WooWeekly #368: Sliding

Hello there, how you doing?

Here in Sicily all is well. Lorenzo won’t need surgery until March 2022 after all, and it seems it’s a quick one, so we’re ok with that and are happy to be back to normal life for a while. Well, now comes Christmas, his very first birthday, granpas and granmas, uncles, friends… I’ll try to make it through.

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!

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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content

WooCommerce Snippet: Override Single Product Settings e.g. Enable Reviews

In WooCommerce, everything is easy until you have a dozen products to manage. But once you start scaling, and maybe need to import hundreds of items, right then is when you go looking for shortcuts. Problem is – there are single product settings that you must enter manually for each product (or do it in bulk anyway) such as tax status, tax class, shipping class, sold individually, enable reviews and more; you could keep repeating your manual setup operations or fine-tune your bulk editor system to get that done, but what if there were a few lines of code that would simply “set” whatever option you need for ALL products, without bothering whether that specific option is set or not set in the single product edit page? Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-override-single-product-settings/

WooCommerce Tutorial: Top Quick View Plugins

Imagine if your customers didn’t have to visit a separate product page every time they wanted to check out a product. They could see product details right from the page they’re on and avoid going back and forth between the store and product pages. Sounds convenient, right? This is exactly what a quick view feature on your WooCommerce store can do. It allows shoppers to view product images, features, and prices from the shop page through a popup window. The good news is that there are some great quick view plugins you can use to add this functionality to your shop and optimize it for sales. We’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of seven of the best WooCommerce quick view plugins you can use for your online store. Let’s dive in: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-top-quick-view-plugins/

WooCommerce Tutorial: Winning With a Cross-Sell Strategy

If you’ve experienced the difficulty and high cost of acquiring new customers, you’re not alone. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be hard. With the help of WooCommerce, you can easily create personalized recommendations to attract more sales from customers who are already interested in your offerings. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at cross-selling and its benefits. We’ll also show you how you can create an effective strategy for your online store, using the WooCommerce Added to Cart trigger in MailOptin. Let’s get started: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-cross-sell-strategy/

WooCommerce Tutorial: Why Enable Sliding Cart?

Cart abandonments are a WooCommerce store owner’s worst nemesis – research suggests a whopping 69.8% of customers abandon shopping carts, causing a massive dip in sales and revenue. Well, we already covered a possible solution earlier, so we’ll add to that today by looking at floating cart plugins. These tools can help your customers view their shopping cart on any page of your WooCommerce store, saving them the back and forth between the page they’re currently on and the WooCommerce cart page. This article will explore some popular WooCommerce floating cart plugins you can use to leverage this feature on your store: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-sliding-floating-cart/

THANK YOU, ORCHESTRA SPONSORS!

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2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights

Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:

1. The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Dave Rodenbaugh of Recapture.io fame memorably referred to WooCommerce as the sleeping giant of the eCommerce world in a recent episode of The WP Minute. If we are to take into consideration Rodenbaugh’s own estimate of the amount of money processed through WooCommerce from Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM) — a whopping $840 million — then it would seem that the sleeping giant is beginning to awaken. After all, that equates to almost 5% of the total amount of money processed through WooCommerce for the entirety of 2020. However, it has to be acknowledged that Shopify was already hitting these numbers several years ago. This year, Shopify’s merchants — though fewer in number compared to WooCommerce — hit $2.9 billion during Black Friday alone. For the moment, Shopify remains outnumbered but not unprocessed, except by Amazon, naturally. 
2. WordPressopoly: I have spoken about the consolidation happening in the WordPress ecosystem before. This should interest all of us primarily concerned with WooCommerce because our platform is a bit like an unwalled garden existing within the broader WordPress ecosystem. This week, I am raising the topic once more not because of some game-changing acquisition (at least not at the time I am writing this…), but because FlipWP added another acquisition listing after a brief lapse. This latest product is not explicitly WooCommerce-focused, but it would not be unreasonable to think there are a fair share of WooCommerce store owners using it. 
3. Stripe’s New Stripes: Stripe is hands-down the most popular payment gateway for WooCommerce, as is the case with Shopify (make no mistake: Shop Pay is powered by Stripe, as is WooCommerce Payments). And Stripe is coming at you once again with new stripes. This time brought to you by Brainstorm Force, the creators of the legendary Astra theme. There’s not too much out there yet about why this beats other Stripe plugins, but I imagine customer support is one key distinguisher. All in all, I am intrigued by this latest payments project unveiled by a seasoned and prolific team.
4. Just Wait for It: Check out Barn2’s guide on the best WooCommerce waitlist plugins. If you need extra guidance, be sure to check out our own Business Bloomer post on the subject, which walks you through exactly how to set up a waitlist for out-of-stock products.

3. Bloomer Armada Headlines

Here are the latest news regarding Bloomer Armada, Business Bloomer’s private WooCommerce community.

1. Excitement: that’s the actual feeling I got when a Bloomer Armada subscriber posted the first ever “priority comment” (link). Thanks to this amazing Bloomer Armada perk, Ben and myself have been having a nice back and forth with code and feedback, and we still haven’t finished lol! All before I found the time to reply to all the other blog comments…
2. Angel: that’s our new Armada member of the week! Welcome to the community and hope to see you posting your WooCommerce questions soon on our private Slack channel!
3. Ah, Slack!: speaking of which, great threads this week on Bloomer Armada private Slack channel… Especially one about “Is it possible to connect to the same Stripe account from 2 different WooCommerce websites?“. Interesting outcome there.
4. Rebrand: I’m still working with the designer but it seems we both found the right direction in regard to Bloomer Armada’s logo. The latest version is quite minimal, but at least it communicates this sense of “membership” that I wanted to focus on. Let’s hope we sign off soon.

4. ICYMI

WooCommerce Snippet: Rename “Read more” To “Out of stock” @ Shop

There is an unfortunate (IMO) add to cart button naming on the WooCommerce shop page / category pages / product loops. When an item is out of stock, the “Add to cart” (or “Select options” for a variable product type) button label will turn into “Read more”. To be honest, that doesn’t really say much to the end customer. It’s quite confusing and doesn’t make much sense. Today, we’ll see how to change that “Read more” label into something more comprehensible: “Out of stock”. A super easy trick. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-rename-read-more-out-of-stock-shop/

WooCommerce Tutorial: Google Ads, Merchant Center, Adsense, Facebook Pixel Integrations

While organic strategies like SEO are great for increasing traffic and conversions for your store, sprinkling some paid advertising into your marketing efforts can give it a much-needed push. Paid ads offer an excellent way to increase your WooCommerce store’s reach, exposure, and sales. But whether you display ads on your store to earn extra revenue or create ad campaigns to market your products, managing ads can be challenging and time-consuming. Fortunately for you, there are some fantastic ad automation plugins that can help you create, run, and track ad campaigns, all from scratch. This article will explore some WooCommerce plugins that you can use to automate your advertising campaigns. But first, let’s take a quick look at how these plugins work: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-ad-automation-plugins/

WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Bulk Edit Product Categories

Using WooCommerce product categories is one of the best ways to help your shoppers find what they need quickly and improve their experience at your store. However, the real struggle begins when you have to edit these categories – adding new products, removing items or overwriting them into a new one for example. Performing these actions on one or two categories may not hurt, but editing a large number of them individually can be a challenge. Luckily, there are multiple ways you can bulk edit your product categories to save on time and boost efficiency. In this article, we’ll dive into how you can edit product categories en masse using WooCommerce’s default settings. For more advanced editing options, it’s best to go for plugins – so, we’ll also explore some great plugins you can use for this purpose. Let’s begin: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-how-bulk-edit-product-categories/

WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Start an Affiliate Program in 4 Steps

There are many different ways to reach potential new customers and grow your business. However, most of these methods cost money regardless of whether you achieve the desired results. That’s where affiliate marketing comes in. It is a popular marketing model where you recruit third parties to drive people to your WooCommerce store and purchase your products. Even better, you’ll only pay for successful conversions. In this post, we’ll discuss why using affiliate programs is one of the most effective ways to grow your business. We’ll then show how to create an affiliate program for your WooCommerce store in four easy steps. Let’s get started: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-start-affiliate-program/