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, it’s been a tough week. And I guess it’s been the same for the majority of Europeans and beyond, including all those people from Russia who didn’t like what a bunch of powerful people ordered. It’s not only Ukraine. Let’s not forget about Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Libya, central Africa, and all the ones we never hear about in the news. Today’s newsletter must go on – but war needs to stop. We’ve had enough. [If you need any sort of help, please get in touch]
Anyhow, back to business. Let’s get the Woo party started… enjoy!
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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content
WooCommerce Snippet: View Thank You Page @ Order Admin
I’ve been coding for more than 1 hour but finally I found a way to make this work. When you are in “Edit Order” view under WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Orders, there is a dropdown of “Order actions”: “Email invoice”, “Resend new order notification”, etc. A major problem I’ve always had while troubleshooting or working on the WooCommerce thank you page was that I had to build that URL by hand in order to view it again or to avoid placing yet another test order. Well, from today, you can access that order thank you page URL directly from the “Order actions” dropdown. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-view-thank-you-page-order-admin/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How To Set Up Buy One Get One Free (BOGO) Offers
It’s no secret that the global eCommerce market size is increasing rapidly. As competition heats up, with more players entering the market, customers have more options to choose from. So, how do you thrive in this fiercely competitive atmosphere and maintain your sales growth, while ensuring customer satisfaction? One effective strategy is offering the Buy One Get One (BOGO) offer and discounts, which helps acquire new customers and turn them into repeat buyers. Before we explore how you can add BOGO offers to your store to offer discounts to your customers and improve sales, let’s see how exactly such an initiative helps your store’s bottom line: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-buy-one-get-one-bogo-offer/
WooCommerce Function Of The Week: wc_get_logger
Logging in software development means keeping a file log of events for troubleshooting and health tracking purposes. Go to WordPress Dashboard > WooCommerce > Status > Logs and take a look at the dropdown: you’ll see dozens if not hundreds of log entries generated by either WooCommerce itself or some of your active WooCommerce extensions. You can do that too, with wc_get_logger. The wc_get_logger function lets you create your own event log. You might want one for troubleshooting something under development or to give your clients a handy report of what a plugin or code snippet did on any given day. Not sure why and how you should use wc_get_logger? Here’s more context, some case studies, and a code example. Enjoy: https://poststatus.com/woocommerce-function-of-the-week-wc_get_logger/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to use personalization to boost sales and customer loyalty
Selling online offers businesses new and exciting ways to connect with their customers. One of the most impactful is WooCommerce personalization. With it, you can craft a unique, highly relevant experience for each buyer. This is enabled by the digital nature of an ecommerce site. You can not implement the same way in a physical store, as not everyone shops in the same place. In this post, we will examine how you can use WooCommerce to personalize the shopping experience for your customers: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/using-woocommerce-personalization/
2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights
Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:
Reflections from EEE (Miami ecom event)
What a power play — an entire conference put together by a single ecommerce growth agency and sponsored by the companies behind all its favorite tools. Some of you may know of Absolute Web, as they have more than a few stellar WooCommerce stores in their portfolio. While they are not married to WooCommerce — also producing stores with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento — it is good to see a recognized WooExpert agency thriving like this.
I attended the conference and found it far more informative than most events like these (comprehensive LinkedIn recap here). I very much hope that we’ll see more agencies either exclusively or partially focused on WooCommerce organizing conferences like this one. If you run an agency yourself, it is definitely something to consider, providing ample opportunities for networking, business development, and simply staying up-to-date with the latest trends in ecommerce.
Forever21’s Digital-First Strategy
To say that Forever21 has struggled during the last few years is an understatement. In the wake of bankruptcy, it was scooped up by a consortium of mall operators & Authentic Brands Group, a brand group.
Now under new management, it is taking ecommerce more seriously. Not only did Forever21 implement a PeachPay-style window checkout experience, it appointed a new CEO, Winnie Park, who oversaw the transformation of a brick-and-mortar retailer to a digital lifestyle brand at her previous gig.
It will be interesting to see how other failing retailers dig themselves out of the holes they are in by adopting a digital-first strategy, i.e. taking ecommerce seriously. I cannot help but hope that some of these retailers will find a home in WooCommerce as opposed to Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. Regardless, I think Park’s story will become an increasingly common one: ecommerce gurus climbing the greasy corporate ladder until they reach the c-suite.
The Future of Fraud?
A story about the rise in theft across U.S. retail stores caught my eye. Obviously, ecommerce store owners don’t have to worry about shoplifting, but fraud is still a concern. Although ecommerce fraud has decreased as a proportion of the ecommerce industry since the start of the pandemic, that has more to do with ecommerce ballooning as opposed to more robust fraud detection.
Even if you’re not thinking about fraud, it is affecting you via high transaction fees & false declines. I wonder whether the future of fraud will consist of adjustable risk management options, whereby more risk-tolerant ecommerce merchants are able to opt for lower transaction fees or fewer false declines. Maybe that’s silly, but a couple of things are plain as day: ecommerce fraud is still a problem, and so too is the number of false declines resulting from overzealous fraud detection measures.
I would like to see more fraud detection solutions become available in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and specifically something along the lines of Signifyd, which is currently limited to Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento, and a few other platforms. I think it is a big opportunity for any WooCommerce plugin developer with expertise in this space.
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3. ICYMI
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 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/
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/
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