By now, you probably know that you should never run WooCommerce with a single payment gateway. We’ve already seen in the “PayPal or Stripe?” article that (spoiler alert!), the best solution is “PayPal AND Stripe”. Which means you need to understand that different customers prefer different kinds of payment methods (and this could increase your conversion rate dramatically).
Now we move to the next step: the chargebacks issue, and the risk of having your payment gateways banned by their providers.
A user recently told us that he has a WooCommerce subscription-based business, which is great. The problem is that sometimes customers don’t read that part and think they’re making a one-time purchase. And sometimes, when they realize they purchased something different than what they had in mind, they ask their bank or credit card company to issue a chargeback.
A chargeback happens when a cardholder makes a claim to their bank or credit card company that a payment made on their card was fraudulent. When a chargeback occurs, the business to which the payment was originally made is required to repay the full purchase amount, plus a chargeback fee.
While you can really do your best to avoid chargebacks by being transparent on your website and order receipts, sometimes – especially for WooCommerce Subscriptions – that’s not enough. Investors say: “Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket” and the same applies here: you’d better record your active subscriptions under PayPal, Stripe, Authorize, and so on, so that all your recurring revenue is not in the same account.
From chargebacks to banned account
We already said that chargebacks might bring your payment provider to ban your Stripe / PayPal / etc. account. Here are two case studies:
a) If you have legitimate customers and you receive over 1% of chargeback rate, your payment provider could close your account because you’ll be suspicious of having a fraudulent business. Therefore, all your subscriptions will be lost.
b) If a spammer / hacker makes a lot of purchases on your WooCommerce store with stolen credit cards, you might be on the hook for a lot of chargebacks. Yet again, your account could be banned/closed.
Unfortunately, we could talk about chargebacks and banned accounts for hours… so let’s find a solution that could decrease the chargeback rate instead.
Rotating payment methods (with 1 click)
The solution for avoiding chargebacks or having your account disabled is to rotate your payment methods to split the risk between multiple payment methods.
For example, you’ll take credit cards with Stripe for order 1, then Authorize.net for order 2, PayPal for order 3, and so on. That cycle will be repeated in a loop.If something bad happens, you won’t lose all your subscriptions, just a fraction of them.
If you search for a PHP snippet you won’t find a solution. But thankfully, there’s a plugin for that – and you can enable the “rotate payment methods” option with just one click.
This useful setting is just one of the features of the Conditional Payment Methods plugin, which allows you to conditionally enable/disable payment gateways based on shipping rates, user roles, order totals, and more. For example, you can enable credit cards and disable PayPal for high ticket products, enable cash on delivery method for local addresses only, enable bank transfer just for manual invoices, and so on.
Back to the rotating feature, after installing and activating the plugin, tick the “Rotate all payment methods per order” checkbox, click on Save changes and that’s it.
Here’s the 1-click “rotating payment methods” feature
Now your payment methods will be rotated and conditionally shown to customers. In one click, the risk of having your account disabled can be reduced. Ready to give it a go?
When it comes to saving time, the out-of-the-box WooCommerce plugin doesn’t give you many options and features. For example, searching through your WooCommerce orders is not straight forward enough because the search options are fairly limited.
By default, you can go to the WooCommerce Orders admin page (wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=shop_order) and use the basic search bar.
You can look for a customer name, a customer billing email and a few more, but that’s pretty much all you can do. You can’t look for multiple fields, you can sort, you can’t filter by order total, and so on.
You get the picture – for a store manager this Orders dashboard is not handy at all. Each extra minute wasted in trying to find something could be better invested – in marketing spend for example.
That’s why we want to show you a quick alternative in order to do advanced searches in seconds. You won’t need any PHP snippets – just a quick plugin that turns your order list into an intuitive and easy-to-use spreadsheet so that you can do all the filtering and manipulation you desire.
This plugin brings all the benefits from spreadsheets to WooCommerce orders management. You’ll be able to do advanced searches in seconds and even edit a lot of your orders fields and values in a spreadsheet.
You can export all your orders to a CSV document to give reports to clients or print them. Besides, you can import information from Excel or Google Sheets using CSV files.
A quick overview of the WooCommerce Orders, spreadsheet style!
2. Do advanced WooCommerce order searches & bulk edits
Click on Search to open the advanced WooCommerce order search tool:
Clicking on the order search tool…
You can now do advanced searches in seconds. For example, here are 10 advanced search scenarios you can achieve with this tool:
1) Search for WooCommerce orders by payment method
To search for your orders by payment method, you need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and then use these values:
Field key: payment_method_title
Operator: CONTAINS
Value: PayPal, for example. You decide which method you’ll use: Stripe, Alipay, BACs, Direct debit, etc.
Click on Run search to filter your orders.
Once you filter your orders by payment method, you’ll see them displayed on the spreadsheet.
2) Filter WooCommerce orders by total
You can quickly search for all your orders by their total amount. For this you need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and use the following values:
Field key: order total (_order_total)
Operator: You can search for orders by exact amount (=), less than (<), higher than (>), higher or equal (>=), less or equal (<=).
Value: Enter the total amount you want to search.
Click on Run search to filter your orders.
Once you do that, you’ll see all your orders filtered and displayed on the spreadsheet.
3) Search for discounted WooCommerce orders
When one coupon is applied to your order, the discount amount becomes > 0, so you’ll search for all your orders with that search parameter. Just tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and use the following values:
Field key: cart discount (_cart_discount)
Operator: “>”
Value: 0
Click on Run search to filter your orders
Now you’ll see all the orders that fulfill the selected search parameter displayed on the spreadsheet.
4) Search for WooCommerce orders by shipping method
To search for all your orders containing a specific shipping method, you need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values:
Field key: shipping method (_shipping_method)
Operator: “=”
Value: Enter your shipping method here. For example, “free shipping” or “flat rate”
Click on Run search to filter the orders.
Now you’ll see all the orders displayed on the spreadsheet.
5) Search for WooCommerce orders by VAT status
You can search for all your orders by VAT status. Just tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select the following values.
Field key: is vat exempt (is_vat_exempt)
Operator: “=”
Value: Enter Yes or No.
Click on Run search to filter them.
Now you’ll see the orders displayed on the spreadsheet.
6) Search for WooCommerce orders by payment date
Searching your orders by payment date takes seconds. Tick the Enable advanced filters and select these values:
Field key: date paid (_date_paid)
Operator: “=”
Value: Enter the date using this format: YYYYMMDD. No spaces; no hyphens.
Click on Run search to filter the orders
Now you’ll see all the orders displayed on the spreadsheet.
7) Search for WooCommerce orders by customer IP address
You can search for all orders by customer IP address by ticking the Enable advanced filters and selecting these values:
Field key: customer IP address (_customer_ip_address)
Operator: “=”
Value: Enter the IP address in this field.
Click on Run search to filter the orders.
After that, you’ll see all the orders made from that IP address displayed on the spreadsheet.
8) Search WooCommerce orders by date range
You can quickly search for all orders created during a specific date range. For this you need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values:
Date range from: Enter the range initial date
Date range to: Enter the range final date
Click on Run search to filter all your orders by date range.
Now you’ll see all the orders displayed on the spreadsheet.
9) Search for WooCommerce orders created by guest users
To find all orders created by non-registered users, you need to tick the Enable advanced filters checkbox and select these values:
Field key: customer user (_customer_user)
Operator: “=”
Value: (empty)
Click on Run search
Now you’ll see all orders by non-registered users displayed on the spreadsheet.
10) Search for WooCommerce orders by discount amount
Search for all your orders by discount amount by ticking the Enable advanced filters checkbox and selecting these simple values:
Field key: cart discount (_cart_discount)
Operator: You’ll have these options: exact amount(=), less than (<), higher than (>), higher or equal (>=), less or equal (<=)
Value: Enter the amount. 10 for example.
Click on Run search to filter the orders
After that, all your WooCommerce orders with discounts will be displayed on the spreadsheet.
Advanced WooCommerce order searches are easy!
We know that saving time is crucial to you, so we hope the WooCommerce Orders Spreadsheet plugin can be a valuable asset to your business.
If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment or contact the plugin developer. José would be super happy to get back to your pre-sale requests.
Maybe you don’t have staging, and you need to clone your WooCommerce website elsewhere to test updates or new functionality (because you’re not doing that on a live website, right?). Maybe you need to migrate an existing WooCommerce website to another server. Or, like me, maybe you need to copy an entire WooCommerce website on a fresh subdomain in order to write this step-by-step tutorial!
Either way, the free Duplicator plugin, available on the official WordPress.org repository, is your best friend. Whether you need to duplicate, clone, migrate, copy or even backup your WooCommerce website, Duplicator is the most straight forward system to achieve that.
Of course, is not super simple and this is why you’re reading this step-by-step tutorial about duplicating WooCommerce websites (including helpful screenshots). Hope this is helpful to those of you who need to achieve a complex and delicate operation (cloning/migrating is ALWAYS a delicate thing) within few steps.
All you need is an existing WooCommerce website, the Duplicator plugin, an FTP client (or File Manager) and access to the server where you will create the new subdomain and blank database. All the rest is handled by the plugin, so here’s the tutorial you were waiting for.
Select your existing WooCommerce install you want to clone, and add and activate the Duplicator plugin.
2. Existing WooCommerce Website: Create a new package
Go to Duplicator and click on “Create New” package.
3. Existing WooCommerce Website: Set up the new package
Set the package name if you want, then decide if you want to exclude certain files from the clone. For example, ZIP files. Or PDF files. Or even all your images, so the process will be much faster.
4. Existing WooCommerce Website: Scan the new package
When you move to the Scan step, the system will give you warnings if the package is too big in size or if there are other errors. In case you can go back to the Setup step and add more file exclusions.
5. Existing WooCommerce Website: Build the new package
When you proceed to the “Build” step, Duplicator will slowly backup your existing WooCommerce website and will generate two files: an ARCHIVE file containing website files and database, and an INSTALLER file necessary to clone the website elsewhere.
6. Download the package
Now go ahead and download the INSTALLER and ARCHIVE files on your computer. We’ll need them later to create the website clone.
7. Hosting: Create a new subdomain
From your hosting control panel, create a new subdomain where you wish to place your WooCommerce clone. You’ll need FTP access to this folder later.
8. Hosting: Create a new database
From your hosting control panel, create a new MySQL database through the wizard. You will need to set a database name, a database user and a database password. You’ll need these at step 11.
9. FTP: Place package in the subdomain folder
With an FTP software, place the INSTALLER and ARCHIVE files inside your subdomain folder. It should be empty i.e. there should not be another WordPress install or such.
10. Run the installer
Now open your browser and go to https://SUBDOMAIN_URL/installer.php. If you’ve placed the installer in the correct folder, Duplicator will display Step 1 and “Setup” and “Validation” will show a “Pass” badge.
11. Set up the installer
This is the most difficult and more “technical” step of the cloning process. Earlier, we created a database so you should have the database name, user and password available already and you can enter them in the relative input fields. The most complex input field is the “Host” one, but not that much really. It’s basically your hosting control panel “Main Domain”. If not sure, ask your host.
12. Review the installer setup
On step 3, simply review the “Setup” window, and make sure title, URL and path are correct. Title will be taken from the original website, URL should be the URL of your NEW WooCommerce clone. Then click on Next.
13. New WooCommerce Website: login
That’s it – easy peasy! You can now login to the cloned site and verify everything is working properly. Of course, you can login with the same credentials you use for the existing WooCommerce website.
WooCommerce is a powerful and feature-rich WordPress plugin. But despite the fact it’s got many features, there is always something missing for custom ecommerce businesses.
The problem with “all-you-can-do plugins” is the same as “all-in-one WordPress themes“: the more custom functionalities a piece of software has, the worse its performance gets.
Therefore, there is no need to pack every imaginable functionality into WooCommerce as it is easily expandable with other plugins.
For example, one particular feature is not available in WooCommerce out of the box: the possibility to use math formulas to calculate product prices.
This functionality is crucial for specific industries such as digital printing, custom-sized furniture, curtains, tiles, rollers and so on.
Curious to know how this can be implemented?
The idea and purpose of flexible price calculation
Quite often, businesses need to use some variables for a proper and accurate price calculation. It is relevant for products with measurements like width or height. Typically these are advertisement banners and other printing products, rollers and shutters etc.
Another use case would be when a product involves customization, e.g. ingredients or services, so a customer is allowed to choose add-ons. A perfect example would be a food ordering form, like pizza or cakes. Usually, the price for such products is based on quantity and type of ingredients added.
Other examples: personalized medals, gift wrappings, custom cut glasses/mirrors or even online game user rank upgrades!
There is a handy plugin for that
Uni CPO WordPress plugin lets you use math formulas for product prices – any formula! Whatever you put inside the ‘main formula’ setting becomes the product’s price.
Leave it empty and you will get a ‘0.00‘ price; fill it with any valid math expression and you can “build” your product price. Putting only a number also works (e.g. ‘42‘).
Math formula can be as simple as the following one:
Please note: variables inside the curly brackets are product custom fields. Those that begin with ‘uni_cpo_‘ are regular variables from the custom options added to the product.
Which brings us to the next note: Uni CPO plugin also lets you add custom product options by using a visual form builder.
Each regular variable holds the value of its option. Those that start with ‘uni_nov_cpo_‘ are numeric variables, created without any connection to options. It is possible to create a lot of artificial variables – in the plugin I call them NOVs (abbr for “non-option variables“) – and each can hold its part of the formula.
It is also possible to re-use NOVs in other NOVs and create a cascading effect.
Custom functions and NOV matrixes
You may have noticed that I used known math functions in the previous examples: ‘round‘ and ‘max‘. That’s right, and you can use these are functions in your formulas in the same way as you may do that in spreadsheet software.
There are more! Functions like ‘round‘, ‘floor‘ and ‘ceil‘ help with rounding. Functions such as ‘min‘ and ‘max‘ accept several arguments and make it possible to get the lowest and the highest number from a set of options. There are also ‘IF‘ statements. You can compare the option’s value against some threshold and determine if it is higher or lower and build additional logic on this.
NOV matrixes can be one or two dimensional and are used to derive a new value based on the value(s) from regular option(s) or NOV(s).
The simplest example is table-based pricing. Let’s say you have an option called “Thickness” (a dropdown of available values). Each thickness value (e.g. 4mm, 6mm etc.) has a specific price (e.g. 4mm has price $5.10, 6mm has price $8.79).
In this case, {uni_nov_cpo_thickness} will be holding thickness values (4 and 6 mm):
…and {uni_nov_cpo_thickness_price} will be holding price values:
Each option includes sub-options such as nicename, slug and price/rate settings (in our example these will be used instead of ‘1’ and ‘2’ that really don’t mean anything):
Demo and usage examples
Uni CPO demo site features many case studies – for example “Foamex banner” or “Furniture” products. They all take advantage of math formulas in order to calculate their prices.
The potential of the Uni CPO plugin is quite vast. You can use it even for product add-ons and for product configurations.
Another Uni CPO case study: measurement price calculations
Free vs PRO version
The free version of Uni CPO gives you the option to use math formulas and math functions in your product price calculations. Non-option variables are also available.
Uni CPO PRO introduces matrix functionality; therefore, it gives a possibility to create table-based pricing. Besides, it enables the product’s weight calculation and allows defining its measures; these values could be used during shipping price calculation (if your shipping plugin supports these values to be set dynamically).
The pro version includes updates and support (first response is always within 24 hours) for one year or lifetime, depending on the chosen license.
The default WooCommerce shop page layout makes it difficult for wholesale buyers to purchase in bulk.
This is because wholesale stores have different requirements as compared to retail stores. For instance, wholesale products are best displayed in a one-page order form for quick wholesale ordering as opposed to a more visual, image-rich layout.
In this post, we’ll run the rule over some of the best tools available for building a great WooCommerce wholesale store.
Along the way, we’ll share some tips on how each WooCommerce wholesale plugin can help you achieve a specific goal and deliver a better user experience.
Features to look for in a WooCommerce Wholesale plugin
If you go looking for WooCommerce wholesale plugins, you’ll find lots of plugins that let you display different product prices to retail and B2B customers. For example, if a t-shirt costs $19.99 for a retail customer, it might cost $11.99 per unit for B2B customers if they purchase at least 150 t-shirts.
While differentiated pricing is important for wholesale stores, you also need other features to convert your WooCommerce website into a complete wholesale store. Some useful features include the ability to:
Display products in a less visual way that is more suitable for B2B buyers
A private WooCommerce shop to hide the wholesale area of the store from retail customers
Making it easy for wholesale buyers to quickly see important product details and select variations
Restricting store access to specific user roles
Next, we’ll introduce you to some of the best WooCommerce wholesale plugins that can help you improve your wholesale purchasing user flows and make your wholesale store more user-friendly.
4 Best WooCommerce Wholesale Plugins
Here, we’ll take a look at some of the best WooCommerce wholesale plugins and how they can help you optimize your WooCommerce wholesale store for sales.
Out of the box, WooCommerce is pretty limited when it comes to displaying product categories on the front-end. The products are displayed in a grid view with large images and 2 to 3 products per row. If you have a large product catalog, your customers will have to scroll down all the way and browse multiple pages to view the full list.
While this may work for retail stores, it isn’t an ideal option for WooCommerce wholesale stores because B2B customers already know exactly which products they’d like to purchase. In other words, they don’t need to browse your product catalog. They are typically repeat buyers who want to quickly select products from a list view and add them to the shopping cart.
The WooCommerce Product Table plugin is especially useful for wholesale stores as it gives you a compact list view of products and can be used as a one-page order form. You can display Add to Cart buttons to allow wholesale customers to place their order without ever clicking through to the single product page.
You can also use the product tables to display all the products in a single product table or create individual product tables for each product category. Additionally, you can control different aspects of the front-end table layout such as which columns appear in the table, the sort order of products, and the number of products per page.
The plugin comes with extensive documentation and helpful video tutorials that explain how you can properly configure the tables based on your specific needs.
The WooCommerce Private Store plugin lets you hide your entire store so only wholesale customers can access it. This is a must-have for store owners who sell to both retail and B2B customers.
All you have to do is select a page that will be used as the wholesale store login and create a password. Alternatively, you can choose to give only logged-in users access to the wholesale store.
The WooCommerce Private Store plugin restricts the visibility of all WooCommerce products from public view. Users will need to enter the correct password or login to their user account to access the wholesale shop page, products, product categories, menu items, tags, and widgets. Your WooCommerce wholesale shop will also be hidden from WordPress search, search engines, and sitemaps.
If you sell WooCommerce products that have lots of attributes or variations that don’t fit into a single page order form easily, you can use the WooCommerce Quick View Pro plugin to add Quick View buttons to each product.
Your wholesale customers can then click the Quick View button to quickly view the variations, attributes, and purchase options for each product which will open up a quick view lightbox popup.
This way, they can quickly see full product details and variations without having to navigate to individual product pages. To make a purchase, they can simply click on the quick view button, select variations, add products to cart, and quickly go back to the order form to continue shopping.
The WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin offers the simplest way to password-protect a WooCommerce product category or make it visible to specific user roles only.
You can add one (or more) passwords to each product category and give the passwords to your wholesale customers. The password allows them to unlock the product category to view and purchase the products within it. Alternatively, you can set up a wholesale user role using the free User Role Editor plugin and protect your wholesale categories for that specific user role using the WooCommerce Protected Categories plugin. This way, only logged-in wholesale customers can view the protected product categories.
After you’ve locked down a WooCommerce category, all the products and any sub-categories within it will automatically receive the same protection. For example, if you password-protect a parent category Canned Food then the sub-category Canned Fruit will also be protected in the same way.
WooCommerce Protected Categories can also be used to mark categories as Private. Private categories can only be accessed by logged-in users of the correct level such as store managers or administrators. However, you can modify your existing user roles to give other user roles access to your private categories.
For example, you can create a Wholesale Customer user role for giving wholesale customers access to private categories. This is great for store owners who need an easy way to give individual logins for your store to wholesale buyers instead of creating password-protected categories.
Wrapping Up
Optimizing your WooCommerce store for wholesale customers helps you simplify the purchasing user flow and improve their overall shopping experience.
The WooCommerce wholesale plugins we covered in this article offer a number of features that give you complete control over your wholesale store page and make it easier for customers to find, select, and add products to their shopping cart.
What are some of the plugins and tools you use to run your WooCommerce wholesale store? Let us know by commenting below.
Running an online store often means coming up with smart ideas that can help you sell your products faster. Some of those ideas might succeed and some may fail.
There are no strategies that work all the time, for all WooCommerce websites. But there is one that is often very effective: offering store credits. The reason for its popularity can be attributed to the awesome flexibility it provides to both store owners and customers.
So, let’s find out more about store credits through this article and how you can enable them in your WooCommerce online store. But first – what are store credits?
Well, with this functionality, customers can purchase store credits (as opposed to buying products) and then they can use their credits to buy products from the store. Buyers can either use it for themselves or gift it to others. It’s an easy and effective way to convert your store visitors into buyers.
Now it’s time to figure it all out. And thankfully, there’s a plugin for that.
After purchasing the Smart Coupon Plugin For WooCommerce, the plugin will be available as a zip file in the API Downloads section of your My Account page.
Download the zip file from API Downloads by logging into your WebToffee My Accounts page.
Log in as the WordPress Admin of your online store.
Navigate to Plugins > Add New to Upload the downloaded plugin.
Choose the plugin file to upload.
Finally, activate the plugin.
Step 2 – Create a New WooCommerce Product
In later steps, you will associate this product to Store credit. For creating a product, navigate to Products > Add New from your WordPress dashboard. Add the necessary details like description, category, etc.
This product is what will be considered as store credit so we do not associate a regular price here. Hit Publish.
Step 3 – Configure Store Credit
To configure the store credit in your store, go to WooCommerce > Coupons > Store credit.
Let’s explore how to configure store credit by learning what each of the above fields is for.
Extended store credit – You need to enable this checkbox to sell store credits in your store.
Apply store credit before calculating tax – When you enable this checkbox the tax will be applied only on the remaining value after deducting the store credit. E.g. if you made an order of $100 from a store and apply store credit of $80, the tax will be applicable only on the remaining $20.
Associate a product – Here you have to choose the product you have created in step 2.
Credit purchase options – You have three options available:
Custom, in which customers will be able to decide and set the store credit amount to purchase. You can set the maximum and minimum limits for it.
Predefined, using this option you will be able to decide what denominations of store credit will be available in your store.
Finally the third option Custom & Predefined will display both custom and predefined options in your store.
Set amount – Here you can set the amount for predefined credit purchase. Amounts can be separated by a comma.
Minimum credit – Set minimum credit amount for custom credit purchase.
Maximum credit – Set maximum credit amount for custom credit purchase.
Email store credit for order status – Here you can choose the appropriate order status to email store credit.
Store Credit Coupon Format – Here you can choose what the store credit coupon generated in your store looks like by adding a custom prefix, suffix, and coupon code length.
By finishing the above three steps, you have successfully enabled store credit in your store.
Here is how the above-configured store credit looks on the front-end to your customers.
Now the customer can either choose a predefined amount or enter a custom amount in the box. Customers can either use it for themselves or gift it to someone else. Here is what a birthday gift preview looks like.
Email Store Credit – Should you prefer to manually assign store credit to a specific customers you can do so by configuring the below email settings:
By clicking the Send email button the store credit coupon will reach your customer’s inbox. You can even look at the preview of the email to see if it needs any change before sending it.
Different Types of Store Credit
Rather than sticking to one type of store credit, you should offer varieties at your store. This will act like a magnet that can pull more customers towards your store. The following are the commonly observed store credit types.
Store credits that offer necessary finance to customers who make payment at a later date or on increments.
For return or exchange of the product sold, especially when the item sold is non-refundable.
Benefits of Store Credit to Customers and Store Owners
Store credit has been dearest to people ever since it was first introduced into online stores. Customers get to enjoy a lot of benefits with store credit. For example, they can:
Share store credit with friends and family
Use store credit as a gift
On the other end, shop managers can also benefit from enabling store credit. For example:
You can offer store credit to compensate for any issue customers had to face in your store.
You can encourage sales during certain periods
You can increase trust towards your store thus retaining customers
Perks of Adding Smart Coupon for WooCommerce Plugin to Your Store
Here is how you can make the best use of store credits in your store with the help of the plugin:
You can create store credit of predefined denomination, custom denomination or both– With this awesome feature, you can allow your customers to purchase a store credit of the value of their choice. It’s a great flexibility you can offer to your customers.
You can apply store credit before or after calculating tax – If you chose to apply store credit before calculating tax, the tax will be calculated only on the discounted value instead of actual value.
You can email store credit automatically at a scheduled time – This feature is largely used for gifting purposes. By scheduling the date and time you can ensure that your gift reaches the right person at the right time.
You can create store credit coupons in your store – Store credits can be used as coupons as well.
You can customize the look of store credit coupon, coupon code and email template along with their live preview.
You can exclude store credit from specific products or categories.
You can decide if store credit can be applied either individually or in combination with other coupons.
To Wrap It Up
The search for the best strategy that can keep your store growing never ends. Offering store credits is one the top strategies. It offers a lot of flexibility and convenience to customers in terms of making a purchase from your store. If you haven’t enabled it in your store yet, do it soon and watch your store grow.
When a new version of the WooCommerce plugin is released, and the WordPress dashboard starts sending you notifications that it’s time to update, this question comes always to mind: “Should I update WooCommerce right now, wait a little longer, or stay on the same version unless something breaks?“
Well, updating WooCommerce is ALWAYS a big risk – potentially you can break your live website and miss out on traffic and sales. This can happen every time a significant update is released – many store owners don’t update their stores because they feel the hassle is not worth the effort.
But updating WooCommerce is definitely a good idea for the long-term. The main cause of WordPress hacking is because of out-of-date plugins and themes. And this is where staging environments come in.
A staging website is a clone of your existing live store. It’s completely separate and it doesn’t affect your live store in any way. Staging is also called “testing environment” or “sandbox”, while your live site is usually called “production environment”.
Staging gives you the benefit of 1-click-cloning in a few minutes, updating and testing WooCommerce without worrying about breaking your actual live website, and finally “pushing” the changes to the live website (a.k.a. overwriting the live environment), so the functioning is 100% guaranteed.
Hosting and WooCommerce-Friendly Staging
You might already be hosting with providers that offer staging such as WP Engine, SiteGround, Kinsta. The problem is that these hosts were not built with WooCommerce in mind, but WordPress.
What’s the difference you might ask?
Well, when you’re staging a regular, mainly static, brochure website, no major changes happen on the live website. But with a busy ecommerce website, there are new orders and new customer registrations coming in regularly. You can imagine that after a week from creating a staging environment, the two WooCommerce clones will be horribly out-of-sync.
The problem is that with the previously mentioned hosts, when you click “Push to Live”, the live store gets completely overwritten and all “new” data (new orders, new customers, new pages, etc.) goes lost. Which can be a disaster if you’re not aware of it.
So what’s the solution? Well, there’s always manual export and import of orders and customers. But that’s very cumbersome and will just make you want to update your store less often.
WooCommerce is now almost 9 years old but this one is still the biggest pain for the majority of store owners. How to update WooCommerce on staging, but then avoid losing new data once you “publish” the updated version?
WooCart is the first hosting built exclusively for WooCommmerce. Other hosts, like LiquidWeb and GoDaddy, offer managed WooCommerce, but it’s always part of their existing WordPress infrastructure. WooCart is built from the ground up for WooCommerce.
And it shows from the very first time you login. The dashboard is far from a hosting dashboard you’re used to and it looks closer to Shopify rather than Hostgator.
WooCart runs on Google Cloud Platform, similarly to many other WP hosts lately (Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround). But there’s one major difference: while other hosts offer shared hosting, WooCart provides dedicated hosting.
This means that your store has reserved resources on the server. The benefit is consistent performance and knowing that if something is going wrong it’s something you can fix and not because your neighbor is abusing their server resources.
Great performance doesn’t stop at servers, so WooCart also takes care of static assets delivery with a premium CDN (KeyCDN). One thing that I haven’t seen with other hosts is also automatic image smushing and optimization. Usually you need to use plugins, or even paid services for that, but you get this out of the box with WooCart.
WooCart’s Lossless Staging
The main innovation that WooCart brings to WordPress is simple staging publishing/pushing – Lossless Staging. This system knows how to sync the WooCommerce order and customer data from live to staging before overriding the live environment.
Here’s a video of how this looks in practice:
There are major benefits to this. Updates can now be done in literally minutes. The process would be:
Create staging environment
Bulk update everything on staging
Review your staging store to see if everything looks good
Test the checkout on staging
If all is well, click “Publish to Live”
The store will get merged to live, with new orders synced so nothing gets lost. And if something breaks, no worries – take time to fix it, and once it’s done you can now merge it. WooCart also allows you to sync orders and customers at any time, which is great if you’re working on staging for a longer time.
This significantly simplifies the maintenance, testing, and updating of WooCommerce stores.
Staging is just one of the features of WooCart. If you’re not completely new to WordPress, you’ll benefit from Error Logs where you can review errors that are usually hidden by other hosts. Error logs usually show a broken plugin and can make troubleshooting a lot easier.
Another new feature is Plugin Metrics, where the system lists all plugins by memory usage. This is again very useful for finding plugins that hog your resources.
There’s so many other things that WooCart has but it would be just too much to list and explain. It’s best you visit their website and take a look at the details. However, here are my top 3 picks:
Website security
WooCart takes care of your store security as well and there is no need for security plugins. The brute force attack protection is provided by Google Cloud and their WAF (web application firewall) is automatically updated based on the daily threats.
To make you sleep better, they guarantee that if anything happens to your store, they will thoroughly clean up the mess. So you could say WooCart gives you a “no hacked website guarantee”.
That’s, of course, as long as you follow their guidelines and notifications and don’t keep your store outdated and vulnerable. But since they solved updating plugins and themes with Lossless Staging, it’s a very reasonable guarantee.
Store Wizard and Localization
If you’re building a few stores every month, you probably have a template you reuse for each client. But WooCart created something even better, a Store Wizard. It localizes the store settings based on the store country. These settings include country standards, like currency, time format, date format, etc., installation of language packs where necessary and a lot of other small things. The localization files are entirely open-source and are available on their GitHub repository.
It’s a simple thing but one that will remove some menial work that happens regularly with every new client.
Store Wizard is a great feature, and it feels like there’s a lot of potential in it. And the project lead, Dejan Murko, agrees and promises there are more features coming with a big emphasis on turnkey stores (think industry-specific one-click stores).
Limitations
With a fully managed solution like WooCart, there are always some compromises. One is a black list of plugins that WooCart doesn’t let you install. It spans from performance and security plugins to plugins that reportedly had issues or unfixed vulnerabilities. To their defense, all of it sounds very reasonable. You just might need to adapt a bit. And remember, security is already guaranteed.
Advanced users might also miss phpMyAdmin for database management. Database access is available with WP-CLI, but that’s not that easy to manage. I was told that they might add it in the future but that there has not been enough demand yet to justify the investment.
I think these compromises make sense for most users, but you’ll be the final judge for your use case.
Summary
WooCart is not cheap. It positions itself at the top of the managed WordPress host prices. That said, it does offer a lot for the price. From dedicated server resources, premium CDN, to Lossless Staging and a bunch of other amazing tools.
In the end, it all depends on where you are. If you’re new to WooCommerce, you should probably start somewhere cheaper. But if your store is making money, it becomes a no-brainer. Just the time and frustration saved every month is worth double the price difference. Plus, they offer free trial and free website transfer within the trial period so it’s completely risk-free to try out.
As a WooCommerce development freelancer, every day I repeat many coding operations that I keep forgetting over and over again!
This means I have to search through the WooCommerce plugin files again and again and waste a lot of precious time.
We’ve already seen how to get $product and $order information from their respective objects , so this time we’ll take a look at the Cart page and answer to: “How to get ____ if I have the $cart variable/object available?“.
For example, “How can I get the cart total“? Or “How can I get the cart items“? Or maybe the cart fees, the applied coupons, the cart contents total, the total weight and so on…
Hopefully this article will help you save time as well! Your feedback via Twitter and the blog comments section is much appreciated. Enjoy!
1. If you have access to $cart variable
Hooks (do_action and apply_filters) use additional arguments which are passed on to the function. If they allow you to use the “$cart” object you’re in business.
But because this is quite rare, we’ll move on to step 2 straight away. Just keep in mind that should you have the “$cart” object at your disposal, this is the exact same as “WC()->cart” object, which you can call globally on any frontend section of your WooCommerce website.
In a nutshell:
$cart = WC()->cart;
2. If you don’t have access to $cart
If you don’t have direct access to the $cart object, you can invoke it globally on any page of your WooCommerce website. That’s the beauty of WC()->cart; the Cart page uses this method for example to load the cart object, and so can you, anywhere you like.
With the right approach to user experience you can make your WooCommerce website more effective at converting visitors into customers and encouraging existing users to come back to make purchases more regularly.
There are several ways to enhance UX using WooCommerce as a foundation, so here are just a few of the most impactful options available to you.
1. Speed up page load times
At this point it should go without saying that UX will suffer if your shopping site does not load quickly, since most users will be browsing from mobiles and there is a very low tolerance for sluggish performance amongst web-savvy consumers. This is one of many emerging ecommerce trends to stay on top of if your conversion rates are not where you think they should be.
Compression can help significantly with unsatisfactory load times, and you should apply it both to data-intensive elements like product images and to the CSS of whatever WooCommerce theme you are harnessing.
Of course all the backend optimisation in the world will be fruitless if your site does not have a high quality hosting provider to back it up, so be prepared to pay more for a better quality of package if page load speed is not up to scratch.
2. Test the interface
Unless you actively investigate whether or not your site’s interface is satisfying the needs and expectations of visitors, you might be haemorrhaging sales entirely unnecessarily.
UX testing is the perfect antidote to this and there are plenty of platforms out there designed to make this straightforward, whether your site is just about to launch or it is already an established player in its niche. If you do not have the ability to make significant improvements to UX in-house, it is worth working with agencies that offer user experience design services to help you achieve your aims on the basis of testing results.
3. Integrate live chat for instant on-site support
No matter how well designed your shopping site, there will be times when visitors need to get help and they will be unlikely to want to wait around for a response to an email sent to your customer support team.
This is where adding a live chat function can be a real boon, since it means that you can offer support directly to visitors on the site itself, so that they do not need to twiddle their thumbs until a response is offered and can instead get their problem fixed in real time.
There are a number of live chat plugins for WooCommerce, many of which offer additional functionalities such as integration with popular business email and social networking services.
4. Embrace responsive design
As already discussed, you can safely assume that most of the people who land on your site will be using a smartphone or tablet to do their web browsing. That means you need to make sure that your product pages and interface display correctly regardless of the size of the screen or the amount of horsepower that the user’s device has available.
Using a responsive theme from one of the many thousands available is a good way to go about this, although this is just the first step to truly responsive web design in a mobile-first age. You also need to make sure that you populate your pages in such a way that they will not put off mobile users.
For example, over-stuffing pages with too much written content, including excessive product descriptions which obfuscate the most important details in a wall of text, can really make the UX worse for those using portable devices. A combination of responsive underpinnings with a sparing approach to on-page content will work wonders.
5. Make search a priority
You are far more likely to keep visitors on your site for longer if they can easily search for other products once they have satisfied their curiosity with their first click. This is where a good product search plugin comes into play, and once again WooCommerce supports a variety of interesting options in this regard.
Live Search, for example, is a good feature to include, since it lets users get product suggestions while they are in the middle of entering their query. This makes navigating between different product pages more seamless and intuitive. The more time and effort you put into making your site’s search tools well optimised, the better the results will be.
6. Add feedback features
Modern consumers not only want to be able to leave their opinions on products and services on the e-commerce sites they use, but also want to see what other people think of items before they buy.
The majority of consumers trust user reviews to help guide their buying decisions and so you need to cater to this trend by making sure your WooCommerce site lets visitors leave feedback for others to read.
The ecommerce sector is seeing incredible growth, year after year, with no foreseeable end in sight. The same is true for B2B ecommerce, yet there aren’t many good platform choices available for small-to-medium businesses that want to sell wholesale. There are several SaaS solutions on the market, but these are costly, closed-source, and mostly oriented towards larger businesses.
If you are a business owner or developer, WooCommerce is a solution that’s free, versatile and powerful.
Is WooCommerce right for B2B shops?
“Out-of-the-box”, it isn’t. WooCommerce is a fantastic solution for ecommerce stores, but it wasn’t developed specifically for wholesale, so it lacks many important options at the outset. However, you can use a powerful wholesale plugin like B2BKing to extend WooCommerce and add all the business-to-business functionalities that you may need.
There are two other aspects that you should be aware of when choosing WooCommerce for your B2B project:
WooCommerce will require regular plugin updates to ensure it’s secure and working correctly.
Depending on your hosting and website configuration, the WordPress environment can sometimes perform a little slowly. However, there are ways to optimize and speed it up such as through plugins like WP Rocket (or other caching and optimization plugins).
While it’s not perfect, WooCommerce is currently powering more than 20% of the world’s online stores, and there are good reasons for that: it’s free, open-source, powerful and secure. These same qualities also make it a great choice for wholesale stores.
How does a B2B store differ from a typical e-store?
Selling business-to-business is often a very different and more personal experience than selling directly to consumers. Business buyers are knowledgeable, open to negotiation, and want to get great offers and discounts for buying in bulk. Price catalogs, discount options and payment and shipping options can vary widely from customer to customer, depending on factors such as business size, order size or existing business relationships.
From a website development standpoint this translates into a necessity for a high degree of technical flexibility when it comes to pricing, discounts, shipping and order rules.
Selling to businesses also introduces a need for features such as:
Hiding prices for guests
Business registration form
VAT (or other tax ID) number support
Tax exemptions
Quote requests
Custom billing and checkout fields
Wholesale order form
Ability to support multiple users on a buyer account (for corporate structures)
Let’s go ahead and look at how a few of these features can be implemented in WooCommerce. The next sections will be geared more towards developers and I will share a few code snippets that I hope you will find helpful, as well as free plugins that you can use.
1. Hide prices for guest users
Let’s start off with an easy one. You can do this with two WooCommerce filters. First, let’s use woocommerce_get_price_html to change the displayed price to “Login to view prices”.
Once we’ve done this, prices are no longer visible and will be replaced by our text. This is not enough though, since the user can still add these products to cart and see their price. A solution is provided to us by the aptly named woocommerce_is_purchasable filter.
After you add this, products should no longer be purchasable by guest users and the “add to cart” button will no longer be available. One more thing that’s worth mentioning is that you may get into trouble when using AJAX search forms, depending on how those are set up. A quick way to get that fixed is to also add the above code to your main code and check for AJAX by wrapping the code inside:
if ( wp_doing_ajax() ){
// code here
}
The end result:
If you are interested in a plugin alternative because you’re not familiar with coding, B2BKing has this and other guest access restriction functionalities such as an option to hide the website entirely, or hide prices for individual products or categories.
2. Business registration, or separate B2B and B2C registration forms
What you want to do here is add custom fields such as “Company Name”, “Address”, “VAT ID”, etc.
You can use this code to add a custom field for company name:
If you want to sync this field with the WooCommerce billing field for company name on registration, you can do this by using the woocommerce_created_customer hook and saving the company name as user meta, using the same fields that WooCommerce uses: billing_first_name, billing_company, billing_city, etc:
How can you create separate B2B and B2C form fields? You can add a “Select” field to registration in the way explained above and use a bit of JavaScript to determine whether the user chose “Individual” or “Company”. Show or hide registration fields like Company name depending on what the user chooses.
If you wish to avoid coding, there are some free plugin solutions to extend registration, such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-registration/ that also have options for multiple registration forms, though creating B2B-specific registration may require a little extra work on your side.
If you’re looking for a premium solution, B2BKing provides some handy, easy-to-use shortcodes that you can add to any page and create a business registration form.
3. Wholesale order form
Business customers often know exactly what they want, down to the SKU, so adding a wholesale order form to your website makes it quick to order for your customers, and makes you look professional.
How can you add one? There’s no quick code snippet that can do this, so I think a plugin is your best solution.
B2BKing also has its own proprietary implementation, which you can see in the next image:
4. Wholesale price structure
The relevant question here is: how to set up different prices for different users? There are 2 ways to go about this: change the price directly, or add a discount.
To add a cart discount for a user or category of users, use this code:
The code above uses a bit of a trick by adding a negative fee, which is a discount. The code above doesn’t do much, it just adds a 10 dollar discount for all users. Let’s expand the code a little:
How’s this? Now the code checks if the user’s meta status is ‘b2b’ and gives a discount only to b2b users.
How do you set the meta status? You could set that on registration using the woocommerce_created_customer hook that I used above in the 2nd article section, and a simple line of code. The function update_user_meta is used for both updating and creating user meta.
What if you want to set complex structures of different prices for different products for different users?
This gets a little more complicated but you can use the same principles. In WooCommerce, a product is a “post”, and you can set post meta data for it. For example, you can add a post meta named b2b_price, to have a separate price for b2b users. Here’s the code.
update_post_meta( $post_id, 'b2b_price', 15 ); // 15 is the price for b2b users
How do you show this price to b2b users only?
add_filter('woocommerce_product_get_price', 'b2bking_fixed_price', 99, 2 );
add_filter('woocommerce_product_get_regular_price', 'b2bking_fixed_price', 99, 2 );
add_filter('woocommerce_product_variation_get_regular_price', 'b2bking_fixed_price', 99, 2 );
add_filter('woocommerce_product_variation_get_price', 'b2bking_fixed_price', 99, 2 );
function b2bking_fixed_price( $price, $product ) {
// check if the user is B2B or not
$current_user_id = get_current_user_id();
$current_user_status = get_user_meta( $current_user_id, 'user_status', true );
if ( $current_user_status !== 'b2b' ){
// if user is not b2b show the normal price
return $price;
} else {
// get the current product’s price for B2B users
$current_product_id = $product->get_id();
$b2b_price = get_post_meta( $current_product_id, 'b2b_price', true );
return $b2b_price;
}
}
5. Setting up tax exemptions
This one’s easier than you think! There’s a very handy function that you can use in WooCommerce that will do this for you and even take care of price display in most situations: set_is_vat_exempt() . Good name, right?
This function will even make it so that B2B users see prices with the suffix “excluding tax”, while B2C users see prices saying “including tax”.
add_action( 'init', 'b2bking_tax_exemption' );
function b2bking_tax_exemption(){
// first we check if the user is tax exempt
$tax_exempt = get_user_meta( get_current_user_id(), 'is_tax_exempt', true );
if ( $tax_exempt === 'exempt' ){
$customer = WC()->customer;
$customer->set_is_vat_exempt( true );
} else {
// the next line is only necessary if the user’s exempt status changes dynamically, such as based on billing country
$customer->set_is_vat_exempt( false );
}
}
B2BKing – WooCommerce B2B & Wholesale Plugin
I hope some of what I shared above will be helpful to you. Equipping WooCommerce with B2B functionalities is a complex task though, and I wouldn’t fault you if you decided buying a premium plugin is a better use of your time than writing the code yourself Really, I won’t judge you at all.
With that in mind, I’ll share a few words about B2BKing. This is a project me and my team have been working on for a while, with the goal of turning WooCommerce into a capable B2B solution, an alternative to the costly SAAS platforms.
We’re constantly developing and supporting it as a long-term project, and it currently has more than 137 features including business registration, tax exemptions, dynamic pricing rules, VAT support, built-in messaging system, multiple buyers on account, offers, a dedicated B2B&B2C hybrid mode, and much, much more.
This week, we are proud to have been hand-picked by Envato as its “Featured Plugin of the Week” and showcased on the CodeCanyon front page.
We offer a live demo that you can test at any time, both backend and frontend: Live Demo
If you have any questions about the article, about the plugin, or just want to say hi, don’t be shy! Feel welcome to reach out to your friendly neighbourhood plugin developer.
Stefan Statescu
Stefan Statescu is the team leader over at B2BKing. He loves WooCommerce, B2B, and adding value to people’s businesses through awesome software.
Ecommerce sites are the most dynamic kind of websites. After the launch of the site, development does not stop and elaboration is ongoing. Many businesses just can’t sell their products without the help of programmers.
If you already have PHP programming skills and an understanding of WordPress principles, this article will give you a head start on how you can optimize your coding flow.
Specifically, we will look at the popular WooCommerce plugin and show you how to code effectively with it in CodeLobster IDE, a code editor that is much more complex than NotePad++ or Atom, and that’s because it’s optimized and developed with WordPress and WooCommerce in mind.
Creating a WooCommerce Website From CodeLobster
Probably, you have already read a lot of cases about the successful creation of online stores on WordPress. You can safely choose it as a platform for online trading. This is a fairly secure system for building resources of this type.
Every modern IDE primarily implements good WordPress support and CodeLobster makes it easy to deploy a new project i.e. installing a test WordPress website on your computer (local development) or your server.
You can install the CMS using the wizard. You only need to enter the administrator data and the server address to connect to MySQL.
In addition, there is a convenient admin panel, which features also an integrated search and quick installation of plugins or themes and a way to automatically update WordPress core and plugins.
WooCommerce is there as well and can be added to your local/live install quickly.
Customizing WooCommerce With Functions and Hooks
A developer who is familiar with the concept of WordPress can quickly figure out how to customize WooCommerce, since the plugin is easy to configure and its code is fully extensible.
A PHP programmer can use WooCommerce functions and classes. Thanks to them, you will get access to global variables, settings and all other resources that the WC interacts with.
Use the autocomplete when working with these functions, press Ctrl + Space when entering the function name, or Shift + Ctrl + Space to get a hint about parameters.
In the screenshot above, we have written the following code:
//Get WC_Order object by order ID
$order_id = 55;
$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
//Get customer ID
$customer_id = $order->get_user_id();
WooCommerce function wc_get_order() is used to get the order object, from which you can extract any data of the order, for example, find out the customer ID.
You can instantly move to the function definition if you click on its name while holding down the Ctrl key. This approach will help you understand in detail how functions work in WC.
When you only need to quickly refresh in memory the purpose of any method and find out which parameters to pass to it, pay attention to the tooltips that appear when you hover the cursor over an element in the code.
Hooks, such as Actions and Filters, are widely used in WC so that you can customize such plugin without overriding core files or templates.
If you select “do_action” or “apply_filters” in the file, the editor will highlight all hook matches.
You can use Actions to display additional markup. You just need to find out their location in the files that are responsible for displaying the frontend. Filters are used for processing or analyzing data, for example, when you need to change an array or object before using it.
We can add the necessary functionality to the file “functions.php” in our theme. Write your own function and register it using the add_action() method.
You will save a lot of time if you use the dynamic help system when working with WordPress and WooCommerce in CodeLobster IDE.
As soon as you start entering your code, the IDE automatically selects links to official documentation for all functions and objects.
Go to the “Dynamic Help” tab on the right panel of the program and click on the appropriate link to start studying the documentation in the browser.
Overwriting Template Files in WooCommerce
WooCommerce has its own template system – frontend template files are located in the “wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/” folder.
Technically, if you wish to design a custom Cart page or edit the Single Product page thoroughly, you can “override” the relevant template file and place it in your child theme folder. This is unless you want to work with hooks and filters, which are much easier and cleaner from a development point of view.
To start working with templates, create a “woocommerce” folder in your theme folder. Now you can copy whatever WooCommerce template you want to override and place it there. WooCommerce will find such override and will load yours and not the default one.
You can directly insert HTML, plain text or PHP code into template files by enclosing it in “<?php …. ? >” tags.
In this example, we took the Cart page template file from “woocommerce/templates/cart/cart.php“, copied it and pasted it in our child theme’s /woocommerce folder (“storefront-business/woocommerce/cart/cart.php“), and then customized it.
Now the standard template for displaying the Cart page has been rewritten and all the changes we made will be taken into account.
Effective Ecommerce Project Teamwork
Usually, large online stores are developed and supported by a team of programmers. The CodeLobster IDE makes it easy to maintain project source code through integration with Git.
It is possible to work with both local and remote repositories, create new branches for safe testing and save changes using commits.
Most Git commands can be executed directly from the project’s context menu, for example, to create a commit, just select “Git” -> “Commit”.
At the same time, CodeLobster IDE offers a convenient dialog in which you will immediately see the status of all the files of your project and will be able to select those files that need to be added to snapshot.
IDE comes with handy graphical tools for viewing change history and comparing different versions of files. There is no need to be distracted and run third party utilities.
After executing the “Git” -> “History” command, we have the opportunity to visualize the entire history of modifications, sequentially moving through the commits.
The next useful command “Git” -> “Compare” makes it easy to examine the history of edits and view all modifications of the same file in different commits.
A convenient way to view versions will help you quickly deal with edits, even if they were made by other developers. Lines of the code that are different or have been added are highlighted in red.
Support for a good VCS ensures the integrity of the source code, as well as easy management of the entire project. Built-in features will be useful for teams of any size, including young programmers and professionals.
The site owner will be able to attract visitors and start making sales, while the development team will continue to introduce new functionality and plan the expansion of the site, without fear of disrupting the work of an existing, stable code of the store.
Let’s Summarize
To quickly implement new digital solutions with WordPress, you need a reliable and functional IDE. Codelobster comprehensively supports this system and other popular CMS for all business tasks: Joomla, Drupal and Magento.
Web developers will have to solve most of the upcoming tasks, so be prepared for serious work and for the appearance of many interesting projects soon.
The primary goal of your WooCommerce store is to sell, right?
You’ve probably got some snazzy marketing campaigns running, are working to sharpen your SEO tactics, and are using social media to bring more visitors to your store. But, while driving traffic to your site is important, there’s another key metric you need to keep in mind: your conversion rate. After all, what’s the point of bringing visitors to your store if they don’t end up buying anything?
It’s a no-brainer that more traffic is useless if it’s not bringing you more conversions. The key, then, is to focus on doing more with the shop visitors you already have.
This is where website analytics (such as those collected and stored by Oribi Analytics) can be a game changer.
Oribi is an analytics tool that’s designed to help businesses of every type and size increase their conversions. Once connected, Oribi translates your store’s data into actionable insights, empowering you to make smarter, data-driven decisions independent of developers and analysts. Rather than drowning you in endless reports, Oribi shows you the next steps to take to maximize your marketing campaigns, streamline your sales flow, stay on top of your site’s changes and trends, and much more – all completely code-free.
Oribi takes the guesswork out of optimizing your conversion rate. Oribi tracks every event on your site, provides full marketing attribution, and shows you where your best opportunities for conversions lie. Identifying bottlenecks in your main flow, learning which kinds of content work best for your site, and keeping tabs on which channels drive the most revenue are some of the most important steps on your path to shop optimization. And, Oribi makes it all a cinch! Read on for Oribi’s top 5 CRO hacks for WooCommerce users.
1. Map Your Top Funnels
The starting point for any optimization is to identify your bottlenecks. Using Oribi’s Funnels feature, map out your top funnels—checkout flow, newsletter sign-ups, whatever it is—making sure to get really specific with the steps.
Since Oribi automatically captures each of your steps, adding them to the funnel takes only seconds. Once you’re done, you’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where your prospects drop out.
Is there a big drop between clicks on “Add to Cart” and those who enter the checkout? Try displaying your “Checkout” button more prominently, or try retargeting these users with an email campaign to bring them back.
2. Discover Which Content Drives the Most Sales
Creating content is time consuming. Why spend precious time producing content that doesn’t drive sales? Oribi’s Event Correlations can quickly tell you which content works best, and which content to skip.
For example, if you’d like to see whether your blog readers are more likely to buy than visitors who don’t make it to your blog, Oribi’s Event Correlations will show you exactly that.
Create several correlations like this, and you’ll have a clear understanding of what content to consider removing from your website and what to create more of in order to drive up those sales.
3. Understand Where Your Revenue Comes From
In upping your conversion game, it’s essential to always keep track of the revenue you’re bringing in. With Oribi’s Revenue Analysis, you can easily understand changes in your revenue, know which days bring the most sales, and see breakdowns in revenue by channel, platform, UTM, location, and session.
Armed with this vital information, you can update your marketing campaigns accordingly and make sure you get the most bang for your buck.
4. Allocate Your Budget to the Right Channels
Speaking of marketing campaigns: your customers may visit your store via multiple channels before making a purchase. Oribi gives you full marketing attribution, designed specifically to show eCommerce users how much revenue each channel and touchpoint generates.
You can even find out which of these channels performs best as a first-touch, last-touch, single-touch, or assist channel, which can make a world of difference when investing in retargeting campaigns.
5. Learn From Cart Abandonment
You already know that Oribi will show you at which steps of your sales funnel visitors abandon their carts, but what’s even cooler is that you can also follow these steps for individual store visitors.
Oribi’s Visitor Journeys show you every step your customers take on your site, how long they spend on each step, where they come from, what products they buy—or add to cart and don’t buy—you name it. It’s like peeking over your visitors’ shoulders and seeing your shop through their eyes.
With Visitor Journeys, you can better understand what’s working well, or what needs your attention.
Ready to get to work?
Let’s get those insights to work for your store. Oribi Analytics helps you optimize the flow of your shop, bring high-quality traffic, and maximize completed checkouts. Plus, you get a free trial to make use of all the optimization features mentioned above.
Check out Oribi’s incredibly easy-to-use WooCommerce plugin that’ll have your store connected in seconds. Just create your Oribi account, connect Oribi via the plugin, and Oribi will take care of the rest.
After all, when it comes to boosting your sales, there’s a lot you can do with the visitors you already have. Keep that laser focus on your conversion rate, and you’ll be optimizing like a pro in no time.
Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to look out for when running an online store.
Once you have your store all set up and start attracting traffic to your site through SEO and paid advertising, it’s now time to look at how many of your store’s visitors are converting.
Let’s step back for a moment and take a look at what a conversion is, anyway? Conversion happens when a prospect does what you want them to do.
If the purpose of a page is to get the email address of the visitor, you’ll have a successful conversion when a visitor lands on your page and drops their email address.
In terms of eCommerce, conversions usually refer to the event when a visitor buys your products and completes the checkout process. Or simply put, it means a big, fat sale.
If you thought attracting people to your site was enough to persuade them to buy your products, well, you’re seriously mistaken. It turns out that the average conversion rate in eCommerce is only 1-2%. So, even if you’re doing everything right, you’ll be closing the deal only 2% of the time.
That means every little bit matters.
In this difficult territory of getting people to convert, comes a list of growth-hacking and optimization plugins for WooCommerce that will put your store’s conversions on fire.
What if I told you there was a way to increase your chances of conversions by 30% without even putting in a lot of effort yourself?
Yes, that happens when you get your existing customers to recommend your brand to their friends and family. Referred customers are 4 times more likely to convert and you can also expect 16% more profit from them.
It’s simple: your customers engage with your brand and share the word about you while their friends – attracted by the power of a good and trusted recommendation – convert, all the better!
So, how does it happen? How do you encourage your customers to make more referrals?
Referral System is a WooCommerce plugin that will create a successful refer-a-friend program in your store. With this program, your customers are rewarded with discounts and coupons for making referrals and sharing the word about your brand within their social circle.
And the friends they refer get two good things in return: a good, trusted recommendation and a compelling reward. And voila, here is your ultimate recipe for higher conversions!
With the Referral System plugin, you can reward both the referrer and the referee on referrals that successfully convert. The plugin generates a shareable referral link for the customer so they can easily share away and make referrals.
As a cherry on top, Referral System integrates neatly with WooCommerce Points and Rewards extension and can be used to reward loyalty points as referral rewards.
Conversion happens when a visitor lands on your store and makes a purchase.
But what if there was a way to make the sale without even getting customers to visit your store?
By getting your customers to buy from you without even visiting your store is a legit way of hacking your conversion rate.
And by doing so, you don’t even have to make constant optimization efforts to encourage people to buy from you. It’s because they have already bought from you in advance. Or, in other words, they have subscribed to your products so that they can get the items delivered right when they need it without even visiting the store and placing an order.
If your customers need something regularly, why make them bother to shop and place an order manually every time?
Bring on a system where your customers get what they need without even a single click while you get to earn recurring income and enjoy watching your conversions firing up.
Subscription Add-on is a WooCommerce plugin that will implement this incredible system on your site. An add-on extension of the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension, Subscription Add-on adds a neat functionality to your store.
It gives a nice checkbox feature on your checkout page, asking your customers if they want to subscribe to the products they have added in their cart. When selected, your customers can subscribe to the entire contents of their cart and choose their frequency of subscription so that they can get those items delivered at the time intervals they have defined.
Consider this scenario. A visitor lands on your store looking for some shaving cream and shaving essentials. He already knows which brand he wants to buy and what kind of products he prefers.
Your customer’s mind is all set on buying. Now, it’s your job to serve him content fast so that he can quickly find what he needs and get done with the ordering process as soon as possible.
But things get tricky when he lands on the Shop page or the Product Category page. What he sees in front of him is an unforgiving grid of products with no more details than a product name and a picture. Is he supposed to click through every product he thinks would match his preference?
With the Product Table plugin, this buying process can be optimized. Instead of the grid format, you can display your products in an intuitive table layout that displays essential product information so that the customer doesn’t have to click through any product and open the Product Page. Your customer can look at product details from the Product Table and even buy the items he needs right there without even opening the Product Page.
That’s when we say “fast and steady wins the race”.
The checkout process is always the most dreaded part of online shopping. Nobody likes to fill lengthy, never-ending checkout forms.
Your customers are wishing it could all be done in a jiffy and that someone could come and fill in their forms and addresses so they don’t have to go through that process again and again. Especially if your customers are repeat customers, they just expect you to remember their details so they can get done with the checkout quickly – the fast and furious way.
Address Manager is the plugin that will optimize the checkout process of your online store. It does it by allowing your repeat customers to save multiple addresses in their account and then just select them during the checkout process instead of typing them up all over again.
With this functionality and support for multiple addresses, your customers can even place orders and get them delivered to different locations. This is especially a great feature to have for a B2B eCommerce site where buyers are usually placing orders to refill the stock at different locations of their stores.
B2B eCommerce has experienced a staggering growth with sales surpassing $1 trillion in 2019. If you have a wholesale channel, it’s the ripe time to move it online and give your buyers a convenient consumer-like experience they enjoy on sites like Amazon.
However, creating a smooth, frictionless B2B experience online takes a lot of moving pieces, as it requires you to fulfill the unique and complicated needs and demands of your business buyers – way more complex than the needs of direct consumers.
B2B eCommerce for WooCommerce is a disruptive product that makes it easy and feasible for B2B companies to create an online store without the hassle and the high costs. It’s a WooCommerce plugin that’s packed with all the essential B2B features you need to create a smooth online journey for your business buyers.
B2B eCommerce features a one-in-all plugin that allows you to:
Recruit buyers into your wholesale program through a sign-up form with admin approvals
Offer customized pricing structure to wholesale customers based on user roles, customer groups, average order value, and other factors
Offer quotation functionality that allows buyers to submit quote requests and easily negotiate with you over the price and quantity through a streamlined workflow
Custom payment methods for individual customer accounts like net 30 or net 60
Gate pricing for non-logged-in audience
If you have a wholesale business channel, grab the B2B eCommerce for WooCommerce plugin and be a part of the many B2B success stories out there.
These WooCommerce plugins are designed to give a major boost to your conversions and sales. Install these plugins and have fun watching your business grow.
If you’re setting up a wholesale store for your business or for your clients, WooCommerce is a great choice! It’s free, open-source, powerful, and growing in popularity.
However, many important wholesale functions are missing, and that’s particularly important when it comes to wholesale pricing. Let’s explore how we can set up complex pricing in WooCommerce, and in detail:
Setting up different prices for different users
Tiered pricing and pricing table
Bulk pricing and discounts
Discounts by quantity or order value
Each functionality can be added via a free or premium plugin or, if you’re familiar with PHP, even by code. Either way, this article will feature one of the many options available.
1. Different Prices for Wholesalers, Resellers and Business Customers
There are several free wholesale plugins out there that will allow you to create multiple roles/groups (such as wholesalers, resellers, businesses, etc.) and set different pricing for each group for each product.
For example, you can do it through the lite version of B2BKing which is freely available on WordPress.org. After installing the plugin, each simple product and each variation gets additional price fields for the different groups in the product backend:
In the configuration above, guests and regular customers see a price of $45, whereas customers that are in the Resellers group will see $35 after they log in for the same item. The free version of the plugin is limited to 2 groups, while the premium version allows an unlimited number.
You can assign each user to a group in their profile page, to control who sees which price:
Groups can be created and managed in the plugin’s Groups panel:
This free plugin also allows payment and shipping methods control, so you can make certain methods (e.g. Invoice Payment) available to only selected or pre-approved customers. This is managed for each group in the group page:
Setting up wholesale pricing through code snippets
Below are the hooks you need to set a fixed regular price for simple products as well as variations. A single function is necessary. The method below requires that you set a meta value to identify wholesale users by (‘b2bking_b2buser’ in the snippet) and a meta value that contains the wholesale price (‘b2bking_wholesale_price’ in the snippet).
// Simple Products
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_get_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_get_regular_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
// Variations
add_filter('woocommerce_product_variation_get_regular_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_product_variation_get_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_variation_prices_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
add_filter( 'woocommerce_variation_prices_regular_price', 'b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price', 999, 2 );
function b2bking_individual_pricing_fixed_price( $price, $product ){
$user_id = get_current_user_id();
$is_b2b_user = get_user_meta( $user_id, 'b2bking_b2buser', true );
if ( $is_b2b_user === 'yes' ){
// Search if there is a specific price set for wholesalers
$b2b_price = get_post_meta( $product->get_id(), 'b2bking_wholesale_price', true );
if ( ! empty( $b2b_price ) ){
return $b2b_price;
}
}
return $price;
}
2. Tiered Pricing and Pricing Table
Through tiered pricing you can set different prices for quantity ranges. For example the cost of a product can be $100 for purchases between 1-10 units, $90 for purchases between 11-20 units and $80 for purchases of more than 20 units.
This kind of setup is common in wholesale e-commerce and encourages customers to place larger orders.
This can be easily set up with the Premium version of B2BKing by setting minimum quantity and price in each product’s page:
And here’s what this looks like in the front-end of the site. B2BKing has also automatically generated a tiered pricing table showing customers the different prices they can get by ordering larger quantities.
The tiered pricing table is optional and can be controlled through settings. Each single product, and each variation can have its own separate table.
Setting up dynamic pricing through code snippets
There are several Business Bloomer snippets that could achieve tiered pricing by user role, such as WooCommerce: Set / Override Product Price Programmatically – in this case you can define a “discount percentage” for a user role and avoid touching the settings.
3. Bulk Pricing and Discounts
Besides tiered pricing, another way to set bulk pricing is through discounts for quantity or size, for categories or products. B2BKing (in both free and premium versions) allows you to set discounts through a system of dynamic rules.
For example, let’s see how we can set a discount for 10% for business customers, when the user places an order above $1000.
You could also set discounts for specific products or specific categories only, for a group of customers, or even for a single individual customer.
Setting up bulk pricing through code snippets
There are several Business Bloomer snippets that implement bulk pricing, such as WooCommerce: Bulk Dynamic Pricing Without a Plugin – in this case you can define product prices based on their cart quantity.
4. Product Visibility in Wholesale Sites
Another common way to set up wholesale catalogs in WooCommerce is to create 2 different types of products:
Single products
Product boxes / cartons / crates
Depending on the business model, you can have both in the same site, but occasionally, particularly for Hybrid B2B & B2C sites, you may want to have single products visible to individual customers, and cartons/boxes visible to wholesalers.
This can be controlled for each product and category with the premium plugin version through a simple control panel in the product and category page:
Controlling product / category visibility through custom code
To hide products, you can hook into the ‘woocommerce_product_query’ action hook and control directly which products are visible.:
add_action( 'woocommerce_product_query', 'b2bking_product_visibility' );
function b2bking_product_visibility( $q ){
// calculate available product ids and place them in an array
$product_ids_array = array( 15, 267, 322 );
// set these products as the only ones visible.
$q->set( 'post__in', $product_ids_array );
// alternatively use the post__not_in argument to hide specific products.
}
5. B2BKing – Ultimate Wholesale Plugin for WooCommerce
B2BKing is a featured item and weekly bestseller on CodeCanyon (Envato Market). It aims to be a complete solution for b2b and wholesale stores, with over 137+ features including:
While running an eCommerce store makes the operational part of your business a lot smoother, it does not give the facilities, such as asking dozens of questions about the product, seeing it physically, etc. to your customers. This could become a disadvantage if your online shop does not render sufficient information – text and visual – about the products you are selling. So, how will you prevent this situation?
Well, we have a quick and reliable solution.
Adding the relevant and crisp information on the product page, alongside the product, should solve your concern in some cases. However, when there is a lot of detail to be specified, just do not render it all on the page. Using attachments will keep your shop user-friendly and performance-oriented.
In this article, we are going to review this WooCommerce plugin bit by bit.
WooCommerce Product Attachment – What does this plugin do?
WooCommerce Attachment Plugin lets the business owners attach different types of files to their product pages, helping them improve the user experience for their customers.
Document files, PDFs, video files, excel sheets, audio notes, jpg (image) files and more formats can be attached through its help. So whether it’s your product manual or explainer video, technical specifications or quality certificates, licenses or additional information, user guides or size guides – you can add everything to your product pages now.
The attachments can be made visible for the buyers on different stages of order processing. When you do this, the selected attachment will be added to order details page of the customer’s account whenever the order status matches. You may choose one or more statuses from on-hold, processing, pending payment, completed, refunded, failed, cancelled and completed. You also have the facility to email these files as per order status – especially when new order is placed, an order is completed and an invoice is sent to the customer.
In case you want to add same attachment (or set of attachments) to multiple products, Product Attachment for WooCommerce Plugin lets you do that. Its Bulk Product Attachments feature allows the shop owners assign attachments to one or multiple categories and sub-categories.
This multi-lingual plugin is suitable for the businesses, running in multiple countries. Alongside English, it supports German, French, Polish and Spanish languages too. You just need to set up WPML for this purpose.
Free Vs. Premium Product Attachment for WooCommerce – The Features
By now, you must have understood the basic functioning and capabilities of the product attachment plugin. So, it’s the time to acquaint you with the features made available to the free and premium version users.
This section will help you understand whether the free version will be suitable for you, or the premium version, if you need to add attachments to your products.
Features of Free Product Attachment Plugin for WooCommerce
This Attachment is set status(Pending payment, Processing, On hold, Completed, Cancelled, Refunded, Failed) after that match this status then auto enable on each order download available.
Enable attachment on Product page.
Any type attachments you can attach with order
Add Attachment in all products.
Each Attachment have own settings (Name, Description, Uploads file, select Order status, Set expiry Date and more)
You can make the attachments downloadable or viewable for your buyers. Viewing and downloading is possible from the order details page or product page [any one of these pages].
Setting expiry date for the product attachment(s) is allowed for the free product attachment plugin users. This feature automatically disables the attachment after the set timestamp is passed.
Note – Premium plugin has all the features of its lite/free version. Below, we are only listing those features that are unique to it.
Bulk attachment feature, through which the attachments can be directed assigned to multiple products, categories or subcategories – saving you from the hassle of manually adding attachment to each entity separately.
Premium version supports multiple file format, including (but not limited to):
Document files
PDFs
Video files
Excel sheets
Audio notes
JPG (image) files
You may set everything separately for each of your attachments, unlike the free version. Name of attachment, its description, order statuses for which it will be visible, expiry date, uploads, and more can be managed for each of your attachment through this plugin.
Attaching files to your variable products.
Managing attachment(s) visibility for the orders as per status is possible, while status could be:
Completed
On Hold
Pending payment
Processing
Cancelled
Failed
Refunded
You can choose to disable and enable attachments for the emails being sent.
Set Attachment on email
How does it work?
Once installed, you will see a link named ‘WooCommerce Product Attachment’ or ‘WooCommerce Product Attachment Pro’ in the left sidebar of your WordPress admin dashboard.
Settings
From the settings tab, you can set the following details –
Product Details Page Title
Order Details Page Title
Whether or not to add attachments in emails or not
Whether or not to show the attachment date label
Whether to use link or icon for attachments’ downloading/viewing
Whether to show attachments in ‘My Account’ page or not
Label of the button
The list of user types, for which you can restrict the visibility of your attachments
Creating Attachments
You can specify the constraints for your attachments and upload files for them.
Managing Bulk Attachments
The plugin also allows the shop owners to assign attachments to multiple categories, products, and sub-categories.
Who should opt for a Free Version?
If you have an online store, for which, you just need to attach a few PDF attachments for some of your products, the free version will do just fine.
Who Should Opt for Premium Version?
For the store, having dozens or hundreds of products, and a different set of attachments for each of its product/category, the premium version will be needed. Emailing these attachments as per order status or managing attachment’s visibility will also be a simple task with it.
Pricing of the Plugin
If you are opting for the free version of Product Attachment plugin, there is no cost involved in using it. However, the premium version has a few pricing plans you should know about –
Annual Subscriptions
The single site subscription for this plugin is worth $49. For 5 sites license, you will have to pay $89. And if you are willing to use it for approximately 25 websites, go for the unlimited sites license weighing $119. These subscriptions will remain valid for a year. Afterward, you will have to renew your license subscription.
Yearly Subscriptions
The single site, 5 sites, and unlimited sites yearly subscription of Product Attachment for WooCommerce Plugin costs $149, $269 and $359 respectively. For those, who are willing to use this plugin forever on their website(s), yearly subscription makes more sense without a doubt.
Note: We’ve added this information as the site reflects at the time of writing of this article. For the most updated details regarding the pricing and features of the plugin, please refer to this page.
Using banners is a major digital advertisement method, used for self-promotion or the promotion of others. Both ways, it plays an important role in money making online. Mind that we are not talking about the Google Adwords banners that appear in widgets. Those are easy to set, but cannot be managed by you for your business. Instead, we’re talking about the highly-customizable banners that could run as per your needs and add to your revenue.
If you have an e-commerce store, showcasing the special offers as banners can help you improve your sales speedily. At the same time, you may promote your partner brands and advertisements through banners too. In short, banners are super-useful.
For the shop owners running their business through a WooCommerce store, banner management isn’t a tough nut to crack. Using the plugins like WooCommerce Category Banner Management Plugin, you can do it smoothly. This aid lets you set different category-wise or page-wise banner(s) for your shop.
In this article, we have reviewed the said plugin [free version and premium version] for its usability, efficiency, and functionality for businesses like yours. So, if you want to add advanced banner capabilities to your online store, do read it.
About the WooCommerce Category Banner Management Plugin – The Glimpses
Using this plugin, WooCommerce store owners can manage the banners – one or multiple – for their pages and categories in the shop. At the same time, you can also set banners for other significant pages of your store, such as checkout page, thank you page, shop page, cart page, welcome page, etc.
An advanced version of the Category Banner Management plugin comes with the capabilities of banner scheduling, random banner loading, banner tags, appending custom URLs, and so on.
Note: We’ll discuss plugin features in detail – later in this WooCommerce Plugin review.
WooCommerce Category Banner Management Plugin is multi-lingual and supports Spanish, German, Polish and Spanish languages apart from English. So, if you are running your store in a region, where these languages are used vastly, there won’t be any problem in pitching to these markets.
Additionally, it is compatible with all major browsers and runs on the latest versions of WordPress & WooCommerce too.
Available Versions of the Plugin
There are two versions of WooCommerce Category Management Plugin being offered at present.
One is the free version, which is good for your basic requirements, but obviously has limited functionality. You can download it from the WordPress Plugin directory by searching for its name, or by using the link that we provided in the previous line.
In case, you think that advanced banners, varying as per pages, are advantageous for your store, there is a premium version too. You can buy it from DotStore by clicking on this link.
Features & Capabilities of This Banner Management Plugin
Compatible with the latest version of WooCommerce, Category Banner Management Plugin is a user-friendly aid for managing shop banners. Here is a quick list of features comprised by it –
Enabling and Disabling of Banners for Specific Page
Ecommerce businesses have some very important pages. These pages are considered important because customers pay the most attention to them. Putting banners on these pages may yield good output. Therefore, this banner management plugin lets you add banners to these pages.
The pages for which you can enable and disable the banners using this plugin are –
Shop Page
Thank you Page
Checkout Page
Cart Page
From the plugin dashboard, you can easily enable and disable the page-specific banners, using these options –
Enabling and Disabling of Banners for Specific categories
If you are willing to showcase promotion offers or banners for some of your categories or pages, enabling the banners for those entities will be the easiest method. Similarly, you can disable banners for these categories later on.
For this, go to the category and you’ll find some additional options, which are activated for your categories as you’ll this plugin installed on your WooCommerce shop.
Using these options, you can easily manage the banner for your categories accordingly.
Managing Page/Category Specific Banner
For the 4 pages, as enlisted above, you can manage the banner image and other settings using the WooCommerce Category Banner Management plugin. Here’s all that you can set for your banners –
Types of Banners
You may add one image to your banner or multiple images. The plugin lets you choose between these 2 options, namely –
Single Banner
Multi Banner
Banner Scheduling
You can set the banner start date and banner end date while using the WooCommerce Category Banner Management plugin. Through this feature, you can set up the display duration of banners in advanced, instead of enabling and disabling it manually when the time arrives.
Banner Images URLs
For the banner images, you can add custom links to them, in order to redirect your customers or visitors to another page or section, which you are promoting in the banner.
Banner Rendering [Type – Multi-Banner]
On the web page, you can render your banners in two formats, if its type is multi-banner –
Random – If you’ll select this option, the images you’ve added to the banner will be displayed in random order.
Slider – Using this option will render the images in slider format for your viewers.
Banner Preview
Using this option, you can view your banners prior to publishing them or making them live.
Pricing
For using the plugin with limited features, you can opt for the free version of the Category Banner Management Plugin.
If you want to utilize all its capabilities for your WooCommerce store, go for the premium version. Its single site license costs $59 for a year, and $179, if you are buying this license for a lifetime. Similarly, its 5-sites license is worth $89 for an annual subscription and $269 for a subscription for a lifetime.
For the developers and development agencies who want to configure this plugin for multiple WooCommerce stores, owned by their clients, the unlimited subscriptions will be the best option. It costs $149 annually and $449 for a lifetime license that could be used on up to 25 websites.
The Verdict
Banners can significantly increase the revenue of your WooCommerce store. Using banner images with creative content and optimally placing it in the right sections is very useful for promoting the products and campaigns. So, having the WooCommerce Category Banner Management Plugin ready to handle it all is overall, a wise decision, in conclusion.
So you’ve got your WooCommerce website up and running and all is going OK….
But OK isn’t good enough, is it? What you really want is to be a thriving business with a website that consistently receives high volume traffic.
What you need is a bit of good marketing. Fine. But generic advice just won’t do. You need expert insights into WooCommerce to give you that edge over the competition.
In this article, we’re going to cover the top five methods for marketing WooCommerce websites. Pay attention now! The following information could change everything.
Make it easy to use, or be prepared to lose
That’s a pretty dramatic subheading, right? It’s true, though, that if your website isn’t easy for people to use then you should be prepared to lose customers.
You see, it’s one thing to drive thousands of visitors to your website, but if the site itself isn’t creative and easy to navigate then you won’t convert the traffic.
It all comes down to the UX and UI. If you’re unfamiliar with these terms then get to know them! UX stands for User Experience and is all about the overall experience that your visitors have when they visit your website. It covers everything from the impression they get when they arrive at your landing page, all the way through to the loading time, the transition from page to page and the friendly message you leave thanking customers who have just made their first purchase with you.
UI stands for User Interface and is all about the part of your website that visitors actually see and click on. In other words, it’s all about the buttons, the drop-down menus, the colours, the wallpapers and the controls in general. (If you use the popular music app Spotify, for example, then the user interface would be the black screen with the options in the navigation panel on the left-hand side and the big images of album and playlist covers in the centre.)
The user interface is a really significant part of the overall user experience. A creative and easy-to-use UI really helps drive conversions from the traffic your site gets.
Experience shows that the standard WordPress themes will only take you so far; even if you find it easy to work through tutorials such as this one about WooCommerce Storefront theme, it’s actually often worth investing in the help of an agency to ensure the best possible UI for your site. An agency such as Impression shows just how customizable a WooCommerce website can be, with the help of a little expert know-how in UI and converting traffic.
PPC (pay per click) advertising for WooCommerce
OK, now this is a very hard-hitting driver of traffic for E-commerce and, more specifically, for WooCommerce websites. As long as what you are selling meets the Google advertising guidelines, you can set up conversion-driven ads through re-marketing and Google shopping listings.
This also works for Facebook when setting up a retargeting audience and producing catalogue ads.
These methods are far more effective than more traditional forms of advertising. The fact is that you can have a brilliantly designed advert with beautiful artwork and really snappy copy, but if the right people aren’t seeing it then it’s a complete waste of money!
The beauty of these methods is that you can hit your target market with absolute precision; they’re like the efficient guided missile of the marketing world and definitely well worth making use of.
Strategic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
SEO, SEO, SEO… people are constantly banging on about it these days, aren’t they? Well, in fairness, they should be! That’s because SEO is one of the most important aspects of any online activity. E-commerce is no exception; in fact, SEO is probably more important for WooCommerce sites than almost any other type of website.
If your website is optimised for search engines, it means that your prospective customers are much more likely to find your site when they search for the product or service that you’re offering. Good SEO isn’t just something to give a short-term boost to traffic or sales, either. As a long-term method for achieving a strong and steady flow of traffic that converts extremely well, SEO is beyond compare.
You can go about handling your website’s SEO in different ways. If you have a way with words or know someone on your team that does, then you go through all your web content inserting popular search terms into the copy and making sure that each page has clear and attractive metadata. This is a basic approach, but it will make a difference.
A more advanced approach would be to use an agency that can come up with a complete SEO strategy for you. These guys are experts and have a whole arsenal of tricks up their sleeve to increase the traffic to your site, from SEO-rich blog posts to hosted articles that increase your website’s backlinks and overall Google rating.
Creative Email Marketing
You might be surprised to learn that email is still a very powerful marketing tool.
By targeting your customers with automated emails you can keep them coming back for more and turn them into long-term buyers.
The most obvious purpose of any email marketing campaign is to inform your customers of the latest offers you have available or to tell them about the new stock that you’ve got in. The less obvious purpose is to build a relationship with customers by frequently appearing in their inbox and communicating with them.
Of course, one has to tread carefully these days and be intelligent about how one uses email. As we all know, every email service now has a built-in filter to separate the advertising and marketing emails from the rest.
It’s important to be creative with your emails and to make sure that you’re not just pestering customers. Bombarding them with dry information can have a negative effect on business instead of helping to drive sales. Finding a unique tone of voice for your copy and targeting significant events in the calendar rather than just constantly emailing – bank holidays, school holidays, starts of seasons etc. – are strong tactics.
Social Media for WooCommerce
Of course, social media must play a leading role in marketing your WooCommerce site. Companies that do not take advantage of social media today are like those small restaurants that still don’t have their own websites; it’s a ludicrous way to do business, failing to take advantage of one of the most important aspects of modern life. In fact, it is predicted that almost 3.1 billion people will be using social media worldwide by 2021.
The start is simply having a social media presence. That means making regular posts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. It’s important to post regularly, but this doesn’t have to be hard work. 9 You can post information about the latest offers to keep your customers informed of the bargains they could be benefiting from.
Equally, you can post content such as behind-the-scenes photos of the team getting ready for a sale or a business event. Often, the most popular content on social media is the photos and videos that give people an insight into the life of an individual or an organisation.
Don’t forget that we are all fundamentally very nosey people and we take great interest in the lives of others! The TV world shows us this as some of the most popular programmes today are those that show us other people’s lives, such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Made in Chelsea. Online, the prevalence of vloggers now on YouTube – the real-life version of a concept that was mere fiction back in 1998 with The Truman Show – illustrates this very clearly as well.
Remember that social media should be informal and fun, that we are all very nosey and that posting regularly is the way to build followers.
Testing the WooCommerce checkout is extremely important for your ecommerce business.
Every time you install a new plugin or update WordPress you might run into issues: for example, the cart and payment pages could stop working until you fix the problem.
You don’t want to lose sales and undermine your website reputation, do you? So you must test all the WooCommerce processes on a regular basis, also called “end to end” (E2E) testing.
But how can you do that without wasting too time?
Spoiler alert: simply create an automated test, and let the robot test your WooCommerce website on a regular basis, so that you never have to worry about doing it manually.
Luckily for you, there are some great tools – such as the two you will soon read about – and WooCommerce professionals that can do it for you on a daily or whatever basis.
Here’s your quick introduction to setting up your checkout test automation.
Cheers to a checkout page that works 365 days a year.
Usetrace Test Automation Tool
Usetrace is an online software that analyzes your website in a few seconds through some very accurate tests.
You can automatize lots of different tests, including the WooCommerce checkout one. You simply have to create a trace of the activity you want to check and allow the Usetrace editor to interact with your store.
The tool will record your actions and save them to schedule tests in the cloud following your traces. Usetrace will also automatically go through your website every time you update the WordPress core or add some new features, to make sure everything is working fine.
If the tool finds something wrong, it will send you an email notification with all the instructions you need to fix the bug and restore your WooCommerce.
Ghost Inspector Test Automation Tool
Ghost Inspector is an online testing tool that uses a Chrome extension. To set it up, you need to follow these steps:
After you install the Ghost Inspector Chrome extension, open the website you want to test. Click on the toolbar icon at the top right in your browser to start recording a test;
Now buy something on your store so that the extension can record all of your actions;
Save your purchase and use it as a model to schedule all the tests you need;
If something goes wrong, you will get an email with a full video report of the test.
Ghost Inspector is very useful to create different kinds of tests on the same website, but you may need some time to learn how to use it properly.
Case Study: How We Test Our Clients’ Checkouts
WP-OK specializes in WordPress and WooCommerce support for all kinds of businesses. Whenever we have to run functional tests, we always use Ghost Inspector.
We test our clients’ checkout process twice a day, following these steps:
Open the website homepage;
Click on the Shop page;
Click on a product;
Add it to the cart;
Proceed to the checkout;
Insert personal information;
Complete the purchase without checking the terms & conditions box;
The checkout page should now show an error for the missed checkbox.
With this simple test we manage to detect and identify 90% of the issues.
You may wonder why we don’t actually complete the purchase? Well, there are a couple of reasons for that.
First of all, we prefer not to complete the payment so we don’t have to ask for a refund (even if we could make that automatic too!) – that would somehow affect the billing, generate an invoice to void and a refund to handle.
The second reason is that a fake purchase would compromise our clients’ sales conversion rates.
Troubleshooting Checkout Errors
Ghost Inspector creates a video report after each test and runs a screenshot comparison to recognize possible changes in the pages.
A test can fail for two reasons:
functionality error: one of the test steps is not working (e.g. the add to cart button is missing and the system can’t add a product to cart);
visual error: the loaded page is different from the screenshot of that page from the first successful test (e.g. the footer is missing).
When a test fails you need quick technical support to understand what’s going on.
Sometimes you may experience a false-positive error after you edited a page. It may also happen that the tested product is out of stock, or no longer available on the website.
Checking the test results is a crucial step for your WooCommerce site, especially when you are new to this kind of analysis. It’s really important that you take your time to set up an automated E2E test and analyze its findings.
Recap
Setting up an automated test for your WooCommerce checkout is not only a great idea, but also a great way to avoid errors and save on customer support time.
Ghost Monitor is quite easy to set up and can do pretty complex E2E tests, hence taking action today and moving to the next level is a no-brainer.
While WooCommerce is one of the most powerful and flexible ecommerce platforms on the market today, it was built for retail, and therefore it’s missing many important features for business buyers.
If you are setting up a wholesale store with WooCommerce, you will find many of these features fulfilled by small individual plugins. However, that approach comes with large disadvantages: reduced site performance caused by running a large number of plugins, and plugin conflicts that can lead to technical issues and errors.
One solution can be replacing several wholesale plugins with a single all-in-one WooCommerce wholesale suite solution. By doing that, you avoid cluttering the site with a large number of plugins, as well as avoid conflicts and errors, since all features are running under the same extension.
In this article let’s explore some of the best plugin suites on the market for wholesale sites, by looking at features, use cases, pricing and support.
1. B2BKing – Ultimate Wholesale Plugin for WooCommerce
B2BKing is a complete wholesale plugin that will transform and extend WooCommerce functionality, and get the platform fully ready for B2B or wholesale projects. The plugin addsover a hundred functionalities, covering everything from wholesale prices, bulk discounts and tax exemptions, to business registration, payment methods and VIES VAT number validation.
Here are a few of the plugin’s most important features:
Business Registration with Custom Fields and Forms
Tax Exemptions and Displaying Prices Incl. or Excl. Tax
Request a Quote
Product and Catalog Visibility Control
Payment and Shipping Methods Control
Messaging System for Communication with Customers
Offers Functionality – Ideal for Promotions and Negotiated Pricing
Tiered Prices and Generated Tiered Price Table
Dynamic Rules, Pricing and Complex Discounts
Minimum Order, Free Shipping and Custom Taxes
Different Content for Different Users
Bulk Order Form with AJAX and SKU Search
Invoice Payment Gateway
Purchase Lists – Ideal for Frequent Purchases (e.g. Stock Resupply)
B2BKing is sold with a lifetime license (for a single one-time payment), that comes with unlimited plugin updates and 6 months of included technical support.
2. B2B & Wholesale Suite
B2B & Wholesale Suite is a wholesale plugin suite with similarly powerful functionality, yet a different scope. This suite will also allow you to set up wholesale pricing, tiered pricing, business registration, discounts, tax exemptions and so forth.
Additionally, it has a central control panel, modular design, easy setup, and is ideal for businesses that want to focus on sales, and get everything up and ready as fast as possible.
B2B & Wholesale Suite is available for sale on the official WooCommerce extension store, vetted by, and sold in partnership with WooCommerce. By purchasing this plugin suite you also benefit from the customer-centric Automattic refund policy, including a no-questions-asked 30 day money back guarantee.
There are several feature differences compared to B2BKing, including differences in customers panels, dashboard, quote request and bulk order form functionality.
Group-Based User Management
This plugin suite operates through a powerful group management system, where customers are organized into business groups. Subsequently, each group can have its own wholesale prices for products, specific payment or shipping methods, bulk discounts, minimum order amounts, etc.
The above image shows the group management panel, where business groups are controlled alongside options for B2C users and logged out users.
Modular Control Center and Design
One of the functionalities that sets B2B & Wholesale Suite apart is its modular control center, where each plugin module can be disabled, and each functionality can be controlled in detail from a central location.
The suite has 20 configurable modules, 8 of which can be disabled, reducing unnecessary code and improving performance. These are: discussions, quote requests, bundles, shopping lists, bulk order form, multi-user accounts, product visibility, and payment & shipping control.
Advanced Quote Requests
Another area where this plugin suite will shine is when it comes to quote requests. Quote requests can be enabled for all users, guest users, or specific user groups. Furthermore, the quote request form is customizable, and there are 4 default quote fields: name, email phone and message.
Quote requests are sent either as email notifications, or integrated with the plugin’s discussions functionality, where users can communicate and negotiate with the shop directly.
Wrapping Up
Both plugins presented above are excellent all-in-one solutions for wholesale stores. While B2BKing is more customizable, feature-rich and great for technically-inclined customers, B2B & Wholesale Suite was designed to be as simple to use and setup as possible, making it a fantastic choice for businesses.
The year is 2001 and every Stanford MBA is a dot-com startup founder. Online shopping is a brave new world teeming with new entrants boasting dubiously high valuations. Online shoppers are easily elated, not nearly as fickle as those of today. They are overjoyed merely at being able to buy something without leaving the comfort of their home. Flash forward twenty years and things could not be more different.
However, the actual checkout experience remains relatively unaltered. Is it any surprise, then, that today’s online shoppers are as fickle as they are? Do they not have every right to be abandoning carts left and right?
From the dot-com wreckage came Amazon, which did a lot right early on, including the optimization of the checkout experience. Until recently, one could reasonably assert that only Amazon was delivering an optimal checkout experience with its one-click checkout feature.
As we might expect, they had the very idea of one-click checkout patented until 2017. Since then, a new type of company — the checkout experience platform — has emerged to deliver one-click checkout to an increasing number of online stores. In the face of this revolutionary phenomenon, there have been those who insist on clinging to highly beautified, multi-step checkout flows. Perhaps nowhere else is this faction louder than on WooCommerce, which should come as no surprise given the platform’s prevalence and customizable nature.
The problem is that these holdouts are completely missing the point. The truth is that most online shoppers value convenience over everything else. It’s not like Amazon’s UX/UI is much to boast about, but in the last six months 83% of US consumers have made a purchase on Amazon. One-click checkout simply delivers an elegance of its own, one deeply rooted in simplicity.
1-Click Checkout Solutions for WooCommerce
As it stands, the most prominent players in the one-click WooCommerce checkout space are PeachPay, Bolt and Fast.
Of these, Bolt exclusively services merchants raking in over $3 million in GMV and Fast’s WooCommerce plugin seems to be in beta, although it is unclear. What is certain is that Fast for WooCommerce has stoked complaints regarding lack of customization, the need to create a new payment terminal for processing, and the lack of a confirmation screen before order placement (which clutters up the order feed for merchants).
Thus, PeachPay is possibly the best bet for WooCommerce merchants interested in delivering one-click checkout, which makes all the more sense when one consider the company’s stated mission of “democratizing one-click checkout” (what better platform to begin with than one that powers 1 in 4 online stores?).
For first-time users, PeachPay generates a streamlined form that is already simpler than most of the checkout flows we come across. But instead of stopping there, PeachPay remembers users’ information so that the next time they come across the button they can simply check out with one click.
In keeping with Amazon’s one-click checkout flow, PeachPay gives users one last opportunity to review their preferences before placing an order.
PeachPay’s supplementary mobile app also offers post-checkout features, such as order history aggregation, item tracking, and more.
As of yet, there are no companies referring to themselves as “post-checkout experience platforms”, but the term could perhaps fittingly be extended to PeachPay all the same, making it even more of a must-have for WooCommerce stores
When the prompt appears after activation, give the plugin permission to place orders (this is the only thing the plugin does, but WooCommerce doesn’t support finer permissions, so that’s why you see it asking for more than just permission to place orders).
After activation, click the link in the banner at the top to set up your Stripe Connect account.
After signing up, PeachPay will email you the activation key!
Here are some screenshots:
Installing PeachPay for WooCommerce
Giving WooCommerce permission to PeachPay
Connecting PeachPay with Stripe (whether you have a Stripe account or not)
Setting up PeachPay. Your one-click WooCommerce checkout is now active!
Win Instant Access to the PeachPay for WooCommerce Plugin
The first 50 people who submit the form below will bypass the standard wait time and can begin using PeachPay immediately.
Business Bloomer does not get access to the information submitted below; it goes directly to PeachPay. The decision-making process and final results are at the complete discretion of PeachPay. Offer ends on February 28th 2021.
Really, I won’t judge you at all.
