Happy Wednesday!
It’s been a bit of a health-check week for me. I guess I’m getting to that age where symptoms can’t always be dismissed with “I’ll be fine tomorrow” and forgotten about. I’ve had some checks done, with more to come, nothing major at this stage, but I want to keep an eye on my stress levels and those day-after-a-bad-night’s-sleep moments I’ve been experiencing since I was much younger. Better to look into it properly than keep putting it off, I suppose…
On the business side, I’ve just released a new free plugin on WordPress.org called Advanced Manual Orders, and I’d love you to check it out, together with last week’s Staging Superpowers. Honestly, on paper, I think these two should be installed on every WooCommerce site! I’m now in that early launch phase where a few reviews, feedback, and support requests can make a real difference, so if you give either plugin a try, please interact with me on the repo pages. It would help me get some initial traction and hopefully kick-start their growth.
What Happens After You Vibe Code a WooCommerce Plugin
Vibe coding can now build you a working WooCommerce plugin in five minutes. With just 2 or 3 prompts, it installs smoothly and works perfectly to your specs (unlike a few months ago when AI code output was… pretty rough).
But a plugin isn’t done when it works. It’s done when it survives a WooCommerce update, a security scan, a weird bug, and the six months after you’ve forgotten why you wrote it that way.
Read my full piece on Business Bloomer blog ▶️
Recover your website within minutes from the worst disaster that may strike your WordPress site. With incremental backups, GDPR compliant storage, 1-click restore and more, BlogVault gives you complete peace of mind.
WooCommerce 11.2.0: Release notes
This release is now available for download. Review the highlights below, follow the update guide, and check the full changelog before updating production sites.
Highlights:
- CSV importer updates
- Additional Checkout API gets date fields
- Security updates on multisite admin and more…
WooCommerce Themes in 2026: Woo Goes Purple, CommerceGurus Talks Performance
This episode of Do the Woo looks at how to choose and build a WooCommerce theme in 2026. Hosts James Kemp of Woo and Katie Keith of Barn2 Plugins are joined by Colm Troy and Simon Tomkins, co-founders of CommerceGurus and the team behind the Shoptimizer theme.
James will walk through Woo’s soon-to-be-released Purple theme and who it’s designed for. Colm and Simon will talk about their experience building a performance-focused WooCommerce theme at CommerceGurus, and what they’ve learned about what merchants actually look for in a theme.
Learn more on Do The Woo blog ▶️
The founder story behind WooCommerce Product Options
Barn2 started in 2009 as a web design studio in a converted barn in South West England, building WordPress websites and WooCommerce stores for clients. We transitioned into a plugin company in 2016. By 2022 we’d spent years watching store owners try to add options to their products, so we knew where they got stuck. And WooCommerce Product Options was the result.
As CEO and product manager for WooCommerce Product Options, I wrote the specification myself, right down to the capitalization of the setting labels. Keep reading to learn why we stopped recommending the official add-ons plugin, how that specification came together, the mistake we made at launch, and the feature I’m proudest of.
Woo is the company behind WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform that powers 4M+ stores. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce empowers anyone, anywhere, to sell anything with truly unlimited extensibility, flexibility, and control over how they build and evolve their business. Launched in 2011 and acquired by Automattic in 2015, Woo is a fully distributed company with employees based around the world.
WANotifier for WooCommerce: help your WooCommerce clients drive more revenue by sending order notifications, abandoned cart recovery alerts and promotional marketing campaigns on WhatsApp, powered by the official WhatsApp Business API.
Get a free Google Ads audit for your WooCommerce store from Wolf+Bear Agency, the team behind Pixel Manager for WooCommerce, trusted by 50,000+ daily users. We help established WooCommerce stores improve Google Ads performance and profitability by optimizing structure, tracking, and campaign logic—not by increasing ad spend, but by making your existing campaigns work smarter.
The Subscription Only Strategy Behind Scratch’s Multi-Million Dollar Brand
Scratch co-founder Mike Halligan joins Eric to break down the subscription strategy behind a dog food brand with more than $30 million in annual recurring revenue. They cover acquisition, onboarding, giving customers control over delivery dates and handling cancellations. Throughout, Mike explains the importance of staying close to customers and using cohort analysis to understand which groups of subscribers stay, which leave and why, then turning those insights into a better customer experience.
Who I Want on Stage to Show What Works in Marketing Today
Most people in the WooCommerce world can build almost anything. Where we struggle is selling it: pricing, launches, positioning, getting found, keeping customers once they’ve paid.
That’s why Checkout Summit 2027, April 28 to May 1 in Palermo, is about one thing: learning what actually works in marketing, from people who’ve done it with real products and real clients.
The call for speakers is open (and this year each speaker gets up to €1,000 as honorarium!), but instead of waiting to see who turns up, I decided to say out loud who I’d love to hear from.
Learn more on Checkout Summit blog ▶️
Our WooCommerce Products
- Business Bloomer Club: a private community for WooCommerce freelancers, agencies, plugin developers, and store owners who want direct access to expert support, live classes, feedback, and honest business conversations.
- WooWeekly newsletter: a weekly digest of WooCommerce news, tutorials, product ideas, business lessons, and industry insights delivered to thousands of WooCommerce professionals.
- WooCommerce mini plugins: small, focused plugins that solve one specific WooCommerce problem without the bloat. Install, activate, and move on with your day.
- Checkout Summit: an in-person event dedicated to WooCommerce professionals who want practical strategies, real-world lessons, and fresh ideas from people actively building products and businesses.
- Save the Plugin: a 30-day sprint for premium WooCommerce plugin founders who are watching their install numbers flatline. Join, do the work, get your money back
- Cart Rules: cart-level rules for WooCommerce, block combos, cap quantities, restrict what ships together. Set it once and stop policing carts by hand.
- Sales by State: sales reports broken down by state, built to work across ecommerce platforms, not locked to WooCommerce. See where your customers actually are, without digging through CSV exports.
- Ecommerce And Beyond: my book on ecommerce marketing. It features a practical 9-step framework to attract the right traffic, turn visitors into buyers, and grow revenue without getting lost in technical jargon.
CheckoutWC replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a Shopify style checkout. It’s clean, mobile-first, conversion‑optimized and built with performance and extensibility in mind. Proven to reduce cart abandonment and keep you in full control of your code! Free to install, plus 20% off CheckoutWC Pro for WooWeekly readers with code BLOOMER
SnapEX Pay is a crypto payment gateway for WooCommerce. Customers pay in USDT on TRON, Ethereum or BSC, or in 50+ other coins converted to USDT, and the money lands in your merchant balance in USDT, with no wallets or nodes to run. The free plugin works with the Checkout block, classic checkout and HPOS, marks orders paid automatically and has a test mode that needs no real money. Pricing: 1% per payment, no setup or monthly fee.
Well, congratulations for reading this far! There are many ways you can support WooWeekly:
- Share it: https://wcwkly.com/newsletter-archive/
- Invite friends: https://wcwkly.com
- Leave a review: https://www.businessbloomer.com/shop/newsletters/wooweekly-free/
- Become a sponsor for as little as $97: https://wcwkly.com/sponsors/
Enjoy the rest of the week and see you next Wednesday!
