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, I’m busy with client work, house renovation and at the same time my son just started walking before his surgery in 2 weeks time. Needless to say I’m sleepless these days lol.
Anyhow, let’s get back to Woo. Enjoy!
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1. Brand New WooCommerce Content
WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?
In this article, we’ll cover essential factors such as ease of use, budget, payment methods, checkout experience, scalability, integration options to help you determine which ecommerce solution is best suited for your business requirements. But first, let’s begin with a quick overview of both ecommerce platforms: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-vs-shopify/
WooCommerce Snippet: Display Customer Address @ Order Pay
The annoying thing about the Order Pay page is the fact that it shows no customer address. Let’s see how we can add the billing/shipping customer address at the top of the page – here’s a quick fix for you. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-billing-address-order-pay/
WooCommerce Function of the Week: wc_get_held_stock_quantity
If your store relies on careful stock management, wc_get_held_stock_quantity is very useful. As orders come in for a limited number of products, you can take special action. As usual, let’s first take a look at the function syntax and then consider a practical example of how you might use or display the returned value. Enjoy: https://poststatus.com/woocommerce-function-of-the-week-wc_get_held_stock_quantity/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to build a WooCommerce wholesale site
Buying wholesale is essential to commerce. This leads many ecommerce merchants to build a WooCommerce wholesale site. In this post, we will look at how you can add wholesale pricing and functionality to your ecommerce store using WooCommerce: https://www.godaddy.com/garage/build-woocommerce-wholesale-site/
2. David’s WooCommerce Highlights
Here are a few notes written by David of PeachPay, WooWeekly co-author:
The Great Outdoors
For any developers or designers out there who have created WooCommerce stores catered toward hunters, athletes, fishermen, hikers, or campers… this design & strategy guide is for you.
It centers its analysis on the following sites:
Singling out these commonalities:
- Responsive design (optimizing for mobile, limiting pop-ups & resizing fonts appropriately)
- Emphasized visual elements (homepages replete with high-resolution images & videos)
- Integrated social media (active profiles across a variety of platforms & ensuring a smooth transition from profile to store)
- Investing in email marketing
- Adding/emphasizing call-to-action buttons
Here’s two stores that I would add to the mix, and both were built with WooCommerce:
One similarity you might notice between these two stores is their usage of PeachPay. Skre Gear retains its checkout page, offering PeachPay as a supplementary option, while You Go Pro Baseball is ONLY using PeachPay. Both options are A-OK!
A $761 Billion Problem
The retail industry faces a $761 billion problem. That problem is returns, which in 2021 accounted for 16.6% of all merchandise sold (compared to 10.6% the year before). Regardless of whether or not this is an inevitable consequence of the digitization of commerce — returns are apparently higher than usual when consumers make online purchases — it is important to set your return policy straight as a WooCommerce store owner.
Ideally, you can offer “free” returns. As one expert put it, “Free returns are a game-changer. I, personally, am much more likely to buy online, especially from a brand I don’t know if they will let me return for free. We have clients who offer that, and their conversions are often much higher than those with stricter policies.” Another strategy is to offer store credit, gift cards, and exchanges. In the words of another ecommerce specialist, “Any perks offered in place of free returns should be designed for maximum customer satisfaction. You don’t want customers to have a negative perception of your store just because you cannot process their returns.”
I know there are a couple of return-based WooCommerce plugins with a few thousand active installs each, but I think this is YET ANOTHER category of WooCommerce plugin ripe for new entrants.
Social Commerce: YouTube Edition
With Facebook not quite being what it once was as far as ecommerce ads are concerned, YouTube seems to be making shopping features a higher priority, no doubt also spurred on by Tiktok’s burgeoning success.
The main thing to be excited about is the advent of shoppable videos, the inevitable response to Instagram’s shoppable pictures. I expect the Shopify community to jump on this, just as they did with Instagram. In the present moment, WooCommerce merchants STILL cannot sell products directly on Instagram the same way Shopify and BigCommerce merchants can. This needs to change, and I only hope the WooCommerce merchant community does not need to wait as long for access to direct sales on YouTube.
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3. ICYMI
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Enable Distraction-free Checkout
It’s always a sign of success when customers show interest in your products, add them to their carts, and proceed to checkout. But what’s the point if they drop off and leave your site in the middle of the checkout process? The idea is to remove as much clutter and distractions through the checkout procedure – so customers can focus on completing the checkout entirely and end up buying your products: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-distraction-free-checkout/
WooCommerce Snippet: Automatically Register Guest Checkouts
There is a way to turn guest checkouts into registered customer ones. Of course, “Allow customers to place orders without an account” must be enabled in your WooCommerce settings, otherwise you’re not allowing guest checkouts and the snippet will be irrelevant. So, here’s the fix. Enjoy: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-automatically-register-guest-checkouts/
WooCommerce Tutorial: How to Add Breadcrumbs
One of the most important factors that ensure a positive customer experience is intuitive and seamless website navigation. Enabling breadcrumbs makes it easier and quicker for your customers to move around and navigate through your WooCommerce store and find the page or products they’re looking for. But before getting into it, let’s see how your store can benefit by adding breadcrumbs: https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-add-breadcrumbs/
WooCommerce Snippet: View Thank You Page @ Order Admin
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/
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