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. We’re slowly approaching Lorenzo’s scheduled hernia surgery (beginning of March), but thankfully we’re (still) positive and calm. Also, we’re getting started with renovations around the same date – as usual big things always happen at the same time.
Anyhow, back to business. Let’s get the Woo party started… enjoy!
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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content
WooCommerce Snippet: Truncate Tag List @ Single Product Page
If you use WooCommerce product tags, it’s possible that a product may belong to 10 or more of them. When that happens, the single product page displays a long list of tag links, which may take too much space (see the below screenshot to visualize this). Today’s snippet is indeed a way to truncate that list to – say – 3 tags only, and add a “+” to show the rest upon click. In this way if the customer is really interested in that they can expand the view, otherwise tags will take up a single line only. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-truncate-tag-list-single-product/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How To Migrate From Shopify
As businesses grow – the need for a customizable, flexible, and feature-packed eCommerce platform that offers better control arises. And this is why some entrepreneurs migrate their online store from Shopify to WooCommerce. In this article, we share some plugins you can use to migrate your store from Shopify to WooCommerce with ease. But first, let’s look at some reasons and benefits behind considering Shopify to WooCommerce migration: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-migrate-from-shopify/
WooCommerce Tutorial: 4 extensions to nurture one-time buyers into repeat customers
Successful ecommerce stores don’t just focus on attracting new customers—they also spend time nurturing one-time buyers to turn them into repeat customers. Landing a new sale is great, but your work is only just beginning. Getting a second order from just 10 percent more of your existing customers, could lead to doubling your revenue. So it’s a strategy worth investing in. But how do you go about nurturing one-time customers into repeat buyers? Here are some strategies and tools to help you nurture customers and turn first-time buyers into repeat purchasers: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/woocommerce-customer-nurturing/
WooCommerce Function Of The Week: wc_get_customer_total_spent
WooCommerce is full of unknown gems for developers. For example, there are some core functions that calculate pretty complex data, and these functions are mainly “public” so that WooCommerce developers can reuse them for their own purposes. Today, let’s take a look at the wc_get_customer_total_spent( $user_id ) WooCommerce PHP function. As you can guess by its name, this function returns the total amount spent by a given customer identified by their user ID. There is no need to loop through user orders to add up totals and return a final sum — WooCommerce already has you covered. So, let’s take a deeper look at the syntax, meaning, and usage: https://poststatus.com/woocommerce-function-of-the-week-wc_get_customer_total_spent/
2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights
Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:
1. Muskets vs. Machine Guns: Jonathan Wold at Post Status shared an illuminating Twitter thread with me last week about Shopify. To say that it caused a stir would be an understatement of colossal proportions, and both Shopify’s Tobi Lutke and our very own Matt Mullenweg responded. The central claim was that Shopify merchants were being armed with “muskets” when they really need “machine guns” to compete with Amazon and today’s top brands.
To us at WooCommerce, it may sometimes seem like the grass is always greener on the other side. However, Shopify is evidently not always sunshine and rainbows either. The thread drew attention to the limitations of Shopify Analytics, Subscriptions, and Plus, among other things. Shopify merchants need better analytics, subscriptions that are not akin to “driving on the autobahn in a Soviet-made car,” and a Plus program that actually facilitates the process of scaling. Does any of that sound familiar to a Woo audience?
The last point about Shopify not being suited for merchants that are scaling is made time and time again by Woo evangelists. It is part of a narrative that we have been spoon-fed about merchants “outgrowing” Shopify, about as frequently trumpeted as the ownership argument. I have personally not seen much evidence to support this narrative. If anything, I have seen the reverse play out too often: high-GMV merchants find that Woo cannot provide what they are looking for and they switch to Shopify. Unfortunately, the latest numbers support this trend, as Woo is losing ground to Shopify.
There is much we can take away from this thread, but to me, the headline is that Woo has a real opportunity to close the GMV gap with Shopify by executing on those three core functions: analytics, subscriptions, and scaling support. I would also add a fourth function not mentioned in this thread: checkout & payments. Shopify has Shop Pay, and Woo is playing catch up here too.
All that being said, let’s not turn our competition with Shopify into a blood feud. At the end of the day, both Shopify and Woo are indeed “arming the rebels,” those not willing to put up with the sky-high transaction fees and myriad restrictions of Amazon. Personally, I would really like to see WooCommerce close the GMV gap with Shopify. But I would LOVE to see both WooCommerce & Shopify individually close the GMV gap with Amazon.
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3. ICYMI
WooCommerce Snippet: Split Shop Page By Category
Well, this is gonna be a big one for you. When you start having lots of products and lots of product categories, the shop page becomes either messy or unrepresentative, because it may show just the latest 16 products on page 1 when you have dozens of categories and a much wider range of products… As usual, there are plugins for that – first one that comes to mind is Nested Category Layout by Skyverge – but today I wanted to see how doable it was to code it, and how many lines of PHP were required. So, if you wish to switch the WooCommerce shop page display from “products” to “a given number of products for each parent category”, here’s the fix. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-split-shop-page-by-category/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Sell CBD Products
Since the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) removed cannabidiol, also known as CBD, from schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act in 2018, there has been a significant increase in CBD eCommerce in the United States. However, even though you can sell CBD products with WooCommerce, Automattic only supports the sale of CBD-related products under specific conditions. You cannot use payment gateways like Stripe or PayPal to accept payments. This means that “WooCommerce Payments” prohibits CBD too. Therefore, the real challenge lies in finding the right payment provider. In this article, we’ll talk about seven different payment solutions that permit the sale of CBD-related products with WooCommerce: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-sell-cbd-products/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to create an NFT store using WordPress and WooCommerce
NFT marketplaces are becoming a popular place for artists, designers and other types of creatives to monetize their work. With an NFT, creators can sell unique items, digital or physical customers who get verifiable proof of their ownership rights. In this guide, we will examine how you can use several WordPress and WooCommerce plugins you can use to create a marketplace for selling NFTs and NFT collections: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/woocommerce-wordpress-nft/
WooCommerce Snippet: Sync Billing Name & WP User Name
When someone places an order via the WooCommerce checkout, there is a function (process_customer) that saves the checkout first & last name to the customer Billing address (WooCommerce). The same function also overwrites that same WP user first & last name (WordPress). The same happens when someone updates the Billing address via the My Account edit address tab. There is a WooCommerce function (save_address) that copies Billing first & last name to the WP user first & last name. You’d think that was sufficient to keep billing names and WP user names in sync – well, nope. You can also update billing first & last name from the user edit profile page (WP dashboard). In such case, WP user first & last name is NOT updated, and billing and user names are not in sync. Today, we’ll study some code to make that happen, so that you never have to worry again about inconsistencies. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-sync-billing-name-wp-user-name/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Customize the My Account Page?
Customizing the WooCommerce “My Account” page is one of the most requested features by designers and developers. The “My Account” page of an ecommerce website is absolutely vital to the smooth running of its operations, should be well designed in order to allow users to fully make the most of account management and – of course – can be customized in order to convert more sales and or entice for return business. If you’re familiar with PHP customization, almost anything can be achieved with simple snippets: add a custom tab, remove a tab, change the content of a tab, sort tabs, and so on. We’ve seen this already on Business Bloomer but I’ll link to a few articles and tutorials below as a reminder. The other sleek alternative is to use a plugin. Sometimes, this might be a quick and error-free way to achieve what you need without the need of having to code. It’s up to you – so in this article we will see both methods: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-how-to-customize-the-my-account-page/
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