Customer Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce: Building Customer Profiles for Tailored Recommendations

Understanding your customers’ preferences is key to enhancing their shopping experience and boosting sales. In WooCommerce, building a customer profile based on past purchases and viewed products can help you create personalized product recommendations. This approach is particularly useful for businesses selling products with specific attributes, such as drinks with distinct flavors, colors, or origins. By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, you can highlight products that align with their tastes, encouraging repeat purchases and increasing engagement.

Creating a recommendation engine requires a combination of retrieving customer purchase history, identifying product attributes, and using that data to suggest similar items. While there are plugins available for automating this process, a custom-coded solution offers flexibility and precision. Let’s dive into how you can achieve this by leveraging WooCommerce’s tools and some programming, allowing you to build a dynamic and effective customer profile for personalized shopping experiences.

WooCommerce: Allow Guest Checkout For Existing Customers

In a typical WooCommerce setup, if you disable Guest Checkout via the settings, all customers are required to either log into an existing account or register a new one during checkout. This ensures every order is tied to a user account – great for store management, but not always ideal for user experience.

The problem? Returning customers who aren’t logged in will be forced to remember their credentials or manually reset their password, just to place another order. And if they skip login and try to check out with their email, they’ll get the dreaded “An account is already registered with your email address” error – and the order won’t go through.

Thankfully, there’s a way to bypass all that. With a simple PHP snippet, you can allow users to check out as guests if their billing email matches an existing customer. WooCommerce will assign the order to their account – no login required!

Optimizing WooCommerce Customer Purchases Checks

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a member explored an efficient way to validate customer memberships for accessing restricted pages in WooCommerce.

The challenge was ensuring quick performance when checking if customers have purchased any one of a series of products upon login. Typically, using the wc_customer_bought_product function works well for single product checks, but this case involved verifying around 10-15 products.

Running such multiple checks, especially on member-only pages, risks slowing down the user experience.

Creating a Customer Blacklist in WooCommerce: Options and Insights

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, members shared their thoughts and solutions for a WooCommerce client who wants to implement a blacklist to prevent certain customers from placing new orders.

Blacklisting customers can be a helpful strategy for preventing unwanted or fraudulent transactions, but there are a few ways to approach this based on client needs and security requirements.

This article discusses some recommended plugins, custom code solutions, and advanced approaches to building an effective WooCommerce blacklist.

Bulk Converting Guest Checkout Users to Registered Customers in WooCommerce

In a recent Business Bloomer Club discussion, a user with over 1600 guest checkouts wanted to convert these previous guest users into registered WooCommerce customers. Since these customers had previously checked out as guests, they didn’t have accounts created, but the user needed a way to retroactively register them with the ‘customer’ role.

Solution Recommendation: A one-off PHP script could be used to loop through all guest orders, check if a customer already has an account, and register those who don’t. This would effectively create accounts for each past guest, assigning them the ‘customer’ role and ensuring that no duplicates are created for users who already have accounts.

Tracking Monthly Customer Cohorts in WooCommerce for Repeat Orders

A recent Business Bloomer Club member posed a question about tracking customer behavior over time, specifically aiming to monitor how many orders new customers place after their initial signup.

For instance, if 30 new customers joined in May 2023, they’d like to observe how many of these customers placed additional orders in subsequent months. This type of analysis is known as cohort analysis and can provide insights into customer loyalty and engagement over time.

Here’s a guide on how to implement cohort analysis in WooCommerce.

WooCommerce: Purchase History (With Review Buttons) @ My Account

If you’re running a WooCommerce store, you know how important product reviews are for building trust and boosting sales. But as your product catalog grows, it can become hard for customers to keep track of which purchases still need reviews.

That’s where a Purchase History tab comes in handy. Imagine offering your customers a simple way to see all their previous purchases, with a clear indicator of which items they haven’t reviewed yet.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a custom Purchase History tab within the My Account page. This tab will list purchased products, the date of purchase, and provide a quick “Review” link if the product hasn’t been reviewed yet.

It’s a small feature that can make a big impact on your store’s reviews and engagement. Keep reading to find the code snippet that will make it happen!

Unlocking WooCommerce’s Full Potential: Addressing Its Weaknesses

Greetings from a seasoned WooCommerce user, developer, and advocate with over 12 years of experience!

I “play” with WooCommerce daily and believe there’s room for improvement. Simply catching up with competitors isn’t the right goal—STANDING OUT (yes, in all caps) is what we should be aiming for.

When you’re focused solely on closing the gap, you risk being seen as “the alternative to” rather than a standout in your own right. WooCommerce, with its unique ecosystem and flexibility, has the potential to thrive by embracing its strengths instead of chasing a moving target. By stepping away from the “catching up” mindset, you can create a truly exceptional product—one that isn’t just comparable but incomparable, one that leads rather than follows.

So, let’s take a step back.

I believe ecommerce software should let you sell ANYTHING (products) to ANYONE (customers around the world), while getting PAID and being able to DELIVER the package asap.

If Woo can address all that, it can really become outstanding, a piece of software that is worth talking about, and that doesn’t need to be compared to others. Because it’s unique.

There’s a reason why you can’t compare pears to apples—yet you could argue that diamonds outshine gold.

So, here’s an overview of key areas where WooCommerce might have weaknesses compared to other ecommerce platforms, together with some context.

WooCommerce: View Customer Order History on Single Order Admin Page

Viewing the WooCommerce customer’s order history directly on the single order admin page can be incredibly useful when you need quick access to a customer’s past purchases without navigating away from the current order screen.

With a simple PHP snippet, you can add this functionality, enabling you to view previous orders and better understand customer behavior in real time.

This customization not only enhances your workflow but also improves customer service, allowing you to address inquiries more efficiently.

Below, I’ll walk through the steps needed to implement this feature, providing you with the PHP code necessary to display order history details on the order admin page itself.

As always, remember to test customizations in a staging environment to ensure compatibility with your setup!

WooCommerce: Get Customer ID From An Email Address

Customizing your WooCommerce store via PHP can involve a variety of tasks, from personalizing orders to managing customer interactions. Often, you might need to find a specific customer’s information, but all you have is their email address.

For example, on this same website, I have custom contact forms that give me a name and an email address upon submit. What if I need to check if the email address is an existing WooCommerce customer who has placed some orders?

Well, the PHP below will give you a quick way to “calculate” the customer ID if you only have an email address. It’s then easy to use the result in a custom calculation or core function, such as wc_get_orders().

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add Content To “New Account” Welcome Email

First impressions matter, especially in ecommerce. When a customer creates an account on your WooCommerce store, the “Your {site_title} account has been created!” welcome email is your golden opportunity to solidify a positive connection.

However, the standard WooCommerce email might fall short:

Hi Rodolfo,

Thanks for creating an account on {site_title}. Your username is ____. You can access your account area to view orders, change your password, and more at: ___

Click here to set your new password.

This tutorial teaches you how to display additional content in the “welcome” email. You can then personalize greetings, showcase your brand story, and strategically introduce features like exclusive offers or product recommendations. By tailoring these emails, you’ll not only provide valuable information but also nurture customer loyalty and encourage them to explore your offerings further.

Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Edit User Field @ My Account

Each WordPress user comes with a set of pre-defined fields. These fields store essential information about each user, including the username, name, email, role, website URL, bio, etc.

User fields can be edited in two ways: by the admin, who has access to all user profiles and can edit any user data, including both default and custom fields; and by logged-in users, who can edit their own profile information.

WooCommerce users (customers) can also edit some user data from the My Account page: name, email and password (Account details tab); and also billing and shipping addresses (Addresses tab).

But what if we want to let customers set/edit their bio or their website URL, which are only editable from the WordPress edit profile page? Well, the snippet below will help you display and save data for a default user field, under the Account details tab of the My Account page. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Populate Billing & Shipping When Adding A New User @ WP Dashboard

If you do a lot of manual work such as creating WordPress users for a B2B WooCommerce site (because they can only shop if they have an account, and you’ve disabled registration on the frontend), you may want to populate some Billing and Shipping fields so that you can save some time.

For example, imagine if all customers are based in Florida, USA; you could automatically populate their billing country, billing state, shipping country and shipping state!

So, let’s see how to approach this. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Get Customer Second Last Order

There is a native, handy way to get a WooCommerce customer’s last order: wc_get_customer_last_order( $customer_id )

This time, I want to write some custom code to get the second last order instead. We will indeed reuse most of the above function code and change it slightly. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Change Address Format For a Specific Country

We’ve already covered a little about address formats when we added a custom House Number field to the WooCommerce Checkout page.

Address formats define the way Billing and Shipping addresses are formatted for the end user. Addresses show on the order received / thank you page, on transactional emails and on some My Account pages, and look like this:

{name}\n{company}\n{address_1}\n{address_2}\n{city}\n{state}\n{postcode}\n{country}

Now, what if you wanted to move the “company” before the customer name, or maybe have “address 1” and “address 2” on the same line, or move “postcode” to the last line? Well, thankfully there is a neat WooCommerce filter called “woocommerce_localisation_address_formats” that allows us to do just that – reformat any address for any country we wish. Enjoy!

Tag: Customer