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WooCommerce: How To Make A Website GDPR Compliant? (12 Steps)

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.

WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

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

WooCommerce: Top Wishlist Plugins (Screenshots + Features)

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?

WooCommerce: How to Show Product Search Suggestions?

“Ajax Search” (displaying product search suggestions while a WooCommerce user is typing something in the search bar), is a brilliant idea for all of you ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Saving time to a potential customer is your number one goal. Besides, if your website has a lot of traffic, search should be one of your sales propositions (look at Amazon and eBay to see how prominent the search bar is).

Enabling “Ajax Search” in WooCommerce is actually pretty easy. This time, there is no snippet, but a good combination of free and premium plugins that do the job.

Please note – in this article we will be covering the “Ajax Search” plugins and not the product filtering ones, which are fairly different in regard to the functionality they provide.

So, what are the most reliable “Search Suggestion” plugins for WooCommerce?

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!

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.

WooCommerce: Automatically Update Cart on Quantity Change

There is a lot of literature online that solves this UX problem – so in this article let’s see if I can give you a simplified, working, updated version.

So, do you hate the “Update Cart” button too? Yes, the one you have to click after you update the quantity of a product in the cart…

Well, you’re in the right place: a simple PHP function, two lines of JQuery, one line of CSS (or a mini-plugin) and the result is pretty straight forward!

WooCommerce: How to Get Customers to Request a Quote?

Not all WooCommerce websites are born equal. Sometimes a price and an add to cart button are just not enough.

B2B platforms, wholesalers and high-ticket businesses are usually quite flexible with their pricing and might need to give customers the freedom to request a quote.

Correct, WooCommerce can be used as a quoting engine as opposed to a standard ecommerce website (or both can be enabled at the same time if there are two different audiences).

As usual, there are different solutions. In this article, we’ll see how to use a simple code snippet to show a contact form on the single product page, we’ll see which free plugins are available on WordPress.org and – of course – we will also take a look at more advanced, premium extensions.

Either way, the beauty about WooCommerce is that with the click of a button you can customize the way it behaves!

Storefront Theme: How to Install and Configure It

Storefront is one of the most flexible and extensible theme when it comes to launching a WooCommerce store using WordPress.

Due to its clean code architecture it became hugely popular among users and currently more than 100,000 online stores uses Storefront as their WordPress theme.

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: How to Display Variations with Color / Size Buttons?

Displaying product pages nicely is the entrepreneur’s dream.

Good UX means a much higher probability the interested customer is going to add to cart and complete the checkout.

However, WooCommerce variable products come with annoying dropdowns for each attribute (color, size, style, etc. depending on what options you have set up). And as you’ve already got a hint of my personal opinion, dropdowns are UX-killers.

Today, we take a look at handy plugins you can use to display product options (variations) in a user-friendly way. I’ve used these on many websites and they’re pretty reliable. As usual, it’s just the click of a button!

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.

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.

WooCommerce: Add an Icon to the Add to Cart Buttons

Ecommerce is all about user experience, and making it easier for people to add to cart and checkout smoothly. Reducing the number of checkout fields is a great idea for example – as well as graphically communicating your number 1 objective: “please add to cart now!”.

So, how do you add an icon (or an HTML symbol) to the add to cart buttons in WooCommerce? This can be done in two ways – via CSS if you want to show Fontawesome Icons or via PHP if you prefer to use a simple HTML unicode symbol.

Let’s take a look at both methods!

WooCommerce: How to Enable Multi-Currency?

If you got here it’s because you’re looking to increase your sales conversion rate by enabling “Multi-Currency” in your WooCommerce website.

The concept behind the currency switcher is simple: if I’m based in Europe I’d love paying in Euros, while if I were based in US I wouldn’t fancy the same treatment and I’d prefer paying in US Dollars – and so on. The more currencies, the higher your conversion rate.

Unfortunately you can only pick one currency from the WooCommerce settings, so you’ll need a plugin for enabling Multi-Currency. And despite there are many WooCommerce currency switcher plugins out there, there is one that stands out from the crowd.

A good currency switcher plugin for WooCommerce has many requirements. First of all, great support and clean code – when dealing with online payments you have to be sure everything works perfectly and that online customers don’t abandon the checkout. Second, Multi-Currency should work together with geolocation: manually selecting currencies is ok and all, but displaying automatically the correct currency based on IP address is much better UX. Finally, you should have the option of deciding conversion rates yourself or using reliable automatic database checking for daily exchange rate checking.

Thankfully, you can achieve all that with a single plugin.

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.

WooCommerce: How to Customize Storefront Theme in a Few Clicks

If your WooCommerce website runs on Storefront theme (same as Business Bloomer), then you probably know it doesn’t come with a lot of customization options.

For developers like me, Storefront theme is ideal: it comes with many “hooks”, so that it’s easy to remove, move or add layout elements within a few lines of PHP.

But for those who do not develop or have no intention to waste time troubleshooting missing commas or fighting with FTP clients, well, there’s a plugin for that. And it’s developed and maintained by WooCommerce itself, so you can’t go wrong with the purchase and you’re guaranteed to have a fully working, up to date piece of software for the long term.

So, here’s a quick overview of what the plugin does. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Display $0.00 Amount For Free Shipping Rates

In the past, WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages used to show “$0.00” beside each free shipping rate. Now, this is gone and WooCommerce only shows the shipping rate name, without the 0 amount.

But given that many freelance clients requested this customization, today we’re bringing this back to life with just a few lines of PHP. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

Recently I was on a coaching call with a client and the “Free Sample” challenge came up. Client has 400+ products on the website and had no intention of adding a free variation to each product manually.

So, I promised to myself I was going to study a different approach. And today you get it for free – nice! Needless to say, a comment and a social media share are much appreciated. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Check if Product ID is in the Cart

Here’s the story: I’m working with one of my freelance clients and I need to show certain content in the Checkout (a product-specific “Terms and Conditions”) if such product is in the Cart.

Now, I’ve always looked for products in the Cart by “looping” through the Cart with a foreach (here, for example: Apply a Coupon Programmatically if a Product is in the Cart). But as I said, after some random research, I found out about another magic WooCommerce function: “find_product_in_cart()“. Which means finding a product in the Cart doesn’t require custom loops or complex PHP… it’s just a “one liner”. Enjoy!