We’ve already seen how to remove the product permalink from the “order table” (the one you see on the Thank you page, My account pages and emails). Thsi time, we’re looking at doing the same thing on the Cart page, which uses different “hooks” than the order pages and therefore requires its own snippet.
Here’s how it’s done – as usual 1 PHP line is sufficient! Continue reading WooCommerce: Remove Product Links @ Cart Page
A client purchased a premium “WooCommerce-ready” WordPress theme. Unfortunately, this theme comes with a /woocommerce folder, which means theme developers completely override WooCommerce template files by copying them to the folder, and customizing each of them by hand to match their design and functionality needs.
As you know from my “How To Become an Advanced WooCommerce Developer?” article, however, themes should NOT come with a /woocommerce folder – instead they should use “hooks” (actions and filters) to amend default WooCommerce plugin layouts and behavior. This is a huge problem for best seller themes and their legacy coding – and also a reason most themes break when you update WooCommerce…
So the question I asked myself was: how can I disable the entire /woocommerce folder (i.e. ALL WooCommerce template overrides) in a given theme or a single template, so that I can use the default WooCommerce ones instead?
Continue reading WooCommerce: Disable Theme’s WooCommerce Template Overrides
This is a guest post by Suman Das of Radix – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!
Now that you’re planning to sell online, you need to create your own brand. And while WooCommerce can help you develop a slick ecommerce website, building a great brand starts with picking a great domain name.
When it comes to effective brand building and harboring customer trust, your domain name plays a crucial role. It’s the first touchpoint for your customers and helps them get an understanding of what awaits them on your website. Paid marketing campaigns and special offers can help you convert traffic quickly, but to thrive in the long run it’s essential that you build an outstanding BRAND.
Your WooCommerce website is a virtual storefront, so why not use a brand new and very relevant .STORE domain name instead of a .COM? It’s a smart way to highlight the fact that you sell something on your website… without having to explain it through your brand name.
So, here are some reasons you should consider registering a .STORE domain for your WooCommerce website.
Continue reading WooCommerce: 4 Reasons You Should Use a .STORE Domain
This is a guest post by Michael Lazar of ReadyCloud – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!
Customers are the backbone of any ecommerce store, but loyal customers are the shining stars. They cost less to retain, and they are easier to sell to – not to mention that they’ll do some of your marketing for you via social media.
The biggest names in ecommerce right now are thriving because of their loyal customers. Amazon Prime, for example, has over 100 million subscribers, and Zappos does 75% of their business with repeat customers.
Have you ever wondered how these internet giants have captured and retained customers?
Surprisingly, their tactics are not as expensive and time-consuming as you might think. Even as a small WooCommerce e-tailer, you can provide a shopping experience that will keep your customers coming back.
And here are five ways to make it happen. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Keep Your Customers Loyal?
When you add a hidden product to Cart, either manually or programmatically, this will be displayed in the Cart, Checkout and Order details pages (I’m not sure why a hidden product behaves like that… but thankfully you can hide hidden products from the Cart/Checkout/Order page with this snippet).
Problem is, even if you hide hidden products from the Cart page, the “Mini-Cart” product counter icon or text (it depends on your theme) will still count them as products (see the screenshot below). So the question is: in conjunction with the snippet aforementioned, how do I exclude hidden products from being counted in the “menu cart” (also called Mini-Cart Widget)? Continue reading WooCommerce: Exclude Hidden Products from Mini-Cart Counter
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”?
If you sell downloadable/virtual products and need to simplify your WooCommerce checkout when such product type is in the Cart, you’ve come to the right place!
Here’s a simple snippet to check if there are only “virtual” products in the Cart and if yes, all the billing fields and order notes are hidden (but name and email address). Go test this on your development environment and let me know if this works!
Continue reading WooCommerce: Hide Checkout Fields if Virtual Product @ Cart
All WooCommerce orders go to either “processing”, “completed”, “on-hold” and other default order statuses based on the payment method and product type.
Sometimes these statuses are not enough. For example, you might need to mark certain orders in a different way for tracking, filtering, exporting purposes. Or you might want to disable default emails by bypassing the default order status changes.
Either way, creating a custom order status is quite easy. And today we’ll see which PHP snippet you need in order to make this work!
Continue reading WooCommerce: Create a Custom Order Status
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:
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?
For sustainable growth in an online business, one has to pay critical attention to list building. The email list is an essential aspect of every successful business, it is one way of marketing that never goes old. As far as emails continue to exist, people will continue to make use of it for business and communication.
With Email marketing, you can continually reach out to your loyal customers regarding products and services information with minimal effort compared to reaching out to random people every time you need to push out information about your business. The email list ensures that re-targeting an audience doesn’t stress you out.
While re-targeting your customers via a mailing list is key to profitability online, the problem lies in building an email list. As this has become a great challenge for list builders, a lot of developers have tried to create marketing solutions overcome the challenge. Not many have succeeded in the quest, however.
Well, that is not to burst your bubble, there are a couple of email marketing software that has really made list building easy, achievable and cost-effective. If you are really serious about building a profitable email list, you won’t find it on a free-to-use solution. The best features that you can use to improve conversion with action-based messages and understand the behaviour of your visitors are found in premium list building plugins.
In this article, I want to talk extensively about one of such plugins called MailOptin. This WordPress plugins is designed to help you start your list building journey in next to no time. Within a few minutes, you should have your optin form for collecting email addresses from your visitors. One of the things MailOptin lets you do is to decide how you want to grow your list, you can use an aggressive approach; displaying your optin forms on page load or the less intrusive approach; displaying your optin forms only when a visitor is about to leave your site. This whole phenomenon is called Exit Intent, and we are going to delve into it later down this review, but before then, let’s walk through what MailOptin has to offer.
Continue reading WordPress: MailOptin Forms Plugin Review
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
Here’s a snippet regarding the “My Account” registration form and, once again, GDPR. If you get any website traffic from EU, you will need users to give you Privacy Policy consent – including when they register a new account on your WooCommerce website.
So, how do we display a checkbox on the My Account page, at the bottom of the registration form? Continue reading WooCommerce: Add Privacy Policy Consent @ My Account Registration
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 ID, customer ID, billing info, payment method, total refunds 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
If you decide to delete or reorder checkout fields, you probably also need to change the checkout field with “autofocus”. In plain English, this is the checkout field where the keyboard cursor goes automatically to on checkout page load (by default, this is the Billing First Name).
As usual, changing this default behavior is very easy, even if you’re not familiar with PHP. In the example below, I’m removing the autofocus from Billing First Name and assigning it to the Billing Email field instead.
Copy the snippet, test it on your development environment and only then push it to your live website. Enjoy! Continue reading WooCommerce: Change Autofocus Field @ Checkout
There is no doubt – one of the fastest, most affordable and easiest ways to increase your WooCommerce sales is to “hire your own customers”.
You’ve probably heard of affiliate commissions, referral programs, influencer marketing, brand ambassadors and so on. Online brands are doing all they can to promote this strategy and tap into their fans’ communities.
As a WooCommerce store owner, no matter whether you sell digital or physical products, you should definitely give an affiliate program a go. Besides, what if I told you enabling such a complex system was actually super easy?
With a simple plugin you can immediately add an affiliate marketing program to your WooCommerce website, give registered affiliates their own dashboard with statistics and revenue, pay them via PayPal or Stripe either manually, immediately or monthly and basically do absolutely no coding or complex set up.
Decide your referral commission (e.g. $10 per product, or 15% per order), install the affiliate plugin, contact all your existing customers, subscribers, fans, followers and see your sales grow.
For such a little investment, your returns might be reasonable enough and there is really nothing stopping you from implementing this today.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most reliable WooCommerce Affiliate plugins. They all do the trick, so it’s up to you to make that final choice.
Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Run an Affiliate / Referral Program?
Ok, we all know that the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force on the 25th May 2018.
So the main question is: what changes do we need to make on our WooCommerce website to become compliant? And another important query might be: how does GDPR affect non-European WooCommerce websites?
In this article, I will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do. There are a million articles and plugins on WordPress GDPR compliance, but there is no “ultimate” blog that tells you what you should be doing.
If you don’t know what GDPR is or need a good refresher, read Wikipedia’s GDPR page or the “Introduction to GDPR Compliance for WooCommerce Stores” on the official WooCommerce blog.
Many blogs I’ve read and WordCamp events I’ve attended didn’t really give me the answers I needed. I don’t particularly care about GDPR itself, I just want to know what I need to do on my WooCommerce website.
So, let’s see what changes you’re required to make.
Please note: I’m not a lawyer and cannot guarantee this article is going to make you 100% compliant – make sure to assess your GDPR compliance with a qualified consultant.
Continue reading WooCommerce: How To Make A Website GDPR Compliant? (12 Steps)
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
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)
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
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?