Happy Wednesday!
Today’s “back to the city” day. Mixed feelings, as always… if school wasn’t a thing, I’d happily stay at the beach all year round. Counting down until my kid’s off to uni (another 13 years…) and I get to drop out of the city for good!
Which also means I’m back to full-time(ish) mode starting tomorrow. Yesterday I had a lovely call with our first Checkout Summit 2027 sponsor, and it’s amazing to see how much they value the work I’m doing. The headline sponsor should also get back to me any day now. Two almost closed, five more to go. This feels real, once again.
Business Bloomer, CartRules, Sales by State: My New Multi-Site Bet
For 15 years Business Bloomer was the only thing I worked on: one site, one blog, one catalog of plugins, one audience.
However, my plugin infrastructure got so much easier to run that testing new ideas stopped feeling risky, so I created two new brands (because why not?): CartRules, a set of free and premium plugins for restricting what goes into a WooCommerce cart, and Sales by State, a free-to-paid plugin built around a topic that isn’t tied to Woo alone. Hello FluentCart, SureCart, Shopify…
Read my full piece on Business Bloomer blog ▶️
Recover your website within minutes from the worst disaster that may strike your WordPress site. With incremental backups, GDPR compliant storage, 1-click restore and more, BlogVault gives you complete peace of mind.
The Modern WooCommerce PR Workflow (with James Kemp)
After my first (rather messy) attempt at contributing to WooCommerce Core, it’s time to do things properly. In this live session, James Kemp will guide me through the entire process of building and submitting a real WooCommerce Pull Request—from planning the change to coding, testing, AI, code review, and the final submission. If you’ve ever wanted to contribute to WooCommerce but didn’t know where to start, this is the workflow you’ll want to see.
Join us on September 24, 2026 (10AM NY | 3PM UK | 7:30PM India) for Business Bloomer Club’s first post-summer live class!
Learn more on Business Bloomer ▶️
How to Send WooCommerce WhatsApp Order Notifications?
Do you run a WooCommerce store and want to send order notifications on WhatsApp?
If yes, this guide is for you. By the end of it, you’ll know exactly how to send WhatsApp notifications for WooCommerce orders using the official WhatsApp Business API.
But first, let’s quickly look at the different ways this integration can benefit your store.
Learn more on WANotifier blog ▶️
Proposed change: Requiring PHP 8.1 or newer for WooCommerce 11.5 and beyond
The WooCommerce engineering team has been evaluating WooCommerce’s minimum PHP requirement, talking with the community, and tracking general store hosting trends. Our goal is to bump the minimum requirement to PHP 8.1 or newer, starting with the WooCommerce 11.5 release currently targeted for January 2027. This change would end support for PHP 7.4 and 8.0 in future versions of WooCommerce.
We want to hear from store owners, agencies, hosting providers, extension developers, and other WooCommerce contributors as we determine the target release.
Woo is the company behind WooCommerce, the ecommerce platform that powers 4M+ stores. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce empowers anyone, anywhere, to sell anything with truly unlimited extensibility, flexibility, and control over how they build and evolve their business. Launched in 2011 and acquired by Automattic in 2015, Woo is a fully distributed company with employees based around the world.
WANotifier for WooCommerce: help your WooCommerce clients drive more revenue by sending order notifications, abandoned cart recovery alerts and promotional marketing campaigns on WhatsApp, powered by the official WhatsApp Business API.
Get a free Google Ads audit for your WooCommerce store from Wolf+Bear Agency, the team behind Pixel Manager for WooCommerce, trusted by 50,000+ daily users. We help established WooCommerce stores improve Google Ads performance and profitability by optimizing structure, tracking, and campaign logic—not by increasing ad spend, but by making your existing campaigns work smarter.
Additional Variation Images included in WooCommerce 11.1
Variation galleries were introduced in WooCommerce 10.9 as an opt-in feature and rolled out gradually. As per previous announcement, starting in WooCommerce 11.1, they will enabled for every store, and the experimental feature toggle is removed.
The functionality previously provided by the WooCommerce Additional Variation Images extension is now part of WooCommerce core. When a store updates to WooCommerce 11.1, the standalone extension is automatically deactivated to prevent conflicts. Existing variation galleries continue to appear through WooCommerce core.
The Free Plugins Finally Point Somewhere
The whole reason I started building free CartRules plugins was to eventually point people toward a paid one. That part never actually existed until this week!
One in Cart Pro has been sitting half-finished for a while: a real plugin, but with no licensing, no tests, and nothing tying it back to the free plugins. This week I finally closed that loop, on the plugin itself and on the whole site around it.
Here’s what shipped, and what I’m actually planning to do with it now that it’s real.
Learn more on CartRules blog ▶️
How to Sell Tickets for Live Music Events with WooCommerce
Selling tickets for a concert is easy. Running the ticketing operation around it is where things get complicated.
You might need different ticket types, multiple event dates, merchandise, parking, attendee verification, capacity controls, ticket scanning, re-entry and on-site sales. For larger festivals, all of those moving parts need to work together without creating a patchwork of separate systems or adding fees to every ticket sold.
Learn more on FooEvents blog ▶️
Our WooCommerce Products
- Business Bloomer Club: a private community for WooCommerce freelancers, agencies, plugin developers, and store owners who want direct access to expert support, live classes, feedback, and honest business conversations.
- WooWeekly newsletter: a weekly digest of WooCommerce news, tutorials, product ideas, business lessons, and industry insights delivered to thousands of WooCommerce professionals.
- WooCommerce mini plugins: small, focused plugins that solve one specific WooCommerce problem without the bloat. Install, activate, and move on with your day.
- Checkout Summit: an in-person event dedicated to WooCommerce professionals who want practical strategies, real-world lessons, and fresh ideas from people actively building products and businesses.
- Cart Rules: cart-level rules for WooCommerce, block combos, cap quantities, restrict what ships together. Set it once and stop policing carts by hand.
- Sales by State: sales reports broken down by state, built to work across ecommerce platforms, not locked to WooCommerce. See where your customers actually are, without digging through CSV exports.
- Ecommerce And Beyond: my book on ecommerce marketing. It features a practical 9-step framework to attract the right traffic, turn visitors into buyers, and grow revenue without getting lost in technical jargon.
CheckoutWC replaces your WooCommerce checkout page with a Shopify style checkout. It’s clean, mobile-first, conversion‑optimized and built with performance and extensibility in mind. Proven to reduce cart abandonment and keep you in full control of your code! Free to install, plus 20% off CheckoutWC Pro for WooWeekly readers with code BLOOMER
SEOPress PRO is the SEO plugin agencies white label on client stores. Build product titles and meta descriptions from price, SKU, category and tag variables, then apply them across 5,000 products in one save. Product schema, redirects, 404 monitoring and GA4 ecommerce events included. One license, unlimited client sites, $149/year.
AltTextLab generates accurate alt text for your entire WooCommerce catalog in one bulk run, then automatically for every new product image you upload. It reads your actual product data to describe each image accurately and pulls focus keywords from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and other SEO plugins. Better alt text means better accessibility and stronger image SEO, without the hours of manual writing. Install in minutes, run it once, and keep every store you build covered. Free plan available.
HTech-Solutions provides reliable WooCommerce hosting on dependable U.S.-based infrastructure for store owners, developers, and agencies that want straightforward pricing and practical support. Our hosting includes cPanel, NVMe storage, free SSL, automated backups, CloudLinux account isolation, DDoS protection, WordPress management tools, and migration assistance for eligible stores. Unlike providers that advertise temporary introductory rates, our prices are recurring without a renewal-price surprise. HTech-Solutions has supported website owners and growing businesses since 2006.
Advanced Shipping Rates for WooCommerce is the most flexible all-in-one shipping table rate plugin. With 38 combinable conditions, you can easily set precise shipping costs—from the simplest to the most complex cases. It gives you code-like power with 15 special actions, a packing algorithm, product grouping, and ranges based on 7 distinct criteria. It comes with 60 ready-to-use examples, multilingual and multi-currency support, and a built-in logging system. Get a 20% discount with coupon code BBLOOMER
Wholesale for WooCommerce is the first complete AI-powered B2B+B2C wholesale solution that sets up your B2B store instantly. It helps B2B store owners automate wholesale pricing, buyer roles, quotes, product tables, registrations, and bulk ordering from one place. Use simple AI prompts to manage supported B2B tasks faster, while buyers enjoy role-based pricing, faster product discovery, and smoother quote-to-order workflows. Build a smarter WooCommerce wholesale store without stitching together multiple plugins.
The EU right of withdrawal, handled inside WooCommerce, free. Rooster One is one unified platform: it measures once, every function reads the same backbone, and decisions rest on numbers that agree by design, replacing dozens of plugins along the way. Speed nothing bolted together can match, and a shop that is a pleasure to run. Pro gives hours back every day and sharpens every decision. From a team doing ecommerce since 1995.
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Enjoy the rest of the week and see you next Wednesday!
