExpert page if you think your company has what it takes to become a WooExpert. 

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WooCommerce: How to Set Up Mail & Phone Orders (MOTO)

MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) payments are payment transactions you take while the customer isn’t with you in person. 

MOTO payments are a vital way for many businesses to process customer payments. They’re accessible, secure and can help you expand your customer base by removing payment barriers. 

But what exactly are MOTO payments? 

Well, in this article, we’ll explain exactly that. Plus, we’ll talk about why they’re worth using and how to get them set up on your WooCommerce store.

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WooCommerce: Move Labels Inside Checkout Fields

Although UX and accessibility experts won’t like this customization, it’s still important to know “what’s possible” with WooCommerce.

In regard to the checkout form (billing + shipping + notes), there is a useful “woocommerce_checkout_fields” hook (filter) that is widely used by developers like me to alter the behavior of input fields.

In today’s episode we will take a look, indeed, at how to remove the checkout field labels from their default position (above fields), and use them as placeholders instead, so that we save up some vertical space.

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: Quick Cart Abandonment Solutions

Automattic-acquired WooCommerce platform is one of the largest eCommerce giants – powering 29% of all online stores. It isn’t even a decade old and is already known to be a market leader – with about 5M+ active installations.                  

What makes WooCommerce so popular amongst eCommerce merchants is its enhanced customization ability – allowing them to tweak their store’s appearance and functionalities per specific business goals. However, eCommerce merchants’ biggest unsolved issue is the increasing cart abandonment rates.

This is where Shopify gets a competitive edge with its ShopPay checkout feature – an effective way to speed up transactions and ensure frictionless checkout for customers to reduce cart abandonment.

Today’s customers expect the checkout process to be quick and easy – which otherwise makes them abandon your website and leave the items in the carts unpurchased. The longer it takes for customers to complete the checkout – the more they’re likely to switch to convenient eCommerce stores like Amazon, which offers one-click checkout. Unfortunately, 97% of customers opt out of making purchases simply because it isn’t convenient. 

We discussed the growing fickle nature of customers in the previous article – but the key takeaway is that while WooCommerce provides a convenient default checkout solution, it doesn’t offer a way that matches Amazon’s and ShopPay’s quick and one-click checkout service. 

So, what’s the solution for WooCommerce merchants, and is there any way to provide an equivalent checkout experience as ShopPay or Amazon? Let’s find out. 

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WooCommerce: Find Products With No Weight @ WP Admin

If your shipping rates depend on product weight, it is very likely you’ve forgotten to add weight to ALL your products. In this way, some shipping rates may be underestimated on the WooCommerce Checkout page.

So, here’s how to print a notice on the WordPress Dashboard > Products screen with a list of products that have no weight, together with the links to edit them quickly.

This is a handy snippet you can reuse for other case scenarios such as easily finding products with no dimensions, no prices, no images, no custom field value, or even a specific weight or given price. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce Wholesale: All-In-One Plugin Solutions

While WooCommerce is one of the most powerful and flexible ecommerce platforms on the market today, it was built for retail, and therefore it’s missing many important features for business buyers.

If you are setting up a wholesale store with WooCommerce, you will find many of these features fulfilled by small individual plugins. However, that approach comes with large disadvantages: reduced site performance caused by running a large number of plugins, and plugin conflicts that can lead to technical issues and errors.

One solution can be replacing several wholesale plugins with a single all-in-one WooCommerce wholesale suite solution. By doing that, you avoid cluttering the site with a large number of plugins, as well as avoid conflicts and errors, since all features are running under the same extension.

In this article let’s explore some of the best plugin suites on the market for wholesale sites, by looking at features, use cases, pricing and support. 

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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: Add a WordPress Customizer Setting

If you’ve taken the ConfigureWoo online course, you’ll know that WooCommerce adds its own “WordPress Customizer” section called “WooCommerce”, indeed. From there you can manage some settings such as the store notice, product images, checkout fields and so on.

What if you want to add your own settings, and let yourself or your client toggle options or type input values, so that this can be applied to your current WooCommerce website? Well, that’s quite doable, so in this post we’ll see how they do it. 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 B2B: How to Set Up a Wholesale Store

The ecommerce sector is seeing incredible growth, year after year, with no foreseeable end in sight. The same is true for B2B ecommerce, yet there aren’t many good platform choices available for small-to-medium businesses that want to sell wholesale. There are several SaaS solutions on the market, but these are costly, closed-source, and mostly oriented towards larger businesses.

If you are a business owner or developer, WooCommerce is a solution that’s free, versatile and powerful. 

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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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WooCommerce: Get Cart Data (total, items, etc) from $cart Object

As a WooCommerce development freelancer, every day I repeat many coding operations that I keep forgetting over and over again!

This means I have to search through the WooCommerce plugin files again and again and waste a lot of precious time.

We’ve already seen how to get $product and $order information from their respective objects , so this time we’ll take a look at the Cart page and answer to: “How to get ____ if I have the $cart variable/object available?“.

For example, “How can I get the cart total“? Or “How can I get the cart items“? Or maybe the cart fees, the applied coupons, the cart contents total, the total weight and so on…

Hopefully this article will help you save time as well! Your feedback via Twitter and the blog comments section is much appreciated. Enjoy!

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