Hello there, how you doing today?
Here in Palermo, Sicily, all is well; today’s a special day. In fact, I’m off to the notary to sign my first house purchase and get the keys. I’m not sure if that ever happened to you before, but that’s something that happens once, maybe twice in the course of a lifetime. I’ll make sure to celebrate accordingly (even if that means we need to start renovating it, and it’s going to be long and stressful).
Anyhow, welcome back to WooWeekly, your appointment with WooCommerce tutorials, tips and updates handpicked for you so that you can learn something new!
WooWeekly is put together by myself, Rodolfo Melogli, founder at Business Bloomer, your go-to blog for WooCommerce tips and David Mainayar, co-founder at PeachPay, the backed-by-WooCommerce 1-click checkout solution. If you wish to spread the word about WooWeekly you can tell friends and colleagues to sign up at wcwkly.com
So, let’s get the party started… enjoy!
BUT FIRST… THANK YOU, STAGE SPONSOR!
Over 80,000+ store owners actively use Woosuite plugins for WooCommerce to enhance their user experience and increase the average order value. Some of their popular plugins include Wholesale Suite for WooCommerce, Dynamic pricing, Variation Swatches, and much more.
Want to sponsor WooWeekly to an audience of 15,000+ active readers as well as being featured on our website (dofollow) for a lifetime? Info on our sponsor slots are available at wcwkly.com/sponsors – we’re now selling slots for Dec 2021 and Jan-Apr 2022
1. Brand New WooCommerce Content
[WooCommerce Snippet] Phone Input Mask @ Checkout
The WooCommerce checkout page has a default phone input field that gets validated upon checkout (for HTML geeks, it’s actually an input type = “tel”). Usually, if such phone number contains letters, it will fail and checkout will stop. But that’s not the problem. Let’s suppose you only have US customers, or that you want to force customer to enter a certain format (e.g. “+” or “01” as prefix)… well, there is no way to achieve that out of the box within the WooCommerce settings. However, anything is possible in regard to customization, so all we need are 3 small changes: force the billing phone input to stay within a “maxlength“, set the phone input placeholder so that users know what the format should be before typing in, and finally add some JavaScript to provide an input “mask”, so that the final output is exactly what we want (123-456-7890 in this case scenario, but it could be anything). Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-phone-input-mask-checkout/
[WooCommerce Tutorial] How To Create A Buy One Get One Free Offer
This article will teach you how to create a Buy One Get One Free offer on your products. Buy One Get One Free is a special offer where customers get an extra product for free. Retailers commonly use this offer to encourage customers to buy their products. If you are an e-commerce site owner, it can be your next strategy to promote sales on your website. When the customers find the best offer on your website, you will get good feedback from them. You can also use it to clear out the inventory. We will be using the Dynamic Pricing & Discount Rules plugin, which enables you to set up the offer easily. Many e-commerce sites use this offer as a marketing strategy to boost sales of their products: https://woosuite.com/woocommerce/buy-one-get-one-free-offer/
[WooCommerce Tutorial] Waiting List for Out-Of-Stock Products
There’s no better feeling than “selling out” and still having more customers who want to buy your products. But while this image looks exciting, it comes with a considerable downside. Sold-out products put you at risk of losing customers – simply because they wouldn’t know when a product is back in stock to purchase it. They can also frustrate your customers and make them buy from your competitors instead, leading to business and customer loss. But what if there was a way to avoid this? By enabling waitlists for your online store, you can keep customers updated about their favorite product’s availability and immediately notify them when it’s back in stock. This article will take you through six of the best WooCommerce waitlist plugins that can help you recover missed sales: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-waiting-list-out-of-stock-products/
THANK YOU, ORCHESTRA SPONSORS!
Do the Woo is dedicated to helping guide, connect and elevate the WooCommerce Builder Community. Learn how to grow your Woo business by listening to your peers and colleagues on the Do the Woo podcast. Get biz tips on the Woo BizChat Podcast and discover tons of content on our community site. If you build products or services for WooCommerce, or sites using WooCommerce, the Do the Woo Builder Community is for you.
Consortia is a creator of premium WooCommerce plugins and extensions, each of which is designed to improve the eCommerce management experience for developers and online store owners. Our products focus on giving users better tools for store maintenance, bulk order management, cost and profit tracking pricing, and order and sales reporting. Our best selling products include the Bulk Table Editor, which helps users easily set up sales and bulk update important product values, as well as other popular extensions including Cost & Reports, Bulk Category Editor and Roles & Rules B2B
Shoptimizer is a FAST WooCommerce theme that comes with a ton of features all designed to help you convert more visitors into customers. It’s built for speed and conversions and is based upon real eCommerce research we’ve validated to generate millions of dollars on some of the biggest WooCommerce stores in the world. It includes the CommerceKit plugin which takes WooCommerce to the next level, with ajax search, order bumps, and much more. Grab a copy today for only $49!
WP Engine’s eCommerce hosting makes WooCommerce even better, helping your store run up to 40% faster, and drive up to 18% more sales. Plans come with an eCommerce-ready theme and automated plugin updates. Focus on your business, and let WP Engine protect your brand with enterprise-grade security and features such as Instant Site Search, eCommerce Gutenberg blocks, and more. Get 4 months FREE on any annual eCommerce plan with code WOOWEEKLY20
We are AG creates WooCommerce plugins that offer payment processing solutions for WooCommerce store owners. We then ensure these solutions work well for you, both now and in the future with prompt updates and support where necessary.
Want to join these sponsors and advertise in front of an audience of 15,000+ active readers? Read more at wcwkly.com/sponsors
2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights
Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:
- Let the Dollar Circulate: A recent discussion in the Post Status Slack group sparked my interest. Our humble (but not so little) platform hit ~$21 billion in GMV in 2020. Does that sound crazy? It shouldn’t. Consider the fact that Shopify hit almost 6x that in 2020: a whopping $120 billion. $42.2 billion of that came from the fourth quarter, meaning Shopify raked in 2x WooCommerce’s annual GMV in a single quarter. Granted, WooCommerce’s underground economy (invoicing, cash on delivery, etc.) probably outweighs that of Shopify. But make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen; we have a lot of catching up to do. For now, we’re only the biggest eCommerce platform by number of stores, not GMV.
- Let the Dollar Convert at the Proper Exchange Rate: Diego Zanella, the brains behind Aelia — most renowned for its currency switcher plugin — sat down on Do the Woo to discuss scaling from one plugin to fifteen plugins. The headline? A good developer is a lazy one.
- Back in Black (again): I want to remind all merchants and developers to prepare for Black Friday, just as I did in a previous edition of Woo Weekly a couple weeks back. Check out the conversation about WooCommerce performance that David Vogelphol, VP of Growth at WP Engine, had with WP Mayor’s Gaby Galea. This talk dovetails well with Carl Alexander and Till Kruss’ conversation about drilling in on Woo performance.
- This Time in English: Awesome blogpost from Colin Newcomer about creating a multilingual WooCommerce store. Expect a Business Bloomer list of the best multilingual plugins later this week.
THANK YOU, BALCONY SPONSORS!
WP Frontend Admin’s Restaurant Management free course will show you how to create a Restaurant Management platform using WordPress, WooCommerce, WP Ultimo, and WP Frontend Admin. Restaurants will register on your site, create their own sites, pay you a monthly fee for their site, and they will be able to sell food online, manage orders, and register team members. They will manage their sites using a beautiful frontend dashboard, you can use a custom design for the dashboard to simplify everything and show your custom brand.
Want to sponsor for as little as $97 for 4 issues? Find out more at wcwkly.com/sponsors
3. Bloomer Armada Headlines
Here are the latest news regarding Bloomer Armada, Business Bloomer’s private WooCommerce community.
- Armada & Partners: Welcome to Tosin Ogunrinde from Offerwhere who joined as a PARTNER and immediately issued a discount code for members! Also thank you to Marc, Rajeev, Hess, Valerie and Matt who signed up as SUPPORTERS/FANS. Glad to see so many of you 🙂
- Central… Perks: Already covered Offerwhere’s member discount, so it’s time to unveil this week’s brand new perk. Armada FANS, SUPPORTERS and PARTNERS can now enjoy Business Bloomer blog comment priority! I spent a few hours putting this together but basically active subscribers get a “priority badge” when leaving a blog comment, and I get a special email notification. They will get direct replies from me before non-members. Cool ha?
- Slack & Go: Our private Slack channel is growing, we’re now 19 subscribers. WooCommerce questions and mentorship requests are on the agenda. There is an interesting thread on shipping rates import/export, another on adding custom tabs and one on SEO. Loving how WooCommerce help is now a single click away from all Armada subscribers!
4. ICYMI
[WooCommerce Snippet] “Hide Out of Stock Items” Exception
WooCommerce stores with large inventory often decide to hide out of stock products from the website. As you all know, there is a WooCommerce setting for that, right under Settings > Products > Inventory called “Out of stock visibility“. With the tick of a checkbox you can toggle the visibility of products that ran out of stock and immediately return a clean shop page with no unpurchasable items. The story is, it could be you may want to still show out of stock items on a specific page via a custom shortcode, or limit the out of stock visibility setting only to certain categories. Well, today we will learn a cool WordPress hook called “pre_option_option“, that basically allows us to override whatever settings we have in the WordPress admin, and assign our own value on a specific page or condition. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-hide-out-of-stock-items-exception/
[WooCommerce Tutorial] Why & How to Bundle Products
Maximizing sales and revenue is every eCommerce store’s top priority. And a time-tested strategy to achieve this is – creating product bundles. Bundling happens when you combine complementary products and sell them as a package – often at discounted rates. This helps you sell more items, increase your average order value (AOV), and thus, earn more profits. It’s also a smart way to clear surplus stock and increase sales of slow-moving items. And that’s not it. Bundles benefit customers as well – they get more value by purchasing multiple products and save time and extra shipping charges, which further helps improve their experience at your store. But you don’t have to do this manually, you can easily start selling bundles using product bundle plugins. And given their extensive grouping and customization features, WooCommerce plugins remain a top choice for bundling products. Let’s begin: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-bundle-products/
[Business Development] Testing, 1, 2, 3…
It’s yet another Saturday, and this morning I’m speaking at WordCamp Italia for the second year in a row. I’m delighted my talk was selected and I hope the topic will interest many attendees. I will be streaming live from my own home so I have to rely on two very unlikely events: that my internet doesn’t go down, and that my 10-months old son doesn’t cry. Anyhow, while I’m here (not) rehearsing my talk and testing my microphone and video setup, I’m actually thinking at the exact reason why I pitched that talk: https://rodolfomelogli.com/testing-1-2-3/
