WooWeekly #377: Variable SKUs, Blocks II, Private Store

Hello there,

Welcome back to WooWeekly, your weekly 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 customization tips and David Mainayar, co-founder at PeachPay, the backed-by-WooCommerce 1-click checkout solution.

On a personal note, here in Sicily all is well. Tomorrow I’m finally shipping 3 gift boxes to my friends that I prepared before Christmas. Nothing special, yeah, but what amazes me is (1) how time flies and (2) how I struggle with finding just 10 minutes/day to get this sort of stuff done (no business, no family). I ended up spending 200-300% more for shipping because I had no time to research cheaper options. Also, I need to print shipping labels but I have no printer, so I need to go look for one in the morning. I haven’t purchased gift cards yet. The list goes on… Couriers arrive tomorrow and it’s almost 3am. Well, at this point I’m voting for extending days to at least 25 hours 😀

Anyhow, back to business. Let’s get the Woo party started… enjoy!

BUT FIRST… THANK YOU, STAGE SPONSOR!

GoDaddy PRO WordPress Ecommerce hosting with WooCommerce gives you the freedom to sell anything, anywhere online – from physical products to digital downloads, services and subscriptions. We’ve integrated WooCommerce into our Managed WordPress platform where you can choose from over 75 premium WooCommerce extensions included in your plan for as long as you host your ecommerce store with us. That’s nearly $6,000 in free premium extensions — at no extra charge — to build a powerful, customized ecommerce store.

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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content

WooCommerce Snippet: Display Variations’ SKU @ Product Admin

I find it quite annoying that variable products display an empty SKU cell in the WordPress > Products admin page even if their variations may have one available. Today, we go fix that. With this simple snippet, your variable products will display the SKU of each variation, and if there is none, empty brackets (so, it’s easy to identify if any variation is missing its SKU). So, let’s see how it’s done. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-display-variations-sku-product-admin/

WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Get Started with WooCommerce Blocks – PART 2

WooCommerce is one of the leading eCommerce platforms marking its territory in the eCommerce industry one website at a time – with over 5 million downloads. And now, the development team is working at making WooCommerce fully compatible with Gutenberg. And the first phase is about building custom WooCommerce Blocks that can be used in the new WordPress editor. In part 1 of this article we saw ten WooCommerce blocks and their significance. In this article, we’ll talk about ten more blocks you can use for an interactive online store. But first, let’s learn about adding and editing these blocks on your store: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-get-started-with-blocks-2/

WooCommerce Marketing: 5 Strategies to Narrow the Gap Between WooCommerce and In-Person Shopping

Online shopping is more popular than ever—and its popularity only grew during the pandemic. However, even with its popularity and even with its accelerated growth, eCommerce still only comprises 14 percent of the retail sales in the U.S. The overwhelming majority of shopping still happens at traditional brick and mortar stores. In this article, we’ll address each of those barriers to eCommerce adoption and discuss strategies (and WooCommerce extensions) you can use to narrow the gap between the experience you provide online and one a customer might get in a store: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/narrow-gap-woocommerce-in-person-shopping/

WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Create A Private Store

WooCommerce powers over 26% of global eCommerce websites and is an excellent and convenient way to create your online shop without writing a single line of code. But besides its convenience – another factor that makes WooCommerce a popular choice is its flexibility. For instance, several businesses prefer a private WooCommerce store model to grant access or sell products and services to specific customers and hide from the others. This is where a private store for WooCommerce plugins comes into the picture. In this article, we’ll briefly touch on those reasons and share some of the best WooCommerce private store plugins you can use for your WooCommerce store. Let’s go: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-create-private-store/

2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights

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

1. PeachPay’s Pay Day: I am pleased to announce that PeachPay received an investment from Global Paytech Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in promising payment technology companies. As one of the co-founders at PeachPay, I could not be more excited about what comes next. We will be hiring developers and evaluating the prospect of acquiring great WooCommerce plugins to complement our core checkout offering. We will not rest until we build the ultimate checkout and payments plugin for WooCommerce stores and beyond. 
2. Hot off the (Word)Press: As of a few days ago, you can buy certain plugins directly off the WordPress.com plugin page (not to be confused with the WordPress.org plugin page). Six of the most popular WooCommerce plugins are included in this selection — Woo Subscriptions, Bookings, Table Rate Shipping, AutomateWoo, Shipment Tracking, and Xero. 
3. Don’t Forget to Take Your Vitamins: If you’re interested in the eHealth industry, then be sure to check out Jordi Cabot’s analysis on the adoption of chatbots and eCommerce platforms in the top 50 nutritional supplement online stores. Cabot finds that 7 of the top 50 e-health stores use WooCommerce. Tied for first are Shopify and “none”, both accounting for 12 stores each. Note: I understand “none” to mean that the website in question has no eCommerce functionality, functioning merely as a gallery. 
4. Lights, Camera, Products, Action: Filkers promises to let you turn your store’s products into videos with the click of a button. A new offering, but definitely one worth checking out.

3. ICYMI

WooCommerce Snippet: Add Custom Field to “Quick Edit”

WooCommerce product custom fields are possibly the most used customization from what I’ve seen over the years on clients’ websites. Adding custom fields to the product backend is pretty straight forward (including the input fields to be used for editing their values), however there are two additional areas where you need to do more work in order to allow for custom field editing: the “Quick Edit” and the “Bulk Edit” sections (WordPress Dashboard > Products). We already saw how to allow a new custom field to appear in the Bulk Edit section, so this time we’ll talk about the Quick Edit window. So, how do we add a custom field in there (WordPress Dashboard > Products > Hover on a given product > Quick Edit)? Well, here’s a fully working snippet for you. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-custom-field-quick-edit/

WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Get Started with WooCommerce Blocks – PART 1

Since WordPress 5.0, the default page/post editor has been completely redeveloped. Surely, you’ve heard about Gutenberg. Bad news is that WooCommerce joined the new editing experience much more slowly, and there are still major things to develop in order to make it Gutenberg-friendly. The compatibility progress can be tracked via the WooCommerce Blocks official plugin, because you can find their “beta” blocks in there, those they call “experimental” and that will be officially released into WooCommerce once they are approved. In this article, we’ll specifically dive deep into WooCommerce Blocks – what they are, why they’re important, how many blocks are available, and how you can use them: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-get-started-with-blocks-1

WooCommerce Tutorial: How To Flip Product Images On Hover

Product images on your WooCommerce website play a significant role in increasing clicks and conversions. While installing WooCommerce will help you with the basic setup of your eCommerce store – with minimal image settings and a simple product gallery, you’ll need to look for better ways to boost your product images. One way to do this is through the WooCommerce image swap / flip plugins. These plugins let you add a hover effect on your product images to flip or change them. By doing this, you’ll be able to display additional variations of your products, allow customers to preview products right from the category page and keep customers in your store longer by offering them an enjoyable browsing experience. The product image swap/flip plugins for WooCommerce help stores in several other ways. But first, let’s understand their importance and get a clear picture of their functionality: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-flip-product-images/

WooCommerce Snippet: Hide Price If Product Out of Stock @ Frontend

Sometimes, the nature of ecommerce businesses requires some extra features. Thankfully, WooCommerce allows to customize pretty much everything based on whatever condition. Today, we’ll see how to hide prices for out of stock items, on the shop, categories, archives, loops and single product page. Think of an art gallery which sells unique art pieces, and doesn’t want to let users know for what price sold an item. Or maybe an online business that often runs discounts – why reveal at which price sold an item that is now out of stock? Of course, there are way more case scenarios – I’d be curious if you shared yours in the comment area. But for now, copy and paste the snippet and that’s it, you’re good to go. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-hide-price-if-out-of-stock/

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