A payment gateway is a system developed to enable payment of goods and services for both offline and online merchants. It makes sure that there exists a smooth passage of all transactions through encryption of confidential information. It acts as the link between a buyer, a bank, and an online shop.

Online stores try their best to sell as many products as possible to their customers. WooCommerce comes with built-in functionality and features such as store management and payment options that merchants need to get their stores up and running.

A shop using the WooCommerce plugin is the payment portal while the bank is the payment processor. The payment gateway receives data from the buyer and redirects it to the right payment processor depending on the method of payment that the buyer chooses.

So, let’s see what’s required from a technical and legal point of view before writing a single line of code.

Why Build Your Own Payment Gateway

There are tens if not hundreds of payment gateways that have already been developed and that can be connected to an online store. For instance, when it comes to payments, WooCommerce has built-in payment options such as PayPal and Stripe. It also allows customers to pay for products through bank transfer as well as Cash on Delivery.

These payment gateways are secure and easy to use. This explains the reason why most online stores use the WooCommerce plugin when setting up their stores.

However, these payment gateways might come with limitations especially for businesses that need to have total control over their payment processing. Such businesses need a payment process that they can change when they want to, making sure that it meets their needs. They, therefore, develop their own payment gateway integrated with WooCommerce.

It is these businesses that have now employed the use of API Gateways, as defined in this article, when developing their own payment system. This way, they have total control over the entire payment process and can add or remove anything that they want from the process.

But before coding your own payment gateway from an API, you need to read the following technical and legal requirements.

1. Infrastructure Setup

One needs to first make a decision on whether to set up their own server or host the payment gateway on a third-party server. Setting up your own server might give you more control, but you will be forced to maintain a data center among other complications. Using a third-party service such as AWS might be the better option.

2. Payment Processor Integration

Integrating with a payment processor means that you talk to a financial institution or a company that handles online payments. This is mostly done by banks and other payment systems such as Mastercard, Visa, and American Express among others. 

For successful integration, you need to take the payment processor’s API documentation and make sure that you implement it as required. You then develop a third-party API for your clients to use when sending payments and receiving payment statuses. You need to make sure that this API integrates well with the WooCommerce plugin. 

3. Customer Base Management

You will need a system to manage your customers. This might require you to develop a CRM or implement one. Make sure that you take one that makes it easy for you to keep your client data, manage transactions and control your account managers.

4. Implementing Tokenization

One of the things that you need to be very careful about when building your own payment gateway is security. For instance, you need to make sure that credit and debit card information is not kept on the store’s server, but on the gateway side.

Implementing tokenization helps one to make sure that WooCommerce does not store sensitive information especially during recurring purchases from buyers. It employs the use of a token in place of the debit/credit card number. This token is the one used by the online shop.

5. Getting EMVCo Certificate and Applying for PCI

EMV (Europay, Mastercard, and Visa) is an international standard that governs transactions that use a bank card with a chip. One should get in touch with EMVCo to apply for a certificate.

Finally, you will need to apply for a PCI. This is a standard whose main aim is to reduce fraud by the use of a number of rules governing all applications working with credit or debit cards. For you to be approved, you need to order for a PCI audit, which is quite expensive and should be done at least once every year.

Conclusion

Even though we have a number of popular WooCommerce payment gateways that one can use today, some companies prefer developing their own gateways.

This is not an easy process and it requires a lot of resources and time and one has to make sure that they have all it takes to come up with a payment gateway that meets all the set standards. 

However, once the payment system is set up and running well, you can be assured of having full control over your transactions and over how the payment gateway operates.

The post WooCommerce: 5 Must-Knows to Develop a Payment Gateway From an API appeared first on Business Bloomer.

WooCommerce is the largest ecommerce platform by sheer number of stores and it doesn’t look like things are slowing down. In fact, it seems like the fun is just beginning. The platform isn’t even a decade old and it was only acquired by Automattic (the parent company of WordPress) in 2015.

Despite the fact that the sky is the limit for WooCommerce merchants trying to customize their stores, certain problems faced by merchants on a daily basis remain unsolved. Perhaps at the top of the list is the issue of cart abandonment.

As those keeping up with Shopify already know, Shop Pay has shown to be strikingly effective at solving this issue by eliminating friction from the checkout process. This gives Shopify merchants a major advantage. Depending on your industry, up to 94% of carts are abandoned these days and WooCommerce merchants are particularly susceptible given the association between cart abandonment and frictional checkout.

But why exactly does this association exist? 

We’ve spoken about the history of online checkout and the growing fickleness of shoppers in a previous article, but the bottom line is that, outside of Amazon and Shopify, in the last two decades the online checkout process has not fundamentally changed beyond the use of autofill.

Shoppers are sick and tired of it. With each additional second spent on checking out, they are more likely to turn to more convenient ecommerce destinations, such as Amazon, which pioneered the use of one-click checkout now readily adopted by Shop Pay. Most shoppers simply want their online purchases to be as simple as one click.

So what can the merchants of WooCommerce do to solve the issue of cart abandonment? And is there any equivalent to Shop Pay on WooCommerce?

Fighting Back Against Cart Abandonment: the Traditional Way

First, the obvious should be stated: autofill does remove some of the friction from checking out. But autofill works best when you minimize the amount of checkout pages and fields.

One-page checkout plugins abound these days and many themes come with a one-page checkout by default. Additionally, a plugin like Checkout Field Editor will let you easily reduce the number of fields in your checkout if you’re not comfortable using PHP. As an example, you might consider removing the field for a customer’s phone number if you deem that it is not absolutely necessary to collect that information. 

A very popular solution to cart abandonment is the implementation of an email automation plugin, like Metorik Engage. However, the cold, hard truth is that, by the time the shopper receives the email, it is probably too late. Furthermore, for those shoppers who never bother typing in their email, this solution misses the mark.

An equally popular solution is spending hundreds of dollars or hours of your time on a highly-customized multi-step checkout flow that enables cross-selling and up-selling. But with each item that you attempt to up-sell, friction is being introduced to the checkout process. Thus, the trade-off is self-evident. 

Some merchants implement an account creation process on their site with the incentive of making checkout easier the next time a customer makes a purchase. However, the initial checkout barrier is all a customer needs to decide never to visit your store again. It is highly recommended that you skip this solution entirely unless you rely primarily on repeat customers.

Fighting Back Against Cart Abandonment: the New Way

So far it seems like none of these solutions can match the simple elegance and effectiveness of Amazon or Shop Pay’s one-click checkout. That is only the case with PeachPay for WooCommerce , which allows shoppers who have never been to your store to check out with one click provided they have used PeachPay before. A new era of convenience is upon us and WooCommerce merchants have some catching up to do. 

The first time a customer clicks the button generated by the PeachPay plugin, a simple, streamlined form is generated. The next time the customer encounters the button, on any site whatsoever, all their information will be available for one-click checkout. 

And the best part about PeachPay is that it is free, as its price is built into the standard Stripe transaction fee. All you need to do to bring PeachPay to your store is opt into this waitlist, which will enter you into a queue of merchants. No need to worry about the wait, as the PeachPay team is agile enough to reach out to every merchant in 1-2 days’ time.

To conclude, then, the single most effective approach you can take to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions is to adopt PeachPay’s passwordless one-click checkout plugin.

PeachPay promises merchants a set up that takes minutes and customers a checkout that takes seconds. Now, you can finally compete with Amazon and Shopify. 

The post WooCommerce: Quick Cart Abandonment Solutions appeared first on Business Bloomer.

Upon installation, WooCommerce adds a default product category called “Uncategorized”. This is a nice feature because each product must belong to at least one category, and “Uncategorized” is therefore the WooCommerce-way to avoid problems.

All good so far, until you get to the stage where you have dozens of product categories and if *one day* (everyday for me lol) you forget to assign a product to one of them your product will automatically fall under “Uncategorized”, with that category showing also on the frontend which is not nice at all.

In this post, we’ll see how to remove this “Uncategorized” category, forever. Enjoy!

Step 1: “Make Default” Another Product Category

If you wish to get rid of the “Uncategorized” product category once and for all, you need to create at least another product catergory, so that you can make it the “default” one.

Simply hover onto the category you want to set as default, and click on “Make default”:

Step 2: Delete Uncategorized Category

Now that you have another Default Category, you can now freely hover onto the “Uncategorized” product category and click on “Delete”. That’s it!

The post WooCommerce: Delete “Uncategorized” Product Category Forever appeared first on Business Bloomer.

The term “database” is widely used and known to millions of people, but the proportion of people who have it in their vocabulary without understanding what it describes is sizable.

Databases are at the core of so many digital services today that it is easy to overlook them entirely, but whether you run a shopping site or a business server, building an understanding of them is worthwhile regardless of whether or not you are directly responsible for administration duties.

Having a grasp of the underpinnings of what a database is and how it works is sensible, especially if you run a WooCommerce site and you want to make optimal use of all that this platform has to offer.

To that end, here is an overview of the database fundamentals to bring you up to speed.

Databases – the basics

In essence, a database is a system in which information is stored in an ordered way, allowing for details to be added, retrieved and modified as necessary by an overarching management system.

Order and efficiency is achieved by putting data into tables, with rows and columns allowing for information to be organized logically, in a manner that is both straightforward for human users to understand, and also for software to interact with.

Structured query language (SQL) is not the only programming language on the block, but it is by far the most commonplace in a database context.

In terms of what they can achieve, the answer is multifaceted. Whether storing data for websites and apps, or housing information such as media files, business documents and everything in between, a database will be the ideal solution.

Of course any system which has such vital roles to play in the digital age also needs to be monitored and maintained to ensure that it performs as intended. Performance can suffer due to blocking and deadlocking, as this occurs when multiple processes attempt to use the same resource at once.

Preserving data integrity with these features is important, although the work of administrators to minimize the recurrence of such snafus is equally necessary. A poorly optimized database can create lots of knock-on effects, such as slow page load speeds on websites which in turn might lead to higher bounce rates and fewer conversions.

WooCommerce Database Structure

Now that you have a foundational appreciation of databases, it is worth exploring their implications in a WooCommerce context.

Chiefly it is worth pointing out that the way customer data is stored by WooCommerce is not centralized; rather this information can be distributed among tables that are either customized for the platform itself, or based on the same solutions as all WordPress sites.

Unless you have made any changes yourself, WooCommerce will automatically associate customer data with the orders they have placed on your store. This applies irrespective of whether they have created an account or decide to checkout as a guest.

This all sounds good in principle, but in practice it means that it is perfectly possible for multiple copies of the same customer information to persist on your site’s database, because every order they make will essentially duplicate this. It may not be the most efficient approach, but it does have the advantage of meaning that any detail changes are recorded separately, which is convenient in the event that the delivery address changes, for example.

Likewise when orders are placed, WordPress user accounts will be created and stored for customers, with the wp_users table storing aspects like their email address, while the wp_usermeta is harnessed to handle their shipping details.

By its nature as a plugin, WooCommerce introduces a whole host of new tables to the database, each of which is specifically tuned to provide useful functionality for site operators. Here is a quick overview of these custom tables, and what function each serves.

WooCommerce Products and Orders

In the above table, we have highlighted woocommerce_order_items and woocommerce_order_itemmeta for a specific reason: if you’ll ever need to manipulate the WordPress Database via PHPMyAdmin, for example, you will surely use those two tables as they contain all WooCommerce order data.

Problem is, orders are also stored in some other WordPress tables, and so are WooCommerce products. Here’s a quick overview of the tables involved.

Finding WooCommerce Orders in the WP Database

WooCommerce order data can be found in the following tables:

• woocommerce_order_itemmeta
• woocommerce_order_items
• comments (order_note)
• postmeta (shop_order)
• posts (shop_order ID)

Finding WooCommerce Products in the WP Database

WooCommerce product data can be found in the following tables:

• wc_order_product_lookup (product ID or product_variation ID)
• wc_product_meta_lookup (product ID or product_variation ID)
• postmeta (product or product_variation)
• posts (product ID or product_variation ID)

When to use the WordPress DB

The first step to impactful leveraging of a database when running an e-commerce site is knowing how to make the most of queries to retrieve data efficiently.

When reviewing orders, for example, you can narrow down your search according to a specific date range, which is useful if you want to assess performance within a given window of time, or pinpoint a particular order further down the line. This is also applicable to other variables, such as product weight.

Likewise it makes sense to get a handle on how to export data from WooCommerce so that you can analyze and process it elsewhere, perhaps using spreadsheet software. This can be useful for all sorts of purposes, such as filing taxes and carrying out market research into your audience.

Ultimately it will pay to get to grips with the basics of SQL if you want to make full use of a database for online retail, and as this is one of the most approachable programming languages around, it should be straightforward.

The post WooCommerce Database Explained: How It Works and Where To Find Data appeared first on Business Bloomer.

There are times when you have thousands of WooCommerce orders, products, categories, tags, coupons, customers or custom fields and the “Bulk Edit > Delete” option in the WordPress dashboard is simply not cost- and time-effective.

Maybe because your website goes down as it can’t process that much information at the same time, or maybe because you’re on a low budget and can’t afford to hit “delete” 100 or 1000 times by hand.

Thankfully, WooCommerce information is stored in the WordPress database, which means we can access it, write a “SQL DELETE statement”, and bulk delete anything you like, in seconds. Of course, and you will find warnings below, NEVER DO THIS on a live website as I can’t guarantee this won’t have any side effects.

So, have fun!

How to Access the WordPress Database

Your hosting control panel should have a “phpMyAdmin” icon or link. This will allow you to login to your database. Here’s an example with SiteGround hosting.

Now, select your database from the left and once its tables get listed in the right panel note down the database tables prefix. By default this is “wp_“, but each WordPress install could possibly use a different custom prefix. In my case it’s “apos_“, as you can see from the screenshot.

Then, go to the “SQL” tab and write one of the DELETE statements you find below, based on what you need to erase. Of course, you must change all the occurrences of “wp_” to your custom WordPress database table prefix (“apos_” in my case). That’s it!

1. Bulk Delete All Orders

DELETE FROM wp_woocommerce_order_itemmeta;
DELETE FROM wp_woocommerce_order_items;
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type = 'order_note';
DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN ( SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'shop_order' );
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'shop_order';

2. Bulk Delete All Products

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN ( SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type IN ( 'product', 'product_variation' );
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type IN ( 'product', 'product_variation';

3. Bulk Delete All Trashed Products

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN ( SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product' AND post_status = 'trash' );
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'product' AND post_status = 'trash';

4. Bulk Delete All Coupons

DELETE FROM wp_postmeta WHERE post_id IN ( SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'shop_coupon' );
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'shop_coupon';

5. Bulk Delete All Order Notes

DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id IN ( SELECT ID FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type = 'order_note' );
DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_type = 'order_note';

The post WooCommerce: Bulk Delete Orders / Products Super Fast appeared first on Business Bloomer.

If 2020 taught us anything, it was that businesses needed to stay nimble and find new ways to adapt. During the pandemic many businesses turned to WooCommerce as digital transformation was accelerated overnight out of necessity. Traditionally in-person shops selling anything from food to clothing to auto parts needed an online presence to continue selling in a safe and convenient way.

Developers, agencies and business owners (like yourself) worked very quickly as demand surged to fill in feature gaps for these new use cases in WooCommerce. 

A clear problem started to occur for businesses fulfilling orders in real-time. Knowing when the order was placed and starting the order fulfillment process was manual, slow and not organized. This resulted in increased time for employees to manage orders, errors in orders and delays getting orders to customers quickly.

And here comes Cloud Printing to the rescue. Adding such a system to your WooCommerce store can immediately cut manual steps in the post-purchase fulfillment process resulting in many benefits for your business.

You can expect reduced operations costs, increased employee efficiency and happiness while also increasing customer satisfaction by getting the order in customers hands quicker. So, let’s understand cloud printing better and see how this can be implemented. Enjoy!

3 Reasons Why Store Managers Should Use Cloud Printing for Their Stores

1. Saves Money

How? Do you have an employee clicking to check if an order is placed? Once it occurs, several more clicks to load the order details, and finally the order is printing. We have worked with businesses and discovered 10 mins of every hour is spent checking for new orders and getting the orders started for fulfillment. Wow!

On average you can save 20% of the employees time by automating the printing of tickets. A lot of time wasted in manual non-value added tasks. Let’s not forget, the system also reduces the office supplies cost. Printing orders using our mapping system to specific printers reduces duplicate printing waste and extra paper. 

2. Happier Employees

One of the biggest dissatisfaction of employees is doing mundane tasks that are ‘busy’ work. Previously an employee had to check several places awaiting a new order: email, order lists, notifications on screen and etc. Once the order is discovered, they spend time clicking around to print the order, then waiting for the team to start the next process.

Meanwhile, they’re also expected to talk to customers, prep orders and other required tasks. If we remove these tasks by automating the order discovery, we can save a step and create a new starting point at the fulfillment stage. Now an employee is freed from that mundane task, they can do something else like provide customer service talking with customers as preparing orders will begin automatically with new orders being sent directly to the printer for fulfillment.

Efficiency increases allowing for a smooth transition from one order to the next without pauses, clicks or delays.  

3. Satisfied Customers

What makes a customer leave a 1 star versus 5 star review? Often the biggest part is related to how quickly they get their order fulfilled. After making the purchase commitment the time is ticking.

Using the system, the order prints instantly, each station has the order details, resulting in faster fulfillment and less order errors. On average order fulfillment time was reduced by 5 mins!

Bonus Reason: Avoid Extra Plugins

Where you might have needed a PDF generator plugin to print before, you can skip that purchase because the order data from WooCommerce feeds directly to the preconfigured print templates. You can create multiple templates to give to customers, for your back of house or accounting needs as well as the ability to save PDFs locally.

Meet The New Print Manager for WooCommerce Plugin

The Print Manager Plugin and BizPrint Cloud Service for WooCommerce was designed to solve this problem for managers and store employees by automatically printing orders to local printer stations in real-time.

1. Keeping it simple

Let’s understand how this works in a normal order:

• Customers place an order on your WooCommerce store. Yay!
• After the customer clicks ‘Place Order’, magic happens with the cloud. 
• Instantly & automatically within 5 seconds of clicking ‘Place Order’ the local printer starts.
• The customer’s order is printed as a receipt in one or many printers around the business.
• Now the employee sees an order was placed and can start fulfilling the order.

You can quickly see the benefit of this new order fulfillment workflow.

2. Feature Highlights

Here are some of the highlights of the Print Manager Plugin and BizPrint Cloud Service for WooCommerce:

• Supports all major printer brands including Dymo, HP, Canon, Epson, Zebra, Brother, Star.
• Order printing formatted for both Thermal receipt and Inkjet printers.
• Automatic printing for operational efficiency.
• Print to multiple printers with station management features.
• Cloud printing enables printing to anywhere in the world.
• No limits printing scalable for small to large businesses.
• Fast and secure printing using BizPrint Cloud infrastructure.
• Connect unlimited WooCommerce websites.
• Native compatibility with BizSwoop POS Plugin.
• Custom developer print templates available for advanced users.
• Product mapping add-on for advanced location print mapping.

3. Product Mapping (Add-on)

The add-on allows admins to select products and categories to print out at specific printer station locations. Restaurants and businesses that need packing stations can really take advantage of the product mapping features to optimize their workflows.

For example, your restaurant could set up a front of house station for beverages and pre-made items, a POS station to give a receipt to the customer and a line-cook station to send main entrees and appetizers to the back kitchen for preparation. If you’re an agency building out stores for restaurants, your clients will praise you for this feature!

4. Custom Templates & Compatibility

While the Print Manager already lets you add your logo, adjust margins, and include or take away certain information from the receipt, your might require advanced developer level customization of the template.

While BizSwoop offers native compatibility with a few of their own popular plugins like Takeout & Delivery, Products add-ons and more, if you’re using a 3rd party plugin, you can still use BizPrint by buying a custom template to get the order data showing on the receipt. There is a custom template store & service to add compatibility with popular plugins like Delivery Slots, Order Delivery Date, Product Add-ons and more.

5. Point of Sale Integration

BizSwoop is the development company behind BizPrint, also the creators of their very own full feature POS plugin for WooCommerce. The POS plugin integrates with BizPrint completing the package for brick and mortar establishments using WooCommerce. You can learn more about the POS system and download it for free here.

Wrapping Up

Finally you might be thinking to yourself, I would love to add Cloud printing to my WooCommerce store, but…

• I can’t afford printer hardware. No problem. BizPrint is designed to support thousands of printer model types including thermal receipt printers commonly used in restaurants/retail outlets, InkJet printers used in business environments and label printers commonly used in fulfillment centers. Almost all major printers brands are compatible including the following and more: Dymo, HP, Canon, Epson, Zebra, Brother, Star. Use the printer you have already. 
• Sounds technical. It’s not. Don’t be scared by the word ‘cloud’, if your current thermal, inkjet or other printer connects to a computer, it can become cloud enabled with the included desktop application. After a few minutes, the easy setup process allows everyone from a novice to a power user to start using the service. 
• I have multiple printers so it won’t work. Don’t worry. Businesses often have more than 1 printer, usually 2-3 for a POS station and multiple fulfillment stations or locations around the business. BizPrint works by a station system, allowing your business to have multiple printer stations connected to the cloud to fit your needs. Each printer needs to be connected to the internet through a desktop application available for Mac, PC, or Linux (Raspberry Pi compatible device coming soon). After the setup process, you can define orders to print out to one or multiple stations.
• I can’t afford the system. Small to Medium businesses have tight margins. We understand and realize an extra service monthly might be hard to add to the cost of the business. Doing some quick calculations can show how quickly the service can return savings. If an employee makes $10/hr, the system saves 20% of their time, average savings of $2 /hr. After 1 single day, for a single employee the cost of the plan is paid for in full. Plans as low as $10/month, including a Free Basic plan. 

You can continue to go with the traditional CTRL + P(rint) on a sheet of paper and hand that to your employees to process orders. Or spend money on a PDF plugin to generate an invoice and manually print each order.

Alternatively, you can streamline your operations, create a better experience for customers, and ultimately save money in otherwise wasted time by using Print Manager for WooCommerce and BizPrint Cloud System.

Get started for free with up to 50 print jobs per month. Head over to BizSwoop.com for an easy to follow 7-step setup guide and you’ll be printing automatically on the cloud within 5 minutes.

The post WooCommerce: How To Print Orders Automatically appeared first on Business Bloomer.

Online shoppers are expected to find your store, browse through your products and complete the purchase on their own. Those who seek variety, convenience and flexibility while shopping online, don’t mind the lack of human touch.

However, getting users to actually land on your WooCommerce store, get interested in the products and initiate a purchase can require some pre-sales effort.

Pre-sales process is a combination of activities performed to acquire new customers. It starts early on when you profile the target customers for your WooCommerce store and design your offerings according to their needs. Once they arrive on your website, your intention should be to ensure that they don’t leave without buying or at least engaging with you.

Furthermore, you can prioritize leads, move them through the sales funnel at a faster rate, and improve conversions while creating a positive customer experience.

So, how should you be setting up a robust pre-sales process for your online business?

Well, here is a list of the top ways to implement pre-sales functionality on your WooCommerce store so that you can optimize your conversions.

1. Use Inquiry Forms to Connect with Interested Leads

Not all prospects visiting your WooCommerce website may have a clear understanding of their own needs. At times they may not even realize how your products can help them in meeting their requirements.

A good pre-sales functionality should, therefore, be encouraging potential customers to open up and share their requirements with you. 

The best way to do that is via “Inquiry Forms”. This functionality is especially helpful if you have just set up your WooCommerce store and both you and your customers need time and information to get to know each other. Some clear benefits include:

• Develop Customer Profile: You can get potential customers to submit basic demographic information along with their inquiry. This way, you can develop a better-informed target customer profile for your WooCommerce store. Better customer profiling will not only help you manage their current needs, but also come up with products and services, which may be of relevance to them in the future.
• Offer Customized Solutions: You can make the inquiry form as descriptive as you need, giving your customers ample opportunity to describe their requirement. Even though your store may not be offering a standard solution for specific needs of certain customers, you may consider offering custom solutions. 

Inquiry forms allow you to communicate with your customers and understand what’s missing and what needs to be modified in your products for their desired value proposition. 

• Analyze Product Specific Demand: You can configure product-specific inquiry buttons to show on every product page with the help of special plugins such as Product Enquiry Pro For WooCommerce. This way, you can analyze product-specific demand and gauge customer interest in your offers. 
• Understand Driving Forces Behind Purchase: While some customers are driven by product price in their buying decision, others may be more interested in superior quality or value-adding features. With inquiry forms as a pre-sales functionality, you will be able to determine which are the most significant driving forces behind the purchase behavior of your target customers. You can then accordingly position your WooCommerce website as a premium or value-for-money brand.
• View All Inquiries and Prioritize Response: All the inquiries can be viewed in a centralized admin dashboard. You can flag inquiries for immediate response or allocate specific inquiries to dedicated teams for lead nurturing. It’s also possible to prioritize inquiries on the basis of product categories, order size, and nature of information demanded for effective pre-sales support.
• Align Email Campaign For Lead Nurturing: Inquiry forms can also help you interactively offer solutions to your customers for their specific problems through email. By collecting contact information on inquiry forms, you can set up email campaigns to nurture potential leads and optimize your pre-sales conversion. Also, you can set up a more personalized channel of communication with your customers.

2. Offer Live Chat to Engage With Potential Customers

Sometimes, your target customers may lack the patience of filling an inquiry form and waiting for hours (or worse, days) to receive any response. If they don’t find relevant information on the site to make a buying decision, they simply exit your sales funnel. 

To make sure that doesn’t happen on your WooCommerce store, you can set up a live chat option and engage potential customer in the pre-sales phase of the sales funnel itself. You can either use a plugin or widget to install this functionality in your WooCommerce store and reap several benefits.

• Real-Time Customer Engagement: With simple, bot-assisted chatting, interested customers can receive real-time response to their queries and be moved forward in the purchase process. You can set-up a pre-chat form for customers to submit their inquiry and then an AI enabled, chat-bot can respond based on pre-determined responses to FAQs.
• Easy Integration with CRM: Live Chat option can also be effectively used for customer relationship management through seamless integration with your existing CRM software. When returning customers are engaged through the bot option, the interaction can be tailored on the basis of previous interactions and product requests. Data backed insights can thus be used to delight your customers and offer them a superior buying experience.
• Manage Customer Queries In Non-Business Hours: Your pre-sales functionality should be designed to capture prospects and leads, even when your WooCommerce store is not open. The live chat option enables you to capture customer interest and queries in non-business hours, when no sales or CRM executives may be online. This way, you can service even those prospects who are browsing potential solutions for their needs at odd hours, without over-extending your support staff.
• Track Website Traffic and Lead Quality: If customers are unable to find relevant information on your Home-page or find the site design unhelpful in information search, they may exit without leaving a query or making a purchase. Live chat option allows you to track the inbound website traffic, by analyzing the quality of interactions and information sought. 

You can track when the customer is using the live chat option and what kind of queries are mostly being posted for resolution. Your WooCommerce store design and content can be modified based on these insights.

• Route Leads From Bot to Live Agent: You can maintain complete on-premise tool of the live chat pre-sales functionality and route leads with complex queries or advanced purchase intent to live agents. Such routing can save you time in suspect screening and ensure that valuable leads don’t go unattended without full-service support.

3. Automate Email Campaigns for Lead Nurturing

If your product and services are more complex in nature and require a certain amount of to-and-from interaction before converting prospects into customers, then just having an inquiry form or live-chat option is not enough. You will need to set up an automated drip email campaign to consistently engage and nurture the leads generated through inquiry forms and chats. 

Email as pre-sales functionality can be integrated with your WooCommerce store to begin email interaction with interested customers, as soon as they share their contact information. Just like the previous two ways of optimizing pre-sales conversions, email campaigns also come with their own set of advantages.

• Personalize Customer Communication: Emails are a more personalized way of maintaining customer connection as the content and frequency can be controlled as per your target audience. For customers at the top of the purchase funnel, emails with product information, and ongoing offers can be shared. But for customers who have shown product specific interest or entered price negotiation; buying guides, product demos and other helpful content can be shared.
• Offer Detailed Information and Sales-support: Since your email list is most likely generated as a result of inquiry forms and live chat options, you are already interacting with people interested in your value proposition. Therefore, email becomes an excellent platform to offer detailed information and extensive sales support. 

You can understand the deterrents and blockers in the buying decision of your customers and systematically resolve customer objections with helpful content.

• Create Urgency and Excitement: You can send time-sensitive promotional offers, or limited period product availability to potential leads who are on the verge of converting into customers. This approach creates excitement around the brand and make the leads feel a sense of urgency to complete their buying process.
• Try different pitches via separate campaigns: Even for cold leads who have remained unresponsive to your previous communications, there is still hope when you are using email for pre-sales. From time to time, you can introduce new email campaigns, with varied focus on new product launch, price drops, bulk-order benefits, or increased services. 

This way, even though your value proposition was not previously enticing enough for customers, it can rejuvenate their interest and bring them back to your Woostore.

• Monitor Customer Interest: Email campaigns can be easily monitored with key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. You can measure the effectiveness of content as well as the customer interest in products being promoted through each email campaign. 

While automation of email campaigns help you maintain consistency of communication, back-end data analysis can reveal to you what kind of email content can optimize your pre-sales conversions.

• Generate Referrals: Email campaigns can also be used to generate referral business for your WooCommerce store. For leads who are opening your emails but not really buying anything and existing customers who haven’t come back for a purchase, you can appeal for a referral. You can also provide special discounts and referral codes to customers who can support you in building your pre-sales pipeline.

4. Get Customers to Request for Quotes 

Another brilliant way to get potential customers to engage with you and expedite their purchase process is by allowing them to directly request for quotes. If your WooCommerce website is presenting products or services in catalog mode and dynamic pricing applies to most of your products, this is the best way to engage customers who have high purchase intent.

Instead of giving them price information or “Add to Cart” button on the product pages, you can simply prompt them to “Request Quote” through a button. There are several benefits of this pre-sales approach:

• Increased Chances of Converting Bulk Orders: Request Quote functionality serves as a clear indicator to bulk buyers that the prices on your Woostore are not absolute and based on their order size, they can expect a good offer. By allowing customers to send in inquiries/quote requests for multiple products in a single go, you can maximize the chances of converting large orders.
• Better Understand Customer Needs: When customers submit quote requests, it helps you understand their product preferences and specific needs. You can plan your current inventory and future supply around quote requests too, as these are a good indicator of customer demand.
• Capture Genuine Leads: Unlike customers who add products to their cart or wish-list and never get around to buying them, customers who request a quote tend to have a more genuine interest in buying. They have spent the time in identifying products that they need and filled a request quote form to take things forward. It’s with these kinds of leads, that you can have a higher chance of conversion and a lasting relationship.
• A Great Opportunity For Branding: As you provide interested customers with formal quotations in pdf format, you can insert your brand elements in such a communication in different ways. The quotation format can be professionally designed, with your brand colors, typography, and brand logo included in it. This way, even when the customer is not on your WooCommerce store, they are still reminded of your brand.
• Maintain Complete Record of Pricing Negotiation: The ‘Request Quote’ functionality also allows you to maintain a single thread of communication with prospects and record every new pricing quote generated, post negotiations. Not only does it help you in reaching mutual agreements faster, it also helps you in ensuring that no quote request go unattended. 
• Organize and Prioritize Quote Requests: The quote request functionality can also be managed from your Woostore’s admin dashboard, wherein you can search and flag requests as per product categories, order size, and priority. From a unified platform, you can initiate communication with prospects and begin negotiations. 
• Speed Up Negotiations and Sales Process: The requests generated through this pre-sales functionality are time sensitive and need to be handled with agility. By allocating quote requests to different team members, you can improve your turn around time and delight customers with attention and service. 
• Take Your Business International: You can also enable the quote request functionality for translation into multiple languages, depending upon your customer base. This way you can remove the language barrier and enable customers from all market segments to easily do business with you.

Wrapping Up

In a nutshell, each of these pre-sales functionalities can be used on its own or in combination to improve your sales conversions.

Your choice of functionality may depend on the nature of products or services that you are selling, your target market, and of course, your budget. 

One of the most effective pre-sales functionalities is definitely the quote request form. Not only does it quicken the conversion process by opening up negotiations, but it also gives you an opportunity to focus on leads who actually intend to buy.

The post WooCommerce: How to Increase Your Conversions With Pre-Sales Activities appeared first on Business Bloomer.

PeachPay adds a customizable “express checkout” button to your WooCommerce store’s product pages, cart page, and minicart.

With the swift, simple checkout process you will be able to offer your customers with PeachPay, you can kiss cart abandonment goodbye.

Returning customers check out with just one click, no matter which site they used PeachPay on initially (yes, you read that right!). 

If you wish to learn more about 1-click checkout and PeachPay, you can read another two Business Bloomer articles called “WooCommerce: The Elusive Nature of 1-Click Checkout” and “WooCommerce: Quick Cart Abandonment Solutions“.

In here, on the other hand, you find a brief tutorial with screenshots to help you integrate PeachPay onto your WooCommerce install in a matter of minutes. Enjoy!

Downloading and Installing the PeachPay Plugin

To begin, head to get.peachpay.app and enter your WooCommerce site’s address. On the next screen, click on “Install Now.” You’ll then be redirected to your WordPress dashboard, where you can activate the plugin to continue the set-up process. 

NOTE: If you encounter any issues during this process, you can install the plugin directly through the WordPress repository the good old-fashioned way. 

You will be prompted to authorize PeachPay to connect to your WooCommerce store; click on the “Approve” button to do so. PeachPay requires read/write access so that orders made with PeachPay are successfully placed.

Linking PeachPay and Stripe

Next, you will need to create a Stripe Connect account with PeachPay. Follow the WordPress dashboard banner link and enter the login credentials for your Stripe account (or create one), then complete the Stripe Connect set-up process. 

An activation key will be sent to your email address in the next few minutes. When it arrives, log in to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to the PeachPay plugin settings. You then enter your activation key in the relevant field. 

Setting Up the PeachPay Plugin

While you’re waiting for the email with your activation key, you can play around with some of the PeachPay plugin settings. First, consider enabling test mode. This lets you place WooCommerce orders via PeachPay using test card information. Your customers will not be able to see the PeachPay button while it is in test mode, allowing you to ensure everything is working smoothly with peace of mind. 

You can also explore the button customization settings. The color of the PeachPay button is completely customizable. There are 7 predetermined options as well as a color slider, RGB, HSL, and HEX code fields. There are also options for changing button positioning, width, and more. 

Orders made with PeachPay will seamlessly be added to your WooCommerce order feed and payments will show up in your Stripe dashboard. 

NOTE: PeachPay will be integrating with other payment providers, including PayPal, AuthNet, etc. Thus, if you can’t use Stripe, rest assured you will be able to use PeachPay in the relatively near future!

Checking Out with PeachPay

Checking out with PeachPay is even easier than setting up the plugin. The first time an online shopper selects the “express checkout” button, a streamlined form collects all the information necessary for them to make a purchase.

For every subsequent purchase, on any site using PeachPay, this shopper can simply click the “express checkout” button and then check out with one click. No more time-consuming checkout forms or login credentials to keep track of. 

Ready to get started? Head over to get.peachpay.app and see what one-click checkout can do for you. 

And if you have any questions, check out PeachPay’s website. You are sure to get your query answered using the FAQ or compatibility page or by reaching out to the PeachPay team. 

The post WooCommerce: How to Install PeachPay in Minutes appeared first on Business Bloomer.

You know word-of-mouth is hands down the most cost-effective, lucrative, and fastest way to convert prospects into customers. You have repeat customers that seem to love you, but they hardly engage or spread the good word around. Your mailing list isn’t growing, your products have a negligible number of reviews, your referrals are a bust. 

You want to drive traffic and hope to establish strong sustainable word-of-mouth channels to find new customers – but nothing you have tried so far has worked as well as it should have. 

If this sounds like you – you’re at the right place. This article will look at some of the key aspects of sharing that help promote word-of-mouth sales and how your store can optimize these to scale your business easily and convert your prospects faster.

What Generates Word-of-Mouth?

There is a variety of sharing options to regularly generate word-of-mouth: product reviews, social media sharing buttons, gift cards, referrals, wishlists – the list goes on. 

But while most of us have these set up and incorporated onto our WooCommerce websites – the results rarely ever impress. This is because most ecommerce stores overlook the 1 aspect of word-of-mouth marketing that is critical to its success – the customer experience. 

It’s important to understand that the only reason customers talk about a brand publicly is to share an experience that has gone beyond their standard expectations.

So while you may offer the best rewards for your customers’ review, referral or shout-out – it’s often the very basics of human interaction and communication that pushes the envelope forward. 

Sharing Optimizations that Directly Impact Word-of-Mouth Sales

Here are some of the key reasons why your word-of-mouth is currently suffering and what you can do about it.

1. Replace Your Mailto Links With A Contact Picker

Word-of-mouth starts where the purchase process ends. When redirected to a page where customers can refer, enroll, or share about your business – they are often met with an interface that looks like this: 

You are expecting your customers to either input email addresses into a form field separated by commas. Or worse – use a ‘mailto’ link that not only takes them away from your website but also combines all the people they wish to share it with into a single generic email. An email with lots of recipients not only tends to be flagged for spam but also comes across as impersonal with an implication of a privacy violation. 

You can also never be sure if your customer completed the sharing process since it happens on an external website and there is no way for you to track their actions. This is abysmal. Your customers are motivated to refer to you – but the process is so tedious and flawed that it’s destined to fail.

A contact picker fixes this permanently.

Rather than making your customers do all the hard work – make your sharing process a joy to engage with and watch those referrals skyrocket.

A contact picker is an intuitive, self-sufficient, one-time WooCommerce plugin that allows your customers to select their desired contacts directly from an email address book of their choice – all without ever needing to type down a single letter into the input field. 

This not only keeps your users stationed on your ecommerce site for the entirety of the referral process but also gives you complete control over the message, presentation and frequency of the emails being sent out. This is a game-changing implementation that simplifies the process of sharing so much that customers end up referring nearly 3 times more when using a contact picker, than they would have otherwise. 

An additional benefit of using a contact picker is that it allows you to extract important information like the sender’s and recipients name to personalise your message and improve open rates of your referral emails. The whole process is simple, efficient and productive. And it deeply enriches the customer experience to promote word-of-mouth by eliminating all possible barriers to the process.  

2. Let Your Customers Take Center Stage

Brands expect and want their customers to talk about them while rarely ever making the effort to do the same for the customers, themselves. The effort and recognition are equally valuable both ways – so why is the generous action only expected from the customer?

If your argument is having given them a good shopping experience in exchange for their word-of-mouth marketing, then let’s set this straight. A standard purchase process includes a smooth checkout process, successful and secure transactions, and the seller’s gratitude for making a purchase. So if you’re not doing anything beyond this – then you’re not really doing anything to compel your customers to talk about you.

Thousands of unsolicited marketing emails are sent every day. When your message seems vague, generic and impersonal to the reader – you not only become a part of the thousand but also fail to attract the attention of your readers. In turn, failing to establish a connection that your customers value enough to talk about it to their friends and family. 

Here’s a great example of an email you should never send out. An email that addresses the recipient with their email id, provides little to no information and does nothing to entice the reader to engage or look forward to shopping with the brand.

And while it could be exciting to join a million other people – your customers would much rather feel singled out and special, in their customer journey when shopping with you. 

3. Personalize your Marketing Outreach

Shift the focus of your messaging from brand promotions to content that’s personal and useful for your readers. Let your customer take centre stage.

Study and enroll each of your customers into segmented mailing lists based on their shopping habits and purchase history. Have your referrals/sign-ups choose topics/categories of interest that are available on your website.

Tailoring your strategy around elevating the customer journey and post-purchase experience by bringing readers content, offers and updates relevant to their activity and interests can reportedly lead to 40% higher open rates.

Personalizing the sender, salutations and subject lines is another critical factor since 92% people trust a referral/recommendation that comes directly from friends or family.

The email above is a great example of personalizing each email from the very start. It uses the name of the actual sender, even though the email is coming from the brand’s email address. You should also address the recipient with their actual first or last name as it not only implies that you’re directly speaking to the recipient but that the message is specifically curated to their interests.

A milestone programme is also a great way to push your word-of-mouth marketing. It’s a tiered approach to rewards that unlock increasingly valuable benefits, discounts, and goodies as more and more referrals are made by your customer. Milestone referrals can be utilised to grow your newsletter mailing list, a product, or even a classic refer-a-friend program. Encourage and celebrate your best performing brand advocates with surprise discounts, shout-outs and mentions across your email blasts to acknowledge their efforts and motivate others to follow suit. 

4. Use Data To Make Informed Decisions

We are all too obsessed with tracking and measuring incoming traffic and likes to our website and socials. And don’t get me wrong – it’s great to have an influx of traffic and likes both. But neither of those 2 will directly tell you anything about how well your word-of-mouth acquisition channel can be performing. 

Word-of-mouth marketing is a more intimate affair than broad conversion metrics. For it to truly work – you have to understand the capacity, capability, and willingness of your customers to refer your business to their friends, family, or colleagues.

This is also important to continue providing your customers with the best experience possible. And not bog down or turn off genuine brand advocates with an unnecessary push for more referrals and seeming focussed on promotions. 

Metrics such as how many users engaged with your sharing features and how many actually completed the sharing process gives you a fair idea of where you’re losing potential referrals. The total capacity of sharing vs the average number of shares per customer lends insight to how well your sharing campaigns are performing.

Metrics from multiple campaigns can help you identify and fine-tune your messaging to be more enticing and welcoming for your customers. While also offering a tangible value to your word-of-mouth marketing efforts. 

Just as the buyer’s journey – the sharing process is also spread across various stages from its inception until the completion of a share. And just like with nurturing your leads to convert into customers – you need to carefully curate your messaging to motivate and push your customers into making sizeable referrals to your business. Sharing metrics enable you to take better cognizance of your customer base’s motivation for advocacy and can help to identify improvements that ensure a smooth, barrier-free sharing experience.

Wrapping Up

And there you have it. Some key optimizations to how you should approach word-of-mouth marketing, along with its benefits and implications for your business.

If you’re just about to take notice of your word-of-mouth marketing efforts – then this 3 step workbook can help you do a self-analysis of your website’s current sharing interface. It’s quick, easy and absolutely free.

For any questions or additional suggestions on word-of-mouth marketing – sound off in the comments below. 

The post WooCommerce: How to Increase Your Word-of-Mouth Sales appeared first on Business Bloomer.

Personalized search and product navigation have a dramatic impact on ecommerce sales conversions, and for that reason alone, you should include them in your WooCommerce website build.

But how do you improve the standard search function model included with WooCommerce?

Well, reducing search times and quickly matching your customers to products are two great examples of how you can enhance the customer experience and the value of your brand.

Upgrading the WooCommerce product search function with an AI powered search engine is an easy way to dramatically improve your sales conversion rate; a quick win/win.

This article will explain how to upgrade the basic WooCommerce search and provide a genuinely interactive search experience for your website shoppers. Enjoy!

Why use an advanced search engine in your WooCommerce website?

Customers don’t like to wait. We have moved on from lengthy queues in the high street, and the traditional way of shopping is dying a slow death. It’s the same online. If you can quickly find the product you are looking for by applying some simple search filters, it dramatically enhances your online shopping experience.

There are so many online stores to choose from that it makes it easier to close a browser window and open a new one rather than eternally searching through lengthy stock lists.

For an idea of the impact that a product search engine has on ecommerce sales, it is estimated that, on average, 30% of visitors will use it. Imagine how many clients you could lose if your search engine doesn’t work well or offers poor search results.

Benefits of improving the product search of WooCommerce

WooCommerce includes a native product search, but it is basic in function and very limited; there is no expression matching or product suggestion ideas to assist the shopper.

There are many ways a customer could be searching for a product without explicitly typing in the product name: 

• Perhaps they don’t remember the product name or misspelt it?
• What if there are products that exist in your store that the customer can not find?
• What if the user knows the picture but not the product name?

Some plugins can add an AJAX product search and suggest results as you write, but these are based on retrieving information from product sheets, and so they are limited in scope.

Many search engine solutions improve internal search functioning, but there is only one that is quick and easy to integrate and offers machine language learning ability.

Doofinder, one of the best product search engines for WooCommerce

If you want to convert your WooCommerce website into a powerful selling tool that offers your shoppers a range of products to choose from with auto-suggestion features and much more, then Doofinder is the search engine you should choose.

Doofinder is a search engine compatible with WooCommerce (and other ecommerce platforms) that returns search results based on words and user behavior inside the shop. 

Doofinder uses an algorithm that is constantly learning, offering the most relevant results from any other search engine and predicting, suggesting, and autocompleting the searches. 

Using Doofinder, you can offer quick and fully optimised search results for your shoppers to find what they’re looking for quickly, all without leaving the home page!

In addition to being a brilliant search engine, Doofinder won’t affect your web speed with bloated code or increase your server resources because it works as an external service on the cloud that connects with your store. 

To start using Doofinder, you simply create your Doofinder account, install the plugin and connect with your WooCommerce shop to “let the magic happen” in less than 5 minutes.

Doofinder will massively improve your client’s shopping experience.

Giving search control to the client, enabling them to find what they are looking for, will provide you with a significant advantage over the competition, and in this field, Doofinder is the king of all searches.

Here are the main features: 

• Automatic error correction. In addition to being a product search with synonyms, this powerful tool is based on a semantic process architecture and corrects intelligently orthographic and typographic errors in more than 30 languages. 
• Intelligent search with autocomplete. Doofinder is a search engine that proceeds from the search intention, predicting, offering relevant results and learning from customers behavior. Thanks to its NLP technology (Natural Language Processing), it can understand what the consumer is looking for through synonyms and filtering orthographic mistakes. Doofinder predicts what the customer is searching for and suggests the best results.  
• AI Personalization (Artificial Intelligence). In real-time, Doofinder is capable of offering personalized search results garnered from the behavior and preferences of each user. Now you can display products similar to the ones the user is looking for. Perhaps even products that they didn’t know existed! 
• Semantic understanding. Lots of potential clients do incorrect phonetic searches that a standard search doesn’t know how to interpret. Doofinder product search technology solves this automatically. For example, it can correct “Aifon” for “iPhone”. It can detect what product is searched for even if it contains a misspelling, singular or plural, with empty words.
• Image search. Doofinder allows your customers to search the products inside your website by uploading photographs from their mobile phones.
• Voice Search in mobile phones. 70% of web visits are through a smartphone, and more clients are using voice search. With Doofinder, you can integrate this search option showing a quick, effective and responsive design.

In summary, Doofinder provides your potential customers with optimized results in milliseconds. They’ll also be able to filter or sort the results by relevance or price, as in any other standard products search tool. 

Why Doofinder helps you sell more

Whilst it is essential to make the shopping process as easy as possible for clients, it is also crucial that you can analyse your sales results and create selling opportunities.

Doofinder gives you these administrative functions: 

• Personalized results. One of the most sought after functions. You will be able to promote products in the search results, perhaps for the most profitable products.  To convert your website into a powerful selling tool and offer your users products you are more interested in selling. 
• Merchandising. Take advantage of the marketing functionalities Doofinder offers to show banners and promotions associated with specific search terms. Or to unique business campaigns. 
• Intuitive and personalizable interface. Allows you to stand out from the traditional search engines and configure this to your style in tune with your corporate identity. Show titles, descriptions, images, prices, discounts, offers. Also, the tool facilitates some layouts of different styles (classic, fullscreen, compact design, smartphone design)
• Real-time statistics. Did you know that the search box of your ecommerce is one of the most significant and most valuable info sources? With Doofinder, you have complete access to the statistics control panel to discover clients behavior across multiple devices (top searches, most clicked products, CTR, post-search conversion, geolocation, real-time statistics, session search, opportunities or no results searches)
• Tips for selling more. Doofinder will improve your selling possibilities. Thanks to the compilation of all that valuable data, you will make decisions that will provide a sales improvement. For example, you can show the most searched products on the home page and give them a promotional boost. Also, you can improve the cross-selling, show “related information” banners, negotiate conditions with suppliers or even personalize the order of the results offering similar products to the ones searched. You can configure all these functionalities easily and quickly with Doofinder. 
• Product Boosting. Gain control over the elements of your business that are important to you, from your stock, rentability or other priorities. Of course, one of the functionalities is to sell more in an online store with an intelligent product search. 
• Redirections. You may be interested in redirecting the user to a specific section of your website. For example, searches that contain “returns” to the return policy page. Or “shops” to the physical shop list of your business. In this way, you can make the user’s browsing experience is as positive as possible. 
• Multi-index search. With Doofinder, you’ll be able to show different sources of content simultaneously in searches, such as your blog or your FAQ section. 
• Ratings and direct shopping. Add product ratings or the button to buy directly in the search results. Doofinder will let your customers decide quickly and efficiently which products to buy. 
• Geolocated search. Use user geolocation to optimize the results and suggest products. 
• Search API. Thanks to the API, you’ll be able to do everything you imagine with the search technology of Doofinder. 

Conclusions

Reducing product search time increases the usability of a website, and with more accurate search results comes a better customer experience, translating into higher sales. 

Doofinder will help you differentiate from other ecommerce competitors by offering a personalized search engine experience that dramatically reduces the time taken to hunt down that elusive product.

Get a 30-day free trial and discover the power of the Doofinder search engine for yourself. Simply copy and paste a few lines of code, and you are good to go.

The post WooCommerce: How to Improve Product Search appeared first on Business Bloomer.

On a daily basis, you probably use drag-and-drop in a variety of interfaces. For instance, drag and drop your Gmail items to its category, upload files to WordPress media library, or organize your phone home screen apps.

While many page builder platforms come in to help you design your website with drag-and-drop, building WooCommerce transactional emails is still considered as a complex task. 

By default, WooCommerce email settings only allow you to change basic color profiles and text. In order to customize further, you will have to modify the theme code. 

If you are a non-techie and don’t want to crack the code between the scripts in wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/emails/email-styles.php or so, using a drag-and-drop email builder framework is the best solution.

Introducing YayMail

YayMail is an email builder platform deployed for WooCommerce. 

It has been developed with ease of use as the primary goal, but has been tested for maximum web browser and email client compatibility while keeping an eye on responsiveness.

You can download and use it for free from WordPress.org. This open source code is forever free and you won’t have to upgrade to any premium version to fully customize all the default Woo email templates.

Now that you’ve installed and activated it, head over to WooCommerce > Email Customizer to access the email editor.

Design emails using the drag and drop email builder

As a drag-and-drop editor similar to Elementor page builder, YayMail comes with all the options and settings on the same screen.

1. Upper toolbar

Here you will find the first dropdown for all the available WooCommerce email templates. Depending upon the active WooCommerce plugins on your current site, you’ll see new templates over here. 

If using a WooCommerce membership plugin, you’ll have extra email templates such as Membership – Welcome, Membership Reminder, Expired Membership and so on.

The second dropdown, “Sample order”, allows you to pick any real order to see how the email’s dynamic fields show on a specific shopper’s end.

On this upper toolbar, you can also find the most used action buttons including:

• Shortcodes: Copy a shortcode from here then paste it into the appropriate block of the email design.
• Send test email: One-click to send a test message to any email address to see how your designed email would look like in the inbox.
• Blank: Clear all the email blocks so that you can have a completely blank canva then you can start designing for your own purposes.
• Copy template: Copy from a previously designed template and paste it into the current email body. Then you can make some little adjustments, so as to avoid starting from scratch.
• Reset template: This option resets your template to the initial state, meaning you still have the default email blocks.
• Preview: Instantly see your customized email on desktop and mobile views.
• Save: Save your edits at any point in time.

2. Collapsible side panel

The YayMail WooCommerce email customizer’s side panel consists of two tabs: Elements and Settings.

All elements are draggable and include tons of customization options. The heading block, for instance, allows you to edit its padding, background color, text color, font family, and other visual options.

While the changes in the Elements tab apply only to the chosen block, the adjustments in Settings take effect for the whole email template.

Some frequently used features thus include:

• Email container width
• Peripheral background color
• Hide/Show product image and SKU
• Export/Import email templates

3. Email preview

Since it’s a block-based email builder, you can move any blocks up/down or use the handle to drag and drop it.

On the right corner, you’ll have some options like:

• Duplicate the email block
• Copy the block to another template
• Remove block

With YayMail, there are endless customizations you can make by changing the email designs and layouts, which is not happening if you modify theme code files or use WordPress customizer.

Case study: customize WooCommerce order confirmation email

To start customizing the order confirmation email, go to WooCommerce > Email Customizer > Email to show. From there, you can choose either Processing order or Completed order.

From then on, you can start adding any elements you’d like. Some elements I’m going to be using include:

• Logo: Upload a transparent logo image and resize it to make it aligned with the email container width
• Social icons: Easily choose the social network icons and add the URL for each platform
• Heading: Edit the heading text, heading font, text color, and background color
• Image: Add a custom image and adjust its width using the slide bar
• Footer: Add your website links such as My account, Customer support, etc.

At any point in time, you can click on the Preview button to see the email appearance on desktop/mobile in a popup without having to leave or refresh the current page.

Then, you can easily close the previewer to come back to the editor.

To see YayMail in action, check out this tutorial video to see how it helps you get the job done.

Integrations

Transactional email is a good means of communication for your marketing purpose. Especially when you offer a subscription or membership model through WooCommerce, you should customize the email notifications to make your brand profile bespoke and consistent.

Case Study 1: WooCommerce Membership plugin

By default, this is what your audience receives when their membership at your site is expiring. You can edit the text of the subject, head, and custom message.

Why not turn this email template into a call to action to make sure the audience will come back to their membership package?

For this extra content, I’ll be using multiple columns for the Expiring Membership email message.

The steps go as follows:

• Drag and drop a 2-column block onto the email
• Edit the column width in percentage, i.e. 70/30
• Add background color or image (optional), here I use white as background color
• Pick a text block for the first column
• Pick an image strip for the second column

That’s how I achieve a multiple column email template for the membership email messages.

Case Study 2: WooCommerce Follow-up emails plugin

With a custom email template extension like Follow-Ups, you can send extra content after specific customer actions have been done.

There are so many store scenarios in which scheduled automatic emails with custom content can be sent.

In this section, I’m demonstrating how to create and customize the email template to be sent after a coupon is used.

Firstly, start adding a new follow-up:

• Give it a name, email subject, and some content
• In the Follow-up Type metabox, make sure to choose Purchase Email
• In the bottom boxes, choose trigger as “after coupon used”
• It comes with plenty of advanced options, so feel free to explore it 

Then, let’s move on the customization steps:

• Insert logo and heading
• Add an image box element
• Insert content and social icons

Since I’m trying to set the tone for my brand’s color profiles, a pinkish color will be used for the heading background color and also the main image in the image box element.

Designing the blocks is easy so all’s left to do is to adjust the padding between the email blocks to achieve the looks and feels you’ve always wanted.

Quick note: please refer to their Docs to make sure you get the right YayMail addon for your current active WooCommerce extensions.

Case Study 3: loyalty rewards plugins

A Points and Rewards extension for WooCommerce may generate 10+ email notifications to touch base with customers.

The email templates vary depending upon the plugin you use, but basically it looks like a text message. From the Points Notification settings you can write your own messages in the Email Description box using their shortcode.

Then, save the changes and head over to our WooCommerce email customizer. From the dropdown, choose Points and Rewards email to start customizing the template.

Let’s spice up by adding some more media elements such as images, buttons, and links.

This new design will take effect on all the Points notifications to be sent out. Only that the middle notice block will be replaced with the messages you’ve just written in the previous step.

Conclusion

There are several methods for WooCommerce email template customization without coding. If source code modification is not your choice, then you can try customizing emails with the help of plugins.

Some plugins utilize the WordPress customizer to design email templates. However, a drag and drop email builder will help you create a much more flexible layout with advanced options. 

Today you can try it out by downloading YayMail from the WP repo and use it completely risk-free as it works seamlessly with all WordPress themes.

The post WooCommerce: How to Customize Email Templates Without Coding appeared first on Business Bloomer.

MOTO (Mail Order / Telephone Order) payments are payment transactions you take while the customer isn’t with you in person. 

MOTO payments are a vital way for many businesses to process customer payments. They’re accessible, secure and can help you expand your customer base by removing payment barriers. 

But what exactly are MOTO payments? 

Well, in this article, we’ll explain exactly that. Plus, we’ll talk about why they’re worth using and how to get them set up on your WooCommerce store.

What are MOTO payments?

MOTO payments can either be taken over the phone, by email, post or using a virtual terminal. 

MOTO payments are processed virtually on a web-based payment system (usually a web page, terminal or payment gateway). This works like a card machine and will communicate securely with the customer’s bank to process the payment.

Essentially, a customer will provide you with their details and you’ll process them on your end without storing them.

Why you might want to use MOTO payments

MOTO payments are particularly useful for businesses that need an alternative way to take customer payments that don’t require the customer to be present. 

In particular, by offering payment via MOTO, you’ll be able to serve older customers who might struggle to make orders via a website or in person. By taking payment via phone, you’ll expand your customer base and deliver a customer experience this group vitally needs.

MOTO payments are also useful for businesses that invoice customers via post or email. Merchants such as debt collectors, training bodies or even clubs can offer multiple MOTO payment methods to bring down payment barriers.

Plus, if you run a wholesale store, offering MOTO payments to customers who can’t make a payment online is a worthwhile investment.

Using MOTO payments with WooCommerce

If you’re already running a WooCommerce store and want to take additional MOTO payments, this process is usually quite tricky.

With most payment providers, you have the option to use their own digital terminal to take MOTO payments over the phone. But if you also have a WooCommerce store, you’d need to take payment via the virtual terminal and then manually add this new order (in WooCommerce) for stock take and invoicing.

The good news is, with a payment provider who supports MOTO payments (not all support it) and a WooCommerce plugin for that provider in hand, you can take MOTO payments directly in WooCommerce without having to do any extra work – saving a ton of time.

How to set up MOTO payments in WooCommerce

To set up MOTO payments for your WooCommerce store, you’ll need the help of a supported payment provider and its relevant WooCommerce plugin. 

AIB Authipay for WooCommerce not only acts as a standard payment method for your WooCommerce store, but also has MOTO payments built-in.

Note: To use AIB Authipay for WooCommerce you’ll need to have an AIBMS merchant account. Alternatively, you can achieve the same results with our Lloyds Cardnet and First Data Connect plugins.

With AIB Authipay, you’ll be able to take payments over the phone by adding an order within WooCommerce. Customers can either place orders as an existing customer, new customer or a guest – making the process as simple as possible. 

Let’s walk you through how it works:

1. A customer calls your business looking to place an order via phone.
2. If they don’t yet have a customer account with you, you’ll ask them if they want to register or checkout as a guest. If they choose to register, you’ll walk them through all the information you need (name, email, and address).
3. If they do have an account, or are checking out as a guest, you’ll be able to start the order right away. From your WordPress dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Orders and click Add Order.

4. Find or add your customer in the Customer field.

5. Then, add the customer’s shipping and billing address.
6. Once done, you can add products to the order. Click on Add item > Add products. 
7. Then search for the requested product, type in the quantity, and click Add. At this point, you can change the price, add fees, discounts, shipping costs, and more.

8. Once the products and price are all confirmed with the customer, click the blue Recalculate button under the products. Then click the blue Create button in the Order actions section on the right.
9. After the order has been recalculated and updated, the AG MOTO payment button will appear.

10. Click this button to go to the standard WooCommerce checkout on your store. Enter your customer’s details here to process the payment.
11. Once it has all gone through, your customer will be sent a confirmation email containing the details of their order.

For a more in-depth tutorial, visit the AIB Authipay for WooCommerce MOTO payments tutorial.

Set up MOTO payments today

That’s it! You now have MOTO payments set up on your WooCommerce store. 

By accepting payments via phone, you’ll not only provide a safe way for customers to order, you’ll also expand your customer base and make more sales in the process.

Plus, all of this can be done without additional work on your end, with the payment gateway AIB Authipay for WooCommerce

The post WooCommerce: How to Set Up Mail & Phone Orders (MOTO) appeared first on Business Bloomer.

Sales agents and representatives are an integral part of many businesses’ operational models. However, there’s little to no support in WooCommerce by default for agents, as the platform is built and optimized for typical retail shops.

Managing customers and customer relationships is critical for any business, but even more so for businesses with a large customer base, high transaction values, B2B, wholesale, or affiliate models. Agents are the link between the business and the customer, and may be doing everything from providing sales counsel, to taking and placing orders, or even directly managing and handling individual customer orders.

Each shop might work differently, but what they have in common is that they need an ecommerce solution capable of giving agents a platform with powerful, but limited control over customers and orders.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how a WooCommerce business can add and manage sales agents, as well as useful tricks, tips, and plugins that can help.

Sales Reps Management Requirements

The most important features one may look for in a platform would be:

• Dedicated dashboard for each agent where they can manage their own customers
• The ability to setup and manage commissions, incentives, earnings and payouts
• Marketing features for agents so that they can incentivize customers to purchase
• The ability to take orders for customers
• Sales teams, and the ability to coordinate and communicate between shop and agents

While there are individual solutions for each feature, you can also use a plugin such as SalesKing – Sales Agents & Reps Plugin for WooCommerce that aims to offer a complete Sales Reps management package and take care of everything a shop needs to add and manage agents.

Sales Agents Features: An In-Depth Look

1. Custom Dashboard

First of all, agents need to have a central place from where they can manage customers and orders. One way to achieve this could be to use create a special agent role, and then use a plugin such as User Role Editor to control the abilities and permissions of the role. For example, you could use this technique to give an agent control over customer orders, but no control over shop settings.

If you’re looking to achieve this with a plugin, SalesKing automatically adds an agent dashboard page on installation, and each agent has a dedicated login, as well as the ability to control settings such as notifications for messages or announcements.

This way, each agent can view and track their performance, balance, earnings, as well as view and manage orders, customers, coupons, affiliate links, payouts, and so forth.

2. Earnings and Payouts

When looking at solutions that handle balances, earnings and payouts, the most important things to look for are security, reliability, as well as reports that give insights into sales statistics. 

SalesKing handles this through a commission structure system (with fixed, percentage and condition-based commissions), and dedicated, separate modules for earnings and payouts. The plugin keeps a complete history of all transactions, and allows payments through PayPal, Bank, as well as custom configurable methods. To be noted that the plugin does not handle money directly, it only allows entering payments, but these have to be made manually by the shop.

3. Customer Management and Taking Orders

A critical aspect of such a setup is the ability to take orders on behalf of customers. One way this can be handled is using a free plugin such as Login as User, in conjunction with the user role editor, so that each agent can login and place orders as their customers.

With SalesKing, there is a dedicated “Shop as Customer” button, that opens up a frame through which agents have full access as that customer (configurable via settings)

When shopping as the customer, the agent can place orders and pay directly, or use the “Pending Payment” feature, that places the order, and notifies the customer of the expected payment by email. The customer only receives a payment link, and can review and pay for the order with a few clicks.

Customers are directed to the payment page to finalize their orders after an agent places them.

4. Promotion through Affiliate Links and Coupons

Another useful feature, primarily characteristic of affiliate setups, is the ability to promote individual products, through links, coupons or discounts. While this might be achievable with traditional affiliate plugins, SalesKing also has a dedicated module for coupons and links, where these can be created and managed. 

For example the coupons module offers an easy-to-use interface through which agents can handle discounts:

5. Communication and Sales Teams

Something else to look for in such a setup is the necessary ability to stay in touch with sales reps, to show particular deals, discuss orders, handle issues, or help manage customers.

SalesKing manages this through 2 dedicated modules: one for Announcements, which allows the shop to publish articles for their agents, and one for Messages, which allows both parties to engage in conversation threads.

Furthermore, there is also an ability for each agent to add their own subagents, and earn commissions on their orders. This provides powerful incentives for reps to create their own teams and thus create more earnings and value for the shop.

Case study: B2B & Wholesale Sites

Finally, agents can be particularly useful when looking at a store from a B2B perspective. In these kinds of setups, they can manage orders, offer bulk purchase discounts, advise on orders, and so forth.

SalesKing is built to work perfectly with the B2BKing B2B and Wholesale Plugin, and when used together, these integrations become obvious.

For example, B2B customer groups can be assigned to agents, or business customers can be approved manually, and assigned to an agent during the approval process.

Demo: SalesKing can be tested fully through the live demo at https://demosk.woocommerce-b2b-plugin.com/wp-admin

The post WooCommerce: How To Manage Sales Reps / Agents appeared first on Business Bloomer.

The dropshipping industry is expected to rise by almost $557 billion by 2025. So, if there’s a time to kickstart your dropshipping journey, it’s today.

Apart from being one of the most profitable business models today, dropshipping also has a low entry barrier. You can easily create a dropshipping store with WooCommerce in a few clicks. 

However, managing and running an online dropshipping business is much more than just building a store. Luckily, you can use many plugins and extensions with your WooCommerce store to make your processes and operations more efficient.

If you want to take your dropshipping store to the next level and butter-smooth everything from inventory management and listing to product and supplier selection with plugins – this article is for you. Enjoy!

AliDropship Woo

One of the most popular WooCommerce plugins, AliDropship Woo, is a dropshipping plugin for the retail giant, AliExpress which helps automate all significant business operations like order fulfilment inventory updates and product listings.

With a lot of customization and flexibility options, it’s a smart move to allow dropshipping businesses to add a host of AliExpress products to their own store with this plugin. 

It’s fast, light on the website and offers live statistics for reports and analysis—a one-stop destination for putting your dropshipping business on auto-pilot after the initial setup.

Top feature: Built-in editing software to remove watermarks from product images so you can brand them for your own store.

Pricing: $89 one-time payment

DropshipMe

This free WooCommerce plugin enables you to choose from over 50,000 products from AliExpress and directly add them to your dropshipping store along with the descriptions. DropshipMe is a convenient plugin with interesting features like automatic inventory updates and order fulfilment.

What’s even better is the plugin provides a curated list of suppliers you can choose from—since it’s a vetted list, they’re high on reliability and save hours finding trusted ones for your dropshipping business.

The plugin allows for a hassle-free process and minimizes the time between listing and selling since everything is one click away. Even though the plugin is free, you will have to pay a one-time package fee beyond 50 products—based on the number of items you plan to sell. 

Top feature: Their handpicked product and supplier lists provide a gateway for scaling your dropshipping store. With the unlimited package, you can add unlimited products to your store, which also have high selling potential.

Pricing: Starts at $29 for 100 imports

WooDropship

This plugin also works with AliExpress, but is super smooth with its process—you download the chrome extension and keep adding the products while you browse through the AliExpress website. It’s one of the quickest ways to add products to your store while ensuring you’re adding only quality and relevant ones.

With features like automatic updates when products go out of stock or change in prices along with front-end customization, WooDropship is a popular choice among dropshipping stores. Its one-click integrations and setups further contribute to its popularity.

Top feature:You have complete control over how the products are displayed on your website with image and product description customizations. With front end themes, you can also align your product displays with brand colors and other elements. 

Pricing: 7-day trial, then $199 one-time fee

WooCommerce Dropshipping extension

A diverse dropshipping plugin, WooCommerce Dropshipping works with Amazon, AliExpress and other dropshippers, giving you a wide range of products to choose from and list on your store. 

It’s a seamless process—sign up, choose products, import images and descriptions, set profit margins and start selling. It cannot get easier than this.

What’s better is you can import these products in multiple ways—plugin, Chrome extension, or through a CSV file.

Top feature: After purchase, the plugin automatically sends a notification to the supplier to package and ship the product to the customer.

Pricing: $49 one-time payment

Spocket

If you’re looking for reliable artisans and businesses as suppliers for your dropshipping store products, Spocket dropshipping plugin is for you. It displays a quick-shopping list of suppliers in the US and Europe who are committed to delivering high-quality products, that too with speed.

You can customize your products and invoices, add images and descriptions and style your display the way you want—it’s a win-win with a premium store look and fast order fulfilment. 

Top feature: You get wholesale rates with upto 75% off on selective products allowing you to make high profits while serving quality products to your customers. 

Pricing: 14-day free trial, then starts from $12 per month.

WP Amazon Shop

This dropshipping + affiliate plugin is exclusive to importing products from Amazon. You can easily browse through the millions of products on the platform and display the ones you like on your WooCommerce store.

The process is pretty straightforward—once you’ve imported products on your WooCommerce dropshipping store, the affiliate ID is added to the products, and you get a commission for every sale while Amazon delivers the product to your customers.

Top feature: Amazon’s well-connected network of products and suppliers allows quality product inclusions with reliable suppliers. Moreover, Amazon has a track record of fast deliveries—a cherry on top.

Pricing: Starts at $59 for a single site.

SaleSource

This plugin can convert your WordPress website into a fully-functional WooCommerce dropshipping store and help you import products directly from AliExpress.

No external hassles and integrations—the plugin simplifies the process so you can focus on marketing your dropshipping store while the operations are handled by one of the best dropshipping solution providers. 

SaleSource gives you complete control and access over your store so you can customize, organize and brand it the way you want.

Top feature: After the purchase, the plugin initiates automatic emails to send customer addresses to the supplier for quick order fulfilment.

Pricing: 7-day free trial then starts at $13 per month.

Final thoughts: Best WooCommerce Dropshipping Plugins for 2021

Dropshipping is profitable, but it’s not a cakewalk. While it may seem simple since you’re not taking care of inventory or shipping, it takes a good amount of effort and time to make a dropshipping store successful with recurring orders and satisfied customers.

Among other things, you don’t want to go running behind manual product selection, individual product listings and missed product or supplier updates leading to shipping delays. You can easily manage all of this with dropshipping plugins specially designed for WooCommerce stores.

Make your pick, and choose the plugin that would best support your dropshipping store, and take it to the next level with increased conversions and rising revenue graphs.

The post WooCommerce: Top 7 Dropshipping Plugins (2021) appeared first on Business Bloomer.

If you’re running an ecommerce site and haven’t spent any time thinking about the product recommendation experience your customers are having, then it’s incumbent on you to start doing so immediately.

Just think where Amazon would be without its robust recommendation engine. Certainly not where it is today.

You might not be able to make recommendations as precise as those of Amazon (that’s almost a certainty when you lack access to the mountains of data Amazon is harvesting to make ever-relevant suggestions), but you might as well work with what you have.

What you have, after all, as a merchant using the WooCommerce platform, is the fruits of countless hours of labor spent on all manner of tools and plugins, including those focused on (no surprise!) product recommendations. 

Product recommendations can come in many forms. There is upselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is more expensive than that being purchased; there is downselling, which involves attempting to sell a product that is cheaper than that being purchased; and there is cross-selling, which involves attempting to sell a product around the same price as that being purchased.

Upsells, downsells, and cross-sells typically take place during the checkout or post-checkout process. It is assumed that one or more items are already in the cart by the time the product recommendation is made. To be sure, there are many plugins that perform this sort of function, most famously CartFlows. However, in this blogpost, we are not so concerned with these kinds of product recommendation tools. Instead, we will focus our attention on those plugins that let merchants make recommendations on product and cart pages, regardless of whether the shopper has loaded the cart with anything. 

1. Related Products for WooCommerce

The strongest contender for the crown is Related Products for WooCommerce, which flawlessly fulfills the role its name implies. This plugin, free and simple to install and configure, lets you enable appealing product sliders for product and cart pages as well as posts and sidebar widgets. The product slider will display randomly ordered products based on the attributes, categories, and tags you have selected. You can also opt for displaying this random assortment of products without a slider or you can keep things simple by showing a single related product. Related Products for WooCommerce takes the cake because it is one of those plugins that never fails to bring a smile on our faces, elegant in its simplicity and unerring in the execution of its intended function.

2. Product Recommendations

Upsells, downsells, cross-sells too, but most importantly, for our purposes, recommendations on product and cart pages. In fact, this plugin lets you deploy recommendations on 20+ locations across your store. Not stopping there, its rule-based product recommendation strategies and in-depth analytics are buttressed by machine learning, which is all the rage these days. Do note, however, that for machine learning to bear fruit, you need a solid training set, which is contingent on lots of data, meaning lots of purchases and lots of customers. The higher your gross merchandise volume, the more likely you are to benefit from this plugin. This plugin is ahead of its time and the only thing stopping it from taking home the gold is that it’s a premium plugin (we denizens of WooCommerce are a miserly crowd). 

3. Related Products for WooCommerce

No, this is not a duplicate entry, it’s just that the creative energies of plugin developers do not usually extend to naming things. I am sure the prolific WebToffee, the company behind this plugin and 20+ others available on the WordPress repository, would not disagree. This plugin does exactly what you need it to do, but it does not let you globally display related products by attributes. You can, however, set individual product settings, which override global settings. Furthermore, you can control the number of products appearing concurrently in the slider and decide how products should be ordered (by title, date, name, random, and last modified).  

4. Booster for WooCommerce

Here’s one you may have heard of before. Booster for WooCommerce is a jack-of-all-trades, an exhaustive plugin with 110+ features distributed between a wide range of modules. One such module lets you automate related products based on attributes, categories, and tags. Additionally, if Cartflows isn’t your cup of tea, you can use Booster to configure upsells, downsells, and cross-sells instead. All things considered, this workhorse of a plugin gets the job done despite its comprehensive scope. And there’s always Booster Plus, which is not necessary for the aforementioned features but essential to creating a top-of-the-line WooCommerce shopping experience. 

5. Beeketing for WooCommerce

Another all-in-one plugin, although not so sweeping as the last one, Beeketing ably performs the role of product recommendation automaton. This is part and parcel of its mission to automate the marketing function for you with 10+ features engineered to boost sales. We’re not huge fans of the “fake” orders and countdown clocks, and it’s a shame the plugin doesn’t extend recommendations to product pages, but it lets you do quite a bit with the product carousels you can display on the cart page. 

The post WooCommerce: Top Product Recommendation Plugins appeared first on Business Bloomer.

There are currently 28 WooExperts according to WooCommerce, which defines WooExperts as “hand selected high quality experts that understand our products”.

These are web development and design companies with deep ties to the WooCommerce team, enabling them to stay updated on best practices and new trends in order to lavish their clients with a world-class WooCommerce development experience.

This post provides a brief overview of the services that each of these WooExperts specializes in as well as individual company profiles, portfolios, and contact links.

Even though most of these companies have one or more office locations, many are distributed a là Automattic.

Since I know many in the audience are developers, do note that more than a few of these companies are actively hiring. Alternatively, if you already have a dog in the fight, check out the Becoming a WooExpert page if you think your company has what it takes to become a WooExpert. 

Bright Vessel (Florida, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• WPVIP enterprise-certified partner 
• Manages 200+ WooCommerce sites, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies
• Handle subscriptions, booking, events, hosting, and more 
• 5-star rating on Google, Clutch, and FB 

Portfolio:

• RestoresZ
• Turkey Merck
• EmPower Generators
• Eload Sport Nutrition

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Absolute Web (Florida/California, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations

Company Profile:

• Named a Top eCommerce Developer by Clutch (2019), Inc. 5000 Honoree, W3 Silver Winner (2019), National Excellence Award Winner (2020)
• 20+ years of experience, 80+ eCommerce professionals, and offices in Miami and LA
• Projects from $7,500; hourly from $135

Portfolio:

• Marey
• Atlantic Patio
• National Coin Wholesalers
• Ophelia Swimwear

MORE INFO & CONTACT

SAU/CAL (Toronto, Canada)

Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds

Company Profile:

• WPVIP Silver Agency Partner
• Named a Top eCommerce Developer by Clutch (2019) 
• Focused entirely on WooCommerce, core code contributors 
• PeachPay agency partner 
• Clients include Automattic, Stripe, and Amazon Pay
• Handle subscriptions, multi-vendor stores, internationalization, bookings, and more

Portfolio:

• Hello Subscription
• Dumpster Market
• PHLEARN
• Output

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Progressus.io

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Migrations, Payments, Shipping

Company Profile:

• 10+ years of experience
• 30-day post-launch free hands-on support
• Projects from $5,000; hourly from $100

Portfolio:

• Acoustical Solutions
• Forest Whole Foods
• Mosquito Curtains
• Tacknrider

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Cultura Interactive (Florida, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments

Company Profile:

• Help merchants accept all types of payment (Stripe, PayPal, and all popular credit cards) 
• Handle subscriptions, memberships, e-learning, and more 
• Projects from $3,200; hourly from $100

Portfolio:

• MaxiClimber
• 2 Hounds Design
• Ceasar’s Ice Cream
• CashFlowDepot

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Inpsyde GmbH (Berlin, Germany)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Migrations, Payments, Shipping

Company Profile:

• WPVIP Gold Agency Partner
• Germany’s largest WP agency
• Employing 50+ experts from 10+ countries 
• Projects from $20,000; hourly from $150

Portfolio:

• AGD
• Dometic
• Fastviewer

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Neuralab (New York, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Shipping

Company Profile:

• WPVIP Gold Agency Partner 
• Mailchimp certified 
• Certified as the best WooCommerce global vendor 
• All projects include ISO 27001 security certification and audit 
• 100+ clients and 150+ projects 
• Projects from $15,000; hourly from $180 

Portfolio:

• BIPA
• Pagoda Classics
• OTRUSA
• Learn Practice Communicate

MORE INFO & CONTACT

eCreations (Arizona, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• 150+ years of combined experience
• Google Partner
• Named a Top eCommerce Developer by Clutch (2020)
• Projects from $8,000; hourly from $160 

Portfolio:

• Valley Forge & Bolt
• Beer Dust

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Britecode (Florida, USA)

Design, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping 

Company Profile:

• Speak 3 languages: English, Italian, and Spanish
• Google Partner and Avalara Partner 
• Projects from $900; hourly from $90

Portfolio:

• Reclaim My ID
• All City Artwear
• Coastal Coffees
• Pura Botanica
• Capstone Production

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Advant Interactive (California, USA)

Full Website Builds

Company Profile:

• 30+ years of combined experience and 100+ WooCommerce sites built 
• Work featured on Awwwards, FWA, and CSS Design Awards; designers recognized by Smashing Magazine, CSSMania, and Unmatched Style; recipient of several American Design Awards 
• Client list runs the gamut from large organizations to small startups 
• Projects from $14,000; hourly from $95

Portfolio:

• Gnarly Nutrition
• Dripp
• Derek DeYoung

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Zen Agency (Wyoming, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes

Company Profile:

• 20+ years of experience
• No cookie cutter packages; instead, expect a detailed proposal with specific objectives 
• Projects from $5,000; hourly from $120

Portfolio:

• Jealous Devil
• British Knights
• Lugz
• Perfusion.com

MORE INFO & CONTACT

AnnexCore (California, USA)

Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Quick Fixes

Company Profile:

• 15+ years of experience, from West Coast to East Coast
• Mailchimp Partner, Kinsta Partner, WP Engine Partner, Google Partner 
• Named a Top WooCommerce Developer (2021) and a Top eCommerce Developer (2021) by Clutch 

Portfolio:

• Discovery Cube Connect
• Heggerty Phonemic Awareness
• Farm Design
• PetGrass

MORE INFO & CONTACT

WisdmLabs (Mumbai, India)

Full Website Builds, Migrations, Quick Fixes

Company Profile:

• Built 300+ WooCommerce sites and behind some popular WooCommerce plugins (including Product Enquiry for WooCommerce)
• Official Migration Partner for WooCommerce Subscriptions 
• Projects from $2,500; hourly from $60

Portfolio:

• Ital Veloce
• Artist Warehouse Online
• Taooftea

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Inverse Paradox (Pennsylvania, United States)

Design, Extension Development Full Website Builds, Migrations

Company Profile:

• 10+ years of experience
• Servicing small brick-and-mortar businesses as well as large retailers and wholesalers 
• Projects from $10,000; hourly from $125

Portfolio:

• Cola Gourmet
• F-Factor
• Everase

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Virtina (Pennsylvania, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• Built 1,000+ eCommerce sites 
• 95% of inquiries answered in 5 minutes
• Projects from $75; hourly from $75

Portfolio:

• 360 Reality Audio Creative Suite
• Kemo Sabe
• Wild Flower Meadows
• ExecutiveApparel

MORE INFO & CONTACT

FirstTracks Marketing (New Hampshire, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• Google Partner, Bing Partner, Mailchimp Partner, WP Engine Partner, CallRail Partner, Klaviyo Master
• Handle subscriptions, memberships, and bookings 
• Projects from $5,000; hourly from $130

Portfolio:

• ShadowTrader
• Mike’s Organic Delivery
• Hyo Silver
• Poppy Floral

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Maksimer AS (Oslo, Norway)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Shipping 

Company Profile:

• ~10 years of experience and 40 employees 
• Create B2B and B2C stores
• Specializes in tight integrations with enterprise ERP and POS solutions 
• Google Partner 
• Projects from $20,000; hourly from $150

Portfolio:

• Heymat
• Fitjar Islands
• Global Hobby & Kunst

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Behla Design (California, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• 20+ years of experience
• Founding member and co-sponsor of the WooCommerce LA Meetup Group with WooThemes, also for the West Valley WordPress Meetup Group
• Projects from $375; hourly from $125

Portfolio:

• Mojo Break
• Liquid Glow

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Sleeping Giant Studios (Wisconsin, USA)

Design, Full Website Builds, Migrations

Company Profile:

• 25 years of experience
• Clients range from SMEs to Fortune 500 companies 
• Projects from $2,500; hourly from $125

Portfolio:

• Gilmour
• BAPI
• Dave’s Guitar Shop
• Trusted Coaches

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Built Mighty (Washington, USA)

Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping 

Company Profile:

• Specializes in assisting B2B manufacturers with their digital experience 
• Projects from $6,000; hourly from $160; custom plugins start at 40 hours and custom themes start at 80 hours

Portfolio:

• GenSol Diagnostics
• CAMSS Shelters

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Hall (Maine, USA)

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Shipping 

Company Profile:

• Actively manage 60+ sites and developed many more
• Over 20+ years of experience and specializes in highly-regulated industries (e.g. medical devices, CBD, food/beverage, pharmaceutical, education, and perishables)
• Google Premier Partner, Mailchimp Partner, Taxjar Partner, Klaviyo Partner, Avalara Partner 
• Projects from $75,000; hourly from $150

Portfolio:

• Stamp Stampede
• Anatomy Trains
• Calyx Flowers

MORE INFO & CONTACT

CartKnitter

Design, Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes

Company Profile:

• 350+ satisfied clients and successfully generated $3.5M+ in value 
• Accommodates B2B, B2C, B2M (marketplace) companies 
• Projects from $75; hourly from $75

Portfolio:

• Oysters XO
• The Kind Pen
• Éclat Chocolate

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Emote Digital

Design, Full Website Builds, Marketing

Company Profile:

• Australia’s leading WooCommerce agency 
• Google Partner, Mailchimp Partner, and FB Agency Partner
• Projects from $35,000; hourly from $185

Portfolio:

• Brown Brothers
• Only Mine
• Start Broadband
• NC Fitness

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Silicon Dales (Manchester, UK)

Enterprise, Extension Development, Full Website Builds, Marketing, Migrations, Payments, Quick Fixes, Shipping

Company Profile:

• ~10 years of experience
• Projects from $7,500; hourly from $150

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Wallmander&Co (Gothenburg, Sweden)

Full Website Builds

Company Profile:

• ~15 years of experience 
• B2B and D2C solutions 
• Google Partner
• Projects from $15,000; hourly from $120

Portfolio:

• Telldus
• HoldIt
• Cellink
• Snoot

MORE INFO & CONTACT

Angry Creative (Stockholm, Sweden)

Extension Development, Full Website Builds

Company Profile:

• Sweden’s leading WooCommerce agency, trusted by some of Sweden’s biggest brands 
• B2B and B2C
• Projects from $15,000; hourly from $120

Portfolio:

• Absolut Art
• Equestrian Stockholm
• Strandberg Guitars
• iDeal of Sweden

MORE INFO & CONTACT

LightSpeed

Extension Development, Full Website Builds 

Company Profile:

• ~15 years of experience 
• Mailchimp partner 
• Projects from $2,500; hourly from $65

Portfolio:

• Go Detox
• Men’s Health Belly Off
• 12 Weeks to Sleek with Fairlady
• go! Take Better Photos

MORE INFO & CONTACT

The post WooCommerce: WooExpert Roundup appeared first on Business Bloomer.

WooCommerce is a plugin with a large and complicated codebase.

If you’re a developer, understanding the underlying code in detail is hugely beneficial, and will almost certainly pay dividends in the long term.

If you can write a bit of PHP (most of Business Bloomer is made of PHP Snippets), you definitely need to search the core every now and then. Otherwise, Stackoverflow won’t be sufficient on its own.

If you happened to see and use the WooCommerce Visual Hook Guides such as the one for the Single Product Page, well, those are simply generated (manually…) from the code itself by executing many PHP searches. I personally keep a copy of the latest plugin files in my PC downloads, so that I can always search through it when looking for a hook or a specific function.

So, follow along with me in this article as we explore the WooCommerce codebase, how it’s structured, and some of its inner secrets!

Where to find the code

To explore the WooCommerce codebase you have a couple of alternatives, other than downloading the plugin files from https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce

Firstly, and most accessible, is browsing the code online via the WordPress Trac. This is the most convenient way to navigate the code as it’s always up to date and instantly available. All you need is an internet connection and access to a browser.

This method is great for quick code lookups and bookmarking code files to reference at a later date. You can even bookmark a particular line number too. e.g. to link to the render method of the Checkout Gutenberg block (which begins at line 66) you can use this URL: https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/woocommerce/trunk/packages/woocommerce-blocks/src/BlockTypes/Checkout.php#L66

The other option to view the code is to clone the official WooCommerce GitHub repository. This is recommended if you need to explore the code in more detail locally via your preferred editor, as you have access to more powerful search tools.

To do this you’ll need to use the command line to download and manage the WooCommerce repository. If you’re using macOS or a Linux operating system then you can use the built-in Terminal app. Git Bash is an excellent choice for Windows users.

Whatever terminal app you’re using, open it, and run the following command to clone WooCommerce to a local directory on your computer:

git clone https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce.git

You can either clone it directly into your local WordPress plugins directory (located in /wp-content/plugins/), or instead, clone WooCommerce to a generic folder on your computer and symlink it to your local WordPress plugins folder. The advantage with this method is that you can easily add/remove WooCommerce from a particular local WordPress instance. It’s not tied to a specific one.

Once you’ve cloned the repo then make sure you also run the following command to install the plugin dependencies and external packages.

npm install && composer install

This is important as not all WooCommerce code is included in the core repository. For example, the Gutenberg blocks are contained in a separate repository by default. To include them in the codebase you’ll need to use the above command to specifically install them.

Once all dependencies and external repositories have been installed they’re instantly available. Here’s the same Checkout block code we looked at earlier on the WordPress Trac, but now we have access to it locally.

Code Structure

The WooCommerce plugin is organized into several top level folders:

• /assets
• /i18n
• /includes
• /lib
• /packages
• /sample-data
• /src
• /templates
• /vendor

The assets folder contains a large collection of styles, fonts, images, and JavaScript which help with plugin aesthetics and interactivity both in the WordPress admin and on the frontend.

Standard plugin folders such as i18n, sample-data, and vendor contain functionality for internationalization features, sample product data, and 3rd party libraries respectively.

The template folder contains all the structured PHP templates used for various WooCommerce content such as the cart, checkout, emails etc. Each template can be overwritten by copying it to the relevant location in a custom theme (usually a child theme) so it’s worth browsing through this folder in detail to see all the available templates that can be customized. Please note: customizing WooCommerce via snippets is better than overriding templates.

The main core of the plugin functionality is contained in the includes, lib, packages, and src folders. In particular, the includes folder contains the main list of PHP plugin classes for a variety of WooCommerce features.

Also, all the Gutenberg block definitions available in WooCommerce are located in the packages folder.

Exploring the code

The main plugin file in the root folder is woocommerce.php. This bootstraps the autoloader and packages.

The autoloader manages loading of packages and classes located in the /src directory. Packages include code developed outside of the core WooCommerce plugin, such as the editor blocks.

Once all autoloaded code has been loaded, the main WooCommerce class is then included and instantiated via:

WooCommerce::instance()

This creates a new instance of the WooCommerce class and stores it inside a static class variable. This new instance is then returned and stored in a global variable so it can be accessed from anywhere.

Searching the Codebase

Most modern code editors provide powerful search functions to be able to navigate the codebase. For the examples shown below we’re using VS Code but it really doesn’t matter that much as almost all editors provide similar search functionality.

We can find out a lot about the codebase by performing some basic searches. For instance if we look for what hooks are available then searching for ‘add_filter‘ returns around 380 filter hooks!

Compare that to action hooks which returns even more at around 618 matches for the search term ‘add_action‘.

There’s plenty of scope for refining our searches such as doing searches only on specific file types, and for strings that specifically match the search term case and if it’s a whole word.

e.g. The following search result displays matches for ‘WooCommerce‘ where it’s a whole word, is case sensitive, and is located only in a PHP file (other file types are ignored).

One of the reasons VS Code is so popular is because of the huge number of extensions available, and there are several that can help with code navigation. One particular extension that stands out is Bookmarks.

It allows you to bookmark locations in your code so that you can jump back to specific code sections of interest at the click of a button. It comes in really handy, especially for large codebases such as WooCommerce.

In the following screenshot I’ve bookmarked a few WooCommerce action hooks for quick access that I’d like to come back to later on.

Just clicking on any of the bookmarked items in the explorer panel will take you directly to a specific line of code.

There are many other terms that you could search for. Perhaps you’d like to explore what WooCommerce classes are available. This type of search could be made more powerful when combined with Regex.

For example, it’s easy to search for class names that contain ‘WC’ at the beginning (e.g. ‘WC_Structured_Data’). But what about classes that contain ‘WC’ anywhere in the class name? For that, Regex is required as you’d need to search for the string ‘class’ followed by a space, which is then followed by a string that contains ‘WC’ anywhere inside.

With Regex you can also do things like searching for a function name (or part of a name) that is a method of a class and not a stand-alone function. The possibilities are endless and so a good working knowledge of Regex is highly recommended.

A quick WooCommerce customization example

Let’s say you need to customize the Checkout page, and specifically need to display a subtitle under the “Billing details” heading.

What you could do is a WooCommerce plugin file search for the ‘Billing details‘ string, to see if there is “something” that you can then use in your custom code. In this case I’ll use NotePad++ code editor, just to show that any software is valid:

I got 2 search results, but only one is relevant to the checkout page. So, I open that specific file (form-billing.php), at that specific line (28):

…and notice there is a do_action() right after the heading!

This gives us the chance to “inject” some code in there without overriding the whole template file. I go to my child theme’s functions.php and write the following:

/**
 * @snippet       Add Subtitle Below Billing Heading @ Checkout
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 5
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */
 
add_action( 'woocommerce_before_checkout_billing_form', 'bbloomer_billing_details_subtitle' );

function bbloomer_billing_details_subtitle() {
   echo '<h4>This is a subtitle</h4>';
}

And here’s the “after”:

Keep Exploring!

We’ve only scratched the surface of what is quite frankly a very large codebase. It would take you a long time to look through every single line of code but hopefully I’ve managed to whet your appetite enough to continue digging around the fascinating WooCommerce codebase and learn even more!

The post WooCommerce: Exploring the Codebase appeared first on Business Bloomer.

WooCommerce permalink structure may appear unusual for newcomers. Those /product/ and /product-category/ parts of the URL are well-known distinctive features, but some experts don’t agree that this is the most convenient way to handle permalinks SEO-wise. 

A popular thought is to always keep URL structure as simple as possible and remove any unnecessary parts of it. You don’t have to take the word of those experts or me since the official guideline from Google suggest to avoid lengthy URLs with unnecessary parameters. 

So, what does that exactly mean for WooCommerce store builders? 

First of all, URL bases like /shop/, /product-category/ and /product/ can be considered unnecessary as Google knows how to define shop and product pages without the need of specifying that inside the URL. 

And probably you don’t want to create a false perception of site depth for crawlers so they don’t rate those pages lower than they should be. Again, a well-known precept – pages closer to the main folder (domain) are more meaningful for search engines. 

If you agree with such statements, it would be helpful to understand how to redesign the permalink structure in WooCommerce. So read ahead to find out about that. 

What’s the default WooCommerce permalink structure?

Let’s see how permalinks work now and what we can do to make them more user-friendly. 

There are a few things that you must be sure to indicate when creating permalink settings: 

• product category base (which is /product-category/ by default) 
• product tag base (/product-tag/ by default) 
• product page base (could be /product/, /shop/ or any other custom base) 

You have no way to leave these options blank or use the same (/shop/, for example) for both permalinks. Product, category, and tag bases should be unique not to cause conflicts between taxonomies, posts, and pages. 

So, default URLs for shop pages may be the following: 

• For category pages: site.com/product-category/category-slug 
• For tag pages: site.com/product-tag/tag-slug 
• For product pages: site.com/product/product-slug 

Whereas it’s perfectly fine for tag pages (you probably need some base to define the difference between categories and collections), it may be redundant using those bases for category and products page URLs.  

Why consider changing default permalinks

Sometimes WooCommerce users urge to get rid of /product-category/ and /product/ bases or manipulate standard URL structure in other ways. It happens because of two significant reasons:  

• They wish to see simple and clear URLs, which can also benefit from the SEO standpoint
• In case of switching from another CMS to WP\Woo and desire to keep the same URL structure

It is debatable whether removing those parts of the URL can improve your SEO results. But it’s the most popular reason people are even considering ruining the default permalink structure of WooCommerce. 

There are a few respected sources telling us how to structure permalinks and why shorter URLs are better – Backlinko search engine ranking factors (point #10), Moz best practices for URL structuring (points #6 and #11). 

In case you’re starting a new website, it’s safe to run such experiments and see how it helps your SEO. Whereas changing permalinks on an already well-established website could be a risky affair. I’ll explain my concerns further. 

In regard to changing permalinks to match your old website URLs, on the other hand, that seems reasonable and leaves you with more chances not to harm your SEO track record. 

How to remove /product-category/ and /product/ from WooCommerce permalinks

The following methods are safe to use on new websites when you don’t need to play around with 301 redirects to get your users and crawlers to know that URL has been changed.  

The first thing you need to do is go to WP Settings > Permalinks and scroll to “Product category base” and write “.” (dot) as a custom base. 

Then, paste this snippet into your functions.php file: 

add_filter( 'request', function( $vars ) {

    global $wpdb;

    if( ! empty( $vars['pagename'] ) || ! empty( $vars['category_name'] ) || ! empty( $vars['name'] ) || ! empty( $vars['attachment'] ) ) {

        $slug = ! empty( $vars['pagename'] ) ? $vars['pagename'] : ( ! empty( $vars['name'] ) ? $vars['name'] : ( !empty( $vars['category_name'] ) ? $vars['category_name'] : $vars['attachment'] ) );

        $exists = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT t.term_id FROM $wpdb->terms t LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id WHERE tt.taxonomy = 'product_cat' AND t.slug = %s" ,array( $slug )));

        if( $exists ){

            $old_vars = $vars;

            $vars = array('product_cat' => $slug );

            if ( !empty( $old_vars['paged'] ) || !empty( $old_vars['page'] ) )

                $vars['paged'] = ! empty( $old_vars['paged'] ) ? $old_vars['paged'] : $old_vars['page'];

            if ( !empty( $old_vars['orderby'] ) )

                    $vars['orderby'] = $old_vars['orderby'];

                if ( !empty( $old_vars['order'] ) )

                    $vars['order'] = $old_vars['order'];    

        }

    }

    return $vars;

});

Then add a filter to remove /product/ base from product page URL: 

function na_remove_slug( $post_link, $post, $leavename ) {

        if ( 'product' != $post->post_type || 'publish' != $post->post_status ) {

        return $post_link;

    }

        $post_link = str_replace( '/product/', '/', $post_link );

        return $post_link;

}

add_filter( 'post_type_link', 'na_remove_slug', 10, 3 );

function change_slug_struct( $query ) {

        if ( ! $query->is_main_query() || 2 != count( $query->query ) || ! isset( $query->query['page'] ) ) {

        return;

    }

                if ( ! empty( $query->query['name'] ) ) {

                $query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'product', 'page' ) );

                } elseif ( ! empty( $query->query['pagename'] ) && false === strpos( $query->query['pagename'], '/' ) ) {

                $query->set( 'post_type', array( 'post', 'product', 'page' ) );

        // We also need to set the name query var since redirect_guess_404_permalink() relies on it.

        $query->set( 'name', $query->query['pagename'] );

    }

}

add_action( 'pre_get_posts', 'change_slug_struct', 99 );

Snippets were taken from this StackOverflow’s discussion and seemed to work fine for most users except for some cases:

• Traditional URLs will respond with a 404 error. So if you have those pages indexed previously, be sure to create 301 redirects to corresponding pages. 
• It may not work with pagination or cause issues with filters, depending on the theme and plugin you use. 

How to set up advanced permalinks rules with Custom Permalinks for WooCommerce

Even though WooCommerce in their documentation warns us about removing /product/, /product-category/, or /shop/ from the URLs, you can go and search for Custom Permalinks for WooCommerce extension inside their official marketplace. It provides you with the safest way to change the default permalink options for categories and product pages. 

A few variants of permalinks for category pages are available here: 

Category slug alone simply means removing /product-category/ part from all URLs, leaving domain + category slug. 

Full path means removing /product-category/ and adding up parent category slug (if the category has one) before corresponding category slug. 

There are also several choices for product pages: 

Product slug alone will remove any excessive part of URL and leave domain + product slug only. 

Product slug with category name will create the most popular version of product URL: domain + category slug + product slug. 

Full path works the same way as option #2 with one exception – it expands URL with parent category slug if native product category has one. 

This plugin eliminates pagination and filtering issues, it operates independently of your theme and secures you from possible crawler-made consequences. 

The only thing to beware of while changing those permalinks is duplicate URLs. Double-check if you don’t have pages or post types with the same slugs as categories or products. If you find some, be sure to change those slugs to unique to avoid duplicates. 

How to add extensions like .html to URLs

Honestly, I don’t know if there are any benefits or flaws of doing this SEO-wise. But a lot of people are asking for that, so we can’t ignore this topic. 

Probably the main reason you may be looking for a solution for this is migration from another CMS. If you decide to move from another platform to WooCommerce, you might want to replicate your old URLs (e.g. those with .html at the end). 

Of course, you can use 301 redirects to let everyone know about your new URLs, but we often notice a trivial decrease in traffic and SERP positions after filling a website with a bunch of 301 redirects for some time. Probably it has nothing to do with redirects itself because, as Google says, they don’t penalize PageRank for using redirects anymore.

But because of other reasons related to content migration, new UI, and chances of broken links, you may not want to risk and try to recreate the same URLs you had. 

Custom Permalinks for WooCommerce gives you the chance to add any extension at the URL ending, whether it be .html, .php., .htm, or whatever you need:

How to avoid SEO problems after changing permalinks

The tricky part of changing URLs is content duplicates, 404 errors, and redirects. 

When you manipulate URLs on a recently created website without any track record for the domain, page rank, and URLs in Google index, then you have nothing to worry about. You can feel free to perform experiments and pick up any permalink combination that you like. 

But when it comes to changing permalinks on a website with history and high-grade SERP positions, you should carefully double-check these four pillars: 

1. Are there any pages, posts, taxonomies, custom post types, or other possible entities with the same slug as categories or product pages? If you find some, consider changing slugs to unique ones to avoid conflicts. 
2. Go to your Google search console and check for pages with 404 responses. If you find some broken links, you should scan the sitemap.xml file for them or any other website pages, where you could manually place old links. 
3. In case there’s a chance old URLs can still be spotted somewhere, be sure to include the ‘rel=canonical’ tag. That is needed to let crawlers know what page to credit for the content, and then Google won’t punish you for creating duplicates. 
4. Don’t forget about 301 redirects by no means. It’s crucial for website visitors as well as for crawlers. After you change permalinks, old ones won’t be accessible anymore, so everyone, including crawlers, will be getting 404 errors visiting them. If you changed permalinks with the script, I’d recommend installing the Redirection plugin to handle redirects. 

But you can sleep well: Custom Permalinks for WooCommerce will create 301 redirects and ‘rel=canonical’ for old URLs once you change permalink structure. And also, in conjunction with the Yoast plugin, they will generate a new sitemap on your behalf with appropriate URLs in it. 

Conclusion

WooCommerce warns us about the consequences of changing permalinks – website slowdown and URL conflicts. But considering that that statement was made a long time ago, and since then, they verified this premium plugin which is doing exactly that thing, maybe WooCommerce changed their mind on permalinks matter. 

Would it help your SEO? 

Well, that’s a more complex question. Some researchers say yes; some SEO experts recommend reducing the number of folders in the path to products and categories and designing shorter URLs. But I leave this decision up to you. Eventually, there’s no absolute truth when it comes to SEO. 

And if you choose to give it a shot, how to do it safely? 

If you are building a new website, you can choose whatever method you like – adding code snippets or installing the plugin, both seem to be safe. Just don’t forget to check if everything is in place in sitemap.xml and if there’re any comments on the Google search console side. 

If you consider manipulations over permalinks on an existing site, I’d strongly recommend you go with the verified plugin. You probably don’t want to tempt fate and mess up with broken links, content duplicates, or accidentally create a redirect loop.

The plugin can cover all of your needs, and available support on WooCommerce.com will help you deal with potential problems. Since permalinks are crucial for SEO, it will be a nightmare to be left alone with such a problem. 

The post WooCommerce: How To Change The Permalink Structure appeared first on Business Bloomer.

While acquiring new customers is essential for every business, nothing can beat customer retention. 

Knowing your brand and having tried your products and services, existing customers are much more likely to buy from you after a positive experience.

One way to create a memorable experience for customers and nurture and retain them is to start a points and rewards system. This will not only help increase customer’s interest in your store, but the chances of winning points and exciting rewards will give them another reason to shop from you more often. 

In fact, in a survey, 58.7% of internet users said earning rewards and points was the most valuable aspect of their shopping experience. 

However, managing a rewards system manually and keeping a tab on the points can be pretty taxing – but this is precisely where WooCommerce points and rewards plugins come in handy. 

With their vast features and top-notch support, these plugins can help you create a loyalty program for your online store within a few clicks. Once it’s up and running, you can easily track the success of your program and manage customer points from one single dashboard. 

When it comes to points and rewards plugins, you can be spoilt for choice. But to make things simple for you, we’ve done the legwork and compiled a list of the best WooCommerce points and rewards plugins that can help you increase sales and customer engagement. 

Let’s explore them!

Yith WooCommerce Points and Rewards 

With Yith WooCommerce Points and Rewards, you can incentivize and loyalize your customers by offering them points on actions like signing up, making a purchase, and reaching a spent threshold. 

Customers can then redeem these points as coupons or discounts on their future purchases – which is an excellent way to get more returning customers. 

Moreover, the plugin makes it easy for you to configure conversion rates for points and rewards. For instance, you can set the rate at 1 point for every $1 spent and give a $1 discount for every 100 points. 

It also allows you to set expiry dates for points, send reminder emails to customers, so they redeem their points timely, and even assign points to customers who purchased from you before the installation of the plugin. 

Top feature: It offers multi-currency support, so you can give different numbers of points for various currencies. For example, you can assign 1 point for every €1 spent and 2 points for every $1 spent. 

Pricing: $129.99/year with 1-year support and updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

WooCommerce Points and Rewards

WooCommerce Points and Rewards lets you reward customers with redeemable points for purchases and actions like signing up, writing a product review, and subscribing to your newsletter. 

It gives you the freedom to assign points at the product, category, or global level. Besides setting the points conversion rate, you can also limit the maximum discount available when redeeming points. 

What’s even better is you can choose whether to round up or round down points – for instance, if a user spends $3.5, you can round it up to 4 points or down to 3 points. 

The “Points Log” feature gives you access to a customer’s points balance and history, making it easy for you to manage your rewards system. 

Top feature: You can customize messages shown on the cart and checkout page, and even what points are called. So, you can name your points “Tokens” or “Coins” for example.

Pricing: $129/year with 1-year extension updates, support, and 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Loyalty Points and Rewards for WooCommerce by Flycart

Loyalty Points and Rewards is an excellent plugin to create a loyalty program for your WooCommerce store – it lets you offer points on purchases, signups, reviews, and social shares. 

Its referral system is particularly fascinating and allows your customers to earn points by referring your brand or products to their friends and family. You can also easily set points conversion rates, expiry, and minimum and maximum order values to avail rewards. 

The plugin comes with an easy-to-navigate and clean dashboard where you can track your loyalty program’s insights—like total customers, points awarded and redeemed.

Top feature: The Launcher Widget is one of its most prominent features. Customizable and mobile-friendly, it emerges like a chat pop-up and shows customers their existing points balance and their earned points from different actions. 

Pricing: $99/year for 1 site, $129/year for 5 sites, and $199/year for 25 sites 

 WooRewards-Loyalty and Reward System for WooCommerce

Developed by Long Watch Studio, WooRewards is a lightweight and intuitive plugin with many interesting features. It allows you to award points for more than 20 actions – from purchasing to clicking on an image, publishing a post, or regularly visiting your store. 

Using the plugin, you can create multiple reward programs, including temporary ones – for holidays or a customer’s birthday, and layered ones – where users get to unlock rewards as they proceed. And when it comes to redeeming points, it doesn’t stop at just discounts and lets you offer rewards like free products, free shipping, change in user role, and more.

It also lets you leverage word-of-mouth marketing through a referral program. But what’s different is that you can turn your WooRewards referral system into a full-fledged ambassador program—by incentivizing referrers and setting periodic goals for them. 

Top feature: Besides providing detailed documentation and several tutorials, WooRewards also comes with a wizard to help you set up your loyalty programs. 

Pricing: €99 (around $117) per year for one site, including maintenance and updates. 

WooCommerce Ultimate Points and Rewards

Like other plugins, WooCommerce Ultimate Points and Rewards lets you award points to customers for different on-site actions. 

However, this plugin stands out because it allows you to create a multi-level membership for your store. Customers can win and move along the membership as they acquire a certain number of points, and you can keep your members engaged by offering special discounts or products.  

It has easy settings to configure conversion rates, expiration dates, and referral rewards. And while customers can view their points log, it also gives you access to it to manage your reward system properly. 

Top feature: An interesting feature it offers is that customers can share their points with other customers – this makes it convenient for them to redeem points and can increase interest in your brand.  

Pricing: $39 (one-time payment) with all future updates and six-month support. 

SUMO Reward Points-WooCommerce Reward System

Besides common scenarios like purchases and signups, SUMO Reward Points allows you to offer customers points for actions like creating or commenting on blog posts and logging in to your store daily. They can redeem these points through a discount, purchase, transfer to other users, and even for cash. 

With this plugin, you can assign points to: 

• All products in your catalog
• Only specific products 
• Only specific product categories

You can also assign points based on the number of product purchases or the product price. 

What’s even better is that you can set minimum and maximum points redemption limits – so your rewards system doesn’t affect your profitability. 

It also automatically sends out SMS/emails to customers to notify them about their points and rewards status and remind them about expiration dates. 

Top feature: It lets you assign different numbers of points to different users even for the same action—based on criteria like user roles, total points earned, current points, and membership level. 

Pricing: $49 (one-time payment) with lifetime updates and six-month support.

Gratisfaction – Loyalty Points plugin for WooCommerce

From signups and referrals to subscribing to your newsletter, taking quizzes, or visiting a site page – Gratisfaction lets you offer points to and incentivize your customers on various actions. It provides even greater flexibility in how customers can redeem those points – they can convert them into discounts or get free gifts.  

What’s more, you can set up multiple referral schemes (single or double-sided) using the plugin and also give customers points and rewards on events like their birthdays or anniversaries. 

Gratisfaction’s giveaways, sweepstakes, instant win, and other campaigns are its biggest highlights. It provides several ideas on what campaigns to run and how, but overall, you have complete freedom to create and run your reward programs. 

Top feature: If you sell on Etsy, you can use Gratisfaction to reward your Etsy customers with points they can redeem on your online store. 

Pricing: The plugin is free for 100 loyalty members. The paid plan starts at $13.97/month (for 500 users) and goes up to $279.30 (unlimited users) when billed annually. 

Conclusion

Engaging your customers through a points and rewards system gives you a chance to enhance customer loyalty, build long-term relationships with them, and bring repeat sales. 

These 7 WooCommerce plugins work exceptionally well in helping you create and run a loyalty program for your store. 

But while all of them offer intriguing features, you must make a pick based on your requirements, budget, and audience. Once you’ve made your choice, go on to launch your rewards program, and you’ll be on your way to expanding and loyalizing your customer base.

The post WooCommerce: Top 7 Points and Rewards Plugins appeared first on Business Bloomer.

If you use the word “integration” or “compatibility” with a seasoned plugin developer, chances are you might make them flinch. You can’t blame them. More often than not, these terms bring to mind an inbox laden with emails asking for compatibility with one plugin or another, day in and day out. 

But what’s the big deal?- you ask. You, the proud developer of a newly released plugin, would kill to have an inbox full of customers. You would gladly trade places. 

Well, the fact of the matter is that the prospect of an integration can be daunting. It means a plugin developer may have to become familiarized with a codebase that falls far short of their own standards (we all know what open-source, at its worst, can lead to). After that, resolving the compatibility issue in question ranges from cakewalk to descent into the underworld. Usually, it’s somewhere in between. The last step, of course, is to get back to the customer in question. Imagine the battle-tested plugin developer’s remorse when, on occasion, they never hear so much as a peep from that customer again. Sure, the resolution to this issue may pay dividends in the long-run, but as the veteran developer knows full-well, there is no guarantee of that. 

In a word, ensuring your plugin plays well with others is no joke. That’s why you don’t hear many old-timers advising folks to make integrations and compatibility a focus, or at least that’s my hypothesis. But regardless of whether my suspicion is true or not, the fact that this is a neglected growth lever is beyond dispute. You don’t need to take my word for it either. Just ask Chris Lema, who recently stated as much in one of his blogposts (which I briefly covered in WooWeekly).

The message is simple: it pays well to ensure your plugin plays well with others. Even if that sounds like bad poetry to you, it’s true. 

Create a Robust Integration Roadmap

For the developers of new plugins, it is not always enough to merely oblige every inbound compatibility request either. Fully capitalizing on integrations as a growth strategy requires more proactivity than that. It demands nothing less than creating and adhering to a robust integration roadmap. The first step? Strategically select which plugins you expect your target market to be using and then methodically ensure a seamless integration with the biggest of them. 

I spoke about the need for a website in my last post in this series. One of the great things about having a website to call your own is that you can create a comprehensive compatibility/integrations page.

This not only fulfills its immediate aim of informing the public about all the plugins they can use in tandem with yours, if done right it helps with search engine optimization. It affords you the opportunity of creating blog posts or articles about these various plugins or, more specifically, how these plugins can be used in tandem with yours (complete with backlinks to cash in on gratitude… more on that soon).

If you create good content and at a consistent pace, over time your posts/articles may start drawing in individuals who are looking for precisely these plugins. These individuals are, of course, potential customers of yours. Some portion of them will probe your site and be interested enough in your offering to try it out.

Shout “Compatibility” From the Rooftops

But this is obviously a long-term bet. Is there anything to be gained from preemptive integrations and compatibility in the interim?

As a matter of fact, there is, although I should warn you: this part doesn’t always come easily to the plugin development crowd. It hinges on communication and outreach, another pair of terms likely to make developers flinch.

The good news is that I’m not talking about the annoying and shameless kind of emails most of us have been bombarded with (or even resorted to ourselves, admit it). Instead, I’m talking about a purely informative kind of outreach, which is liable to reciprocation: quid pro quo.

To put it simply, I am saying that once you resolve compatibility with a plugin, you should reach out and let the developer or development company know as much. If you created content revolving around their plugin or your integration with their plugin, even better: you generated a backlink for them (SEO juice).

Expect reciprocation, and if you do not receive it, don’t be afraid to ask. You are well within your rights to ask for a guest post and to even discuss other ways of promoting your plugin to their user-base. 

Where to Begin?

In case you are stuck on the first step, unsure of which plugins to integrate with, start with the really big ones. I am talking site builder plugins (e.g. Elementor, Divi, or Beaver Builder), for which you could feasibly build a widget.

The great thing about a plugin as giant as Elementor, which boasts an install-base of 5 million, is that it has an entire community behind it. As an example, the Elementor team is always happy to encourage developers to ensure their new offerings play well with the Elementor plugin. If the integration seems like a worthwhile one, they are fully prepared to write up a post detailing it. That means SEO juice and massive exposure for you. From there, you can fully leverage such content by drawing attention to it on social media, particularly in the Elementor Facebook group and any other relevant circles. I know of plugin development teams that have experienced major distributional breakthroughs with the Elementor integration, in particular. 

Also consider reaching out to all-in-one plugins, for which you could build a module in the best case scenario (i.e. as tight an integration as possible). You may instinctively shrink from the prospect of turning your plugin into a widget or module, but if it helps you achieve a wider distribution, then it is seriously worth considering, depending on your product offering and key metrics. It is simply much easier to tap into an existing user-base than to create a new one from scratch. 

It’s All About Who You Know

Throughout this process, you are likely to take the first steps necessary to build meaningful, productive, mutually lucrative relationships in the space. These relationships can get you very far. That is why integrations and compatibility are of such paramount importance: they open the door to all of this. 

The post WordPress: Growing Your Plugin (Part 2: Integrations) appeared first on Business Bloomer.