WooCommerce Archives

WooCommerce 3.0.0 – All You Need to Know

April 7, 2017 by Namrata Leave a Comment

WooCommerce – as an e-commerce platform – is ever evolving.The team keeps on adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the plugin to meet our expectations.Some of these updates might go unnoticed. I know I’ve been guilty of skipping a few minor updates, because of frequent releases. :-pBut this time around, WooCommerce has come up with a major update- “Bionic Butterfly“.So what classifies this update as a “major” one? How are you – the store owner – affected? And how do you go about making a smooth transition to WooCommerce 3.0? Let’s find out.

WooCommerce 3.0 – Bionic Butterfly

What started out as WooCommerce version 2.7, scheduled to be released in February, was pushed back after the discovery of a major bug in the process of handling timestamps.The outcome? Bug fixed; issue resolved; and WooCommerce 3.0 released on April 4th, 2017.This version packs some major changes in the way WooCommerce handles data storage. And while this might not affect how you interact with the plugin, WooCommerce extension plugins you use will surely need to be compatible with v3.0 before you upgrade.

WooCommerce v3.0.0 highlights include:

Updated product gallery
Speed and Performance improvements
Addition of CRUD classes
New CLI powered by the REST API
Template Changes

WooCommerce 3.0 Update: Changes to Product Gallery

Now, this is a welcome change that you should see right away when you upgrade to 3.0.0.If you have more than one image for a single WooCommerce product, you should see great improvements when interacting with this product image gallery, especially on a mobile device.This is great news for you, because shoppers now don’t have to struggle when viewing images. The gallery is more intuitive and shopper-friendly, allowing for the following:

Shoppers can now hover over the images to magnify them, or can zoom into them from a lightbox
Clicking on a thumbnail in the image gallery makes it the primary image instead of opening a popup
Mobile shoppers can zoom, pan and scroll through images using pinch or swipe gestures
Zooming a product image on mobile displays its original size, rather than fitting to the browser window (which was the case before)

As you know, images are quite critical for buyers when making a purchase decision; and this change will surely improve their experience.

Things to know Before you Update!

WooCommerce 3.0 has several changes at the code level, which might affect the update if extensions or your theme have not been made compatible. It’s best to take a backup before you update or get professional help.

Get Upgrade Assistance

WooCommerce 3.0 Update: Performance Improvements

This improvement is mainly for large stores that deal with hundreds of products and variations. Not that it isn’t important if you have fewer products, just that larger stores should be able to experience the difference.These are under the hood improvements and have been made at the code level; however here’s what you need to know:

Updating and display of products based on product visibility, featured product and ‘Out of Stock’ product options has been made smoother (due to the introduction of product_visibility taxonomy)

In testing, with ~8k products we saw speed improvements of around 94%.” – WooCommerce

Data stored for Variable products has been optimized; unused data fields have been removed
Management and display of upsells and related products has been improved

This step towards performance improvement is a positive sign for those of you looking to scale your store. WooCommerce does assure of more such updates in the future.

WooCommerce 3.0 Update: CRUD Classes

This is THE change that makes WooCommerce 3.0 a MAJOR update.It’s the introduction of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) classes. With these classes, WooCommerce has standardized the way data can be stored and accessed by developers (or in your case extension plugins).

WooCommerce defines structured data for each resource for easy lookup
Data flow and validation is controlled by WooCommerce
Developers are abstracted from knowing the internals of the data they are working with
Data can be easily moved to say custom tables without affecting existing code
These changes are reusable making the code optimized

This change will make for optimized data storage, and for uniformity in reading and writing data.What you need to know is, due to this update in the way data is handled, WooCommerce extensions will have to adapt this new format to be WooCommerce 3.0 compatible.Also, if you update to the latest version, you might notice a few deprecated function notices. This isn’t a reason for you to be alarmed, but these functions would have to be fixed or upgraded for things to function well in the long run, before WooCommerce completely removes them from their code.

Not All Updates Are the Same!

It might be easy for a fellow store to upgrade to WooCommerce 3.0.0 without any hiccups. But what works for others might not always work for you. Consult a WooExpert right away!

Talk to a WooExpert about WooCommerce Upgrade

WooCommerce 3.0 Update: CLI Powered REST API

WooCommerce has completely overhauled its Command Line Interface (CLI). The new interface has been forked from Restful and is powered by the REST API.Effectively code duplication has been removed with more power to developers.

WooCommerce 3.0 Update: Template Changes & More

Version 3.0.0 has some template changes too. The following templates have been updated:

cart/cart.php
cart/cross-sells.php
checkout/thankyou.php
emails/email-order-items.php
emails/plain/email-order-items.php
myaccount/downloads.php
order/order-details-customer.php
order/order-details-item.php
order/order-details.php
single-product/add-to-cart/grouped.php
single-product/add-to-cart/simple.php
single-product/add-to-cart/variation-add-to-cart-button.php
single-product/meta.php
single-product/photoswipe.php
single-product/price.php
single-product/product-attributes.php
single-product/product-image.php
single-product/product-thumbnails.php
single-product/related.php
single-product/review-meta.php
single-product/review-rating.php
single-product/stock.php
single-product/tabs/additional-information.php

If your theme overrides any of these templates, you might want to update them.Apart from these changes, there are lot more minor changes in this update. These being:

Sorting of tax rates for easy management
An option to dismiss sitewide notice
On WordPress multisite, existing users will be added to a store if the user has an account on the same network
Cart percent and product percent coupon types management has been merged

Ready to Update? Here’s What You Need to Do

If you’ve liked what you’ve read so far, I’m sure you will be eager to update. But *hold on*!Since there are major changes involved, the update might result in some broken functionality – not because WooCommerce itself might be buggy (3.0.1 has fixed most bugs), but because WooCommerce extensions on your site might not be 3.0 ready.So here’s what you would need to do:

Check if all your extensions are WooCommerce 3.0 compatible: You can do this by checking a plugin’s changelog, the release notes, or by contacting the plugin owners. And what if your extension plugins are not compatible? It’s best to not upgrade to WooCommerce 3.0 till then or to test out the changes on a staging site to see if all’s well
Backup all your data: Now, this should be the norm and not just a task you undertake when updating your WordPress website. Backups help you in adverse situations if upgrades go awry
Test updates on a staging site: The most stress-free way of updating WordPress core, plugins or themes is to first test the updates on a staging site. A staging site is a replica of your live site. If all goes well on the staging site, you could make similar changes on your live site
Upgrade extensions before updating WooCommerce: The order to follow when updating plugins, is to first update extensions then to update WooCommerce. This prevents any unexpected errors

While all of this can assure you of a smooth transition to the latest version of WooCommerce, it’s best to tread on the side of caution.For example, you may have custom code that would need to be adapted to the latest changes. Or some changes would have to be made in your custom theme. In such cases, it is best to approach a WooExpert to get your needs resolved.Maintenance plans can help too! WooCommerce specialists offer maintenance plans for a reason. It’s because you’re guaranteed of seamless updates along with regular backups and data security in all-in-one plans.The choice is yours!For more details, you can of course checkout WooCommerce’s official post on the release.That’s all for now? We’d like to hear your thoughts or any upgrade related challenges you faced in the comments below! Happy selling!

22 Plugins to Increase Conversions in WooCommerce

March 24, 2017 by Pranoti Panchwagh Leave a Comment

The success of any website is measured by its conversion rate.The entire effort of creating a beautiful page, adding attractive calls to action, creating innovative content, and adding a host of other peripherals ultimately aims at inducing the visitor to convert.However, many of us mistake conversion rate at only the number of people who buy a product on the website. While this stands true in case of e-commerce websites, as a general rule, conversion is when the visitor does what is expected of them on that specific page.This can be anything from getting a subscription, clicking for more information, sending an inquiry, registering on the site, or of course, buying a product. To ensure that the visitor performs the expected action, here are a few things that need to be taken care of, apart from your page design.Speaking specifically for WooCommerce, we will also discuss the plugins that can be used for enhancing each of these functionalities.The WordPress core provides a lot of scope of optimization and a multitude of WooCommerce-compatible plugins are available that address the glitches that hinder conversion rates.Broadly speaking, conversions depend on four factors:

Speed of the Website

Websites that load fast, sell faster. Statistics show that visitors do not wait more than 5 seconds for a website to load. Given the number of e-commerce websites offering similar products for sale, slow loading times can have a serious impact on your conversion rates.

Page Design

At the heart of conversions is the Page Design. Here is where you are convincing the visitor as to why they should buy the product, or issue a subscription. It is therefore a given that your Page needs to be designed and optimized to perfection. A well-designed and well-optimized page has fast upload speed, convenient search options for the visitor, reassurance markers that indicate its authenticity and safety, and information about the exact location of the visitor within the website.

Marketing Strategy

Despite a beautiful page, visitors might sometimes need a nudge to convert them into customers. Marketing strategies, specifically email-marketing, come in handy here. Using email marketing, potential customers can be informed of offers, discounts, coupons, sales, abandoned carts, and more, which induces them to return and complete the purchase.

Perceived Customer Security

Given the high rates of cybercrime rampant in the virtual world, visitors are understandably apprehensive about giving up financial and personal details to an unknown website. To assuage these fears, it is necessary to ensure incorporation of secure payment gateways.

Now that we have determined the pillars of WooCommerce conversion rate enhancement, let us see plugins that assist in the same.

Plugins to Improve Conversions on Your WooCommerce Website

#1 Speed of the Website

To decrease website loading time, the core of the website needs to be light. This can be done by optimizing your database and caching site pages.The WooCommerce-compatible plugins that can be used for these functions are:

i. WP-Optimize

The WP-Optimize database optimization plugin clears up the unnecessary clutter in your database, without disturbing any of the core information, which helps you keep the website clean and minimalistic.

ii. WP-DB Manager

The other plugin in the database optimization category is WP-DB Manager. A comprehensive database cleaning, storing, managing, restoring, and back-up solution, the plugin is one of the free database management plugins.

iii. W3 Total Cache

Caching Plugins in WordPress: Pros and Cons

The other half of increasing site speed is by caching. Caching plugins like W3 Total Cache store part of the website information using CDN networks on multiple servers so as to decrease the delay in provision of information to the visitor.

iv. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache follows the more traditional approach of storing static pages that are saved from the dynamic website and then shown to the visitor as necessary. This ensures that no visitor encounters a ‘Page Timeout’ error or has to wait ages for the page to upload.

#2 Page Design and Optimization

The bulk of visitor interaction on an e-commerce website is with the Product Pages. Which is why, optimizing your Product Pages is a must for obtaining better conversion rates. The Product Page does 80% of the work of convincing the visitor to convert.As a result, every minute detail of the Page needs to be optimized for increasing conversions. This entails optimization of product images, addition of ratings and reviews, incorporation of quick search options, and integration of easy contact forms.Here is an overview of the different plugins that can be used for these functionalities.

a. Image optimization

i. WP Smush

Developed by WPMU Dev, WP Smush Image Compression and Optimization Plugin is one of the best plugins for compressing, resizing, and reworking product images. Images are stripped of redundant data to improve page load speed and can be compressed in large quantities simultaneously.

ii. EWWW Image Optimiser

The EWWW Image Optimiser plugin offers lossless and lossy compression options for image size optimization. The plugin is an excellent option for increasing site speed without compromising on the quality of the product images.

iii. BJ Lazy Load

One of the reasons why a Page takes longer to load is because all text and visual data needs to be recovered from the server, even that which the visitor hasn’t scrolled to. To avoid these delays, the BJ Lazy Load plugin facilitates the loading of images only if they are scrolled to. This ensures a significant reduction in the time required for the page to load.

b. Ratings and Reviews

i. YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews

The YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews is a popular plugin used to add reviews and rating to the product page. A few of its characteristic features include addition of attachments by reviewers, review summary, and a comparative summary bar with a statistical analysis of the number of 1/2/3/4/5 stars.

ii. WooCommerce Product Reviews Pro

WooCommerce Product Reviews Pro is a premium plugin that lets you create a questionnaire for reviewers to make sure they have adequately used the product before reviewing it. In addition, images and videos can be incorporated in the reviews and reviews can be sorted by viewers based on categories such as ‘Most Helpful’, ‘Most Recent’, ‘Most Positive/Negative’.

c. Quick Search

i. Advanced Woo Search

The Advanced Woo Search plugin adds a Search Bar on your WooStore where visitors can search for products in real-time. The dynamic bar reiterates products as per the spelling typed, to provide the closest results in the shortest possible time.

ii. YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search

Apart from the conventional search bar features, an advanced feature of the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Plugin is that visitors can enter the keyword instead of the specific product name, to browse through relevant products. This is useful when visitors do not know exactly what they are looking for and want to look through multiple choices.

iii. WooCommerce Predictive Search

The WooCommerce Predictive Search plugin features a dropdown menu with a thumbnail display beside the product name, as it is being typed in the Search Bar. This ensures that the visitors can preview the product even before they reach the Product Page.

d. Contact Forms and Live Chat

Contact Forms are a great way of connecting with your audience, either through a Live Chat, or via emails. Adding valid contact information on the website has been known to increase conversions by nearly 16%, as it assures your visitors that they are not being taken for a ride. Some of the best contact form and chat plugins that can be added to the website are as follows:

i. WPForms

WPForms is one of the most user-friendly contact form plugins created by the WordPress solutions’ expert, Syed Balkhi, and features a drag-and-drop form builder for easy addition of fields. The premium plugin also lets you see final outlook of the form as you build it.

ii. Pirate Forms

Pirate Forms is one of the advanced form building and customization options. It provides reCaptcha and contact database options which ensure that no query goes unanswered.

iii. Product Enquiry Pro

Product Enquiry Pro for WooCommerce is a bit different from your regular contact forms. With a per product inquiry option on Shop page or on every product page, it saves the customer time from having to navigate to a different page to ask a pre-sale question.

iv. Olark

Olark for WordPress lets you add a live chat widget on your Page and have conversations with visitors in real-time. The plugin integrates the Olark and WordPress platforms and can leverage all the functionalities of the root company.

v. LiveChat

The LiveChat plugin is available in a Freemium option and is responsive as per the device being used. Automatic greetings and chat notifications are a part of this comprehensive live chat plugin for WordPress.

#3 Marketing Strategies

Despite your best efforts, a visitor might not always convert into a customer. However, it is necessary to follow up that lead and try to keep it live by using different marketing strategies such as email marketing, integration of social media sharing options, and reducing cart abandonment.

a. Email marketing

i. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the leading, independent email marketing service providers. WordPress integrates with MailChimp with the MailChimp for WordPress plugin to let the user access all of MailChimp’s functionalities. However, you need to create an account on the MailChimp website and get a subscription before the two can be integrated.

ii. MailPoet Newsletters

The MailPoet Newsletters plugin can be used to create autoresponders, newsletters, periodic notifications, and send automated emails to increase your customer base. The plugin has a drag-and-drop newsletter builder to create beautiful emails from within the WordPress setup.

b. Cart Recovery

Studies suggest that cart recovery options help increase conversions by nearly 60%! As the administrator, you can easily recover abandoned carts and convert them into certified buyers by sending out email notifications. Here are some plugins that can assist in the same.

i. WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

The WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart is a useful plugin to recover carts abandoned by members and guests, with timely emails sent from the dashboard. The plugin allows for creation of multiple templates that can include various discount coupons to recapture buyer interest.

ii. YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart plugin allows for customization of benefits received by users. Varying advantages can be offered for members according to their user roles, which not only improves cart recovery, but also encourages Guest users to register/subscribe, thus driving conversions.

iii. Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce

The Abandoned Cart is a light-weight plugin for WooCommerce that identifies and recovers the products abandoned by the user and sends periodic email reminders for completing the purchase. The free plugin works efficiently and provides all basic functionalities.

#4 Perceived Customer Security

Security is an important factor for conversions. The second a visitor feels that the store is unreliable, thy will bounce out of the website, no matter how lucrative the deal. To avoid such misunderstandings, it is necessary to ensure that customers know they are purchasing within a secure environment by incorporating secure payment gateways.WooCommerce has extensions for payment gateways for safe transactions, incorporating regional gateways with multiple currency support into your WooStore.These include:i. PayPal Express Checkout ii. Authorize.Net iii. Amazon Pay iv. Stripe v. PayPal powered by BrainTree

Endnote

Optimization of conversion rates is a gradual process, requiring frequent trial and error, site analytics, and reiterations, until the maximum conversion rate is achieved. The conversion rate optimization funnel starts right from the moment you choose your hosting provider and continues through all the creative and analytical phases of the website. For further reference on how to optimize you WooCommerce store, you can take a look at our WooCommerce Optimization Guide.It is necessary to understand that there is no one quick solution to increasing conversions. The conversion rate improvement strategy varies as per the design of your website, your marketing strategies, and the overall selling methods incorporated. Nevertheless, the various plugins discussed above can be successfully used to improve conversion rates on your website!What are your thoughts? Any other plugins you would like to share? Let us know in the comments section below!

5 Best Cart Recovery Plugins for WooCommerce

March 21, 2017 by Anoop Sudhakaran Leave a Comment

Did you know that 7 out of 10 customers tend to abandon their e-store carts?Everyone does that, and I’m sure even you’ve done the same at some point. This is a huge issue for e-Commerce stores. One which costs the big players, billions of dollars every year.So what do they do about this?They throw a pile of money into research and come up with personalized solutions.But if you’re thinking, “I’m just a small online store running on WooCommerce!”Oh! Then we have something for you!In this article, we will cover a few of the best cart recovery plugins for WooCommerce. These plugins will help reduce your cart abandonment rate and convert those users into potential customers.Let’s take a look at these WordPress plugins.

#1 Advanced Cart Recovery

A free WordPress plugin that gets the job done, Advanced Cart Recovery helps recover lost customers.It works quite simply by e-mailing customers who abandon their carts in the middle of a transaction. The plugin saves the contents of a cart when a user abandons it, this helps restore the cart to its previous state if the user wants to continue with the transaction.You can set a schedule to e-mail customers about their abandoned cart so they can continue their order.Since the plugin automatically saves their cart contents, the link sent by the plugin takes them directly to their previous order. Then it is a matter of just proceeding with the transaction and completing the order.A management screen shows an overview of who abandoned their carts and how many recoveries were made.

There is also a premium version of the plugin with custom reporting and many more features.Checkout the plugin : Advanced Cart Recovery

#2 YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

YITH WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart plugin is a premium WordPress plugin for WooCommerce cart recovery.The plugin allows you to set a cut off time for abandoned carts. After the specified amount of time has passed, the plugin considers the transaction as incomplete. A highly customizable E-mail template is available. Everything from Sender name to Reply address can be customized.Apart from automatically sending recovery emails, it also shows you a list of abandoned carts in a “Carts” section on the dashboard. Each cart includes information like customer name, email address, cart status etc.With this plugin, you can further entice a customer to complete their order by giving them a special discount.

YITH allows you to create discount coupons and send them via Email. You can customize these coupons by settings their value, validity and have them expire on a single use.The single site license is priced at ~$69. But they provide a free version with limited features.Find out more : YITH WooCommerce Recovery Abandoned Cart

#3 Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce

The Abandoned Cart Lite for WooCommerce plugin works in the background to help recover lost customers and offers one click cart recovery.It identifies the abandoned order’s information such as the products, their value etc.Another interesting feature is that it can recover abandoned guest carts for customers who included their email at any step of a transaction. Which means customers don’t need to be registered users.As a store owner, you would want the ability to track your order value, this plugin gives you just that. It allows you to track an abandoned order’s value vs. a recovered order’s value. The administrator is also notified by email when an order is recovered.

The email templates can be personalized with custom variables like Customer First Name, Last Name etc.Once a cart is recovered successfully, the plugin makes sure that the customer is not further spammed with notifications by automatically stopping email notifications for that user.The Pro version has additional features like WPML integration, CSV exports etc.You can find the plugin here : Abandoned Cart Lite

#4 Cart Reports

Cart Reports is a WooCommerce extension that provides real-time metrics on your customer’s carts. It reports on everything from open to abandoned carts.It comes with comprehensive tracking reports and quick view dashboard widgets.

A list of carts is displayed in the Dashboard which includes Open, Abandoned and Converted carts. You can filter this list by various parameters like Cart Status, Customer etc.From the same list, you can perform actions related to each item. Actions can range from viewing the order to E-mailing the customer. The Dashboard widget helps get an overview of the carts.Get the plugin from here : Cart Reports

#5 WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

A WooCommerce extension plugin that will help your e-commerce business by .. you guessed it right.. recovering your abandoned carts is the WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart plugin.This plugin will monitor all the carts on your e-store made by members or guests. When a cart gets abandoned, it will automatically send an email to the customer.These email templates can be customized, and you can even create multiple templates. They are set to be automatically sent at certain intervals throughout a period of time.You can even create personalized coupons for customers to give them an extra push towards completion.

This extension is translation ready and works with WPML and WPML string translation.Apart from email captures, this plugin even records the Phone Number of a customer which will allow you to manually follow up on the potential customer.You can buy the plugin from CodeCanyon : WooCommerce Recover Abandoned Cart

Summing Up

Throughout this article, you were introduced to several abandoned cart recovery plugins.As you’ve learned, following up with customers is as important as getting them on to the sales page. It helps build a relationship with the customer which could make them loyal customers.Let us know which plugin worked out for you and share your experience.

How to Sell Wholesale on WooCommerce to Bring in the Big Bucks !

December 20, 2016 by Shehnaz Jabbar Leave a Comment

Image Courtesy: Google

By now, you might’ve already gotten an idea that it isn’t easy selling to wholesale customers!It is a BIG DEAL, and we get it! Even though, in essence, it is not all that different from retail. WooCommerce provides you all that’s needed to sell in bulk. But when it comes to negotiating prices, and offering wholesale buyers a good deal, WooCommerce does not provide you an option to play with quantity based pricing out-of-the-box.

Setting Up Your WooCommerce Store for Wholesellers

Now, when you’re selling to both, wholesale buyers and regular customers, there’s certainly no telling if a regular shopper might be interested in making a bulk purchase. Of course manually evaluating and creating wholesale customers might give you the most control over your wholesaler program, and requires no additional plugins or integrations to create your wholesale customers.But as you can imagine, this can become rather tedious. Registering a customer as a wholesale buyer might not be a problem. However, adjusting prices for each product individually for these customers will be.The solution?Well, you’ve probably guessed it! 😀 Why go through all the hassle when there are dedicated plugins for the same to give you a leg up in the world of online business?Get your WooCommerce store rollin’ with a couple of WooCommerce plugins!

Selling Wholesale on WooCommerce = Pricing Plugin + Negotiation Platform

Well, first things first. You’re planning to cater to wholesale buyers online to make a profit. So setting the right price is critical to make sure you remain competitive while still offering some value to your customers. For this, you need a pricing plugin.But hold on! That’s not all. You also need to allow interested wholesale buyers a window to negotiate, a sort of bargaining platform to reel in those who might be willing to purchase if you offered them a sweet deal.For this, you need a negotiation plugin.And the plugins for this task are:- Customer Specific Pricing, WooCommerce Advance Product Quantities and QuoteUp respectively. These plugins allow you to do all that’s mentioned above and a lot more!Read on..

WooCommerce Pricing Plugin: Customer Specific Pricing

#1 Creating a WooCommerce Wholesale Customer

When anyone purchases an item in your WooCommerce shop and creates an account, they’re by default identified with the “Customer” role.What you need, is to create a “Wholesale Buyer” role for your wholesale customers. If you have multiple wholesale customer tiers, you can create separate roles accordingly.Now, to make sure Wholesalers purchase in bulk, you need the WooCommerce Advance Product Quantities plugin. With this plugin you can set a minimum product quantity purchase rule for certain roles.

#2 Fire up Sales with Exclusive Product Prices

Now, the task to offer percentage discounts to these select customers, has to be handed over to the Customer Specific Pricing plugin!The advantage of using this plugin is that you can set up prices based on user roles. So you will have to setup prices for the wholesale buyer roles you’ve created, and they should be applied to all customers who belong to that role.Best of all, you do not need to set up wholesale prices for your products manually. Customer Specific pricing plugin takes care of this too. With the Pricing Manager, or CSV price import options you can set up prices for your products in one click. 🙂

WooCommerce Negotiation System: QuoteUp

Whenever we buy products in bulk, we always look for a good deal. Don’t we? What if you could give your online wholesale customers the real-time experience of bargaining or let’s put this in a better way, negotiating the prices of products they’re interested in?The plugin to the rescue here- is QuoteUp!QuoteUp is your price negotiation and quotation management plugin for WooCommerce. As the name suggests, interested buyers can request for a price quote on products they are interested in. It is an easy to use plugin with a simple interface.What you can also do with the plugin, is hide the regular “Add to Cart” button on your WooCommerce store, to trigger quote requests only, and disallow direct purchases.

Conclusion

There are two main types of wholesale stores that exist: those that are solely dedicated to wholesale or those that are B2C sites but have a wholesale aspect.Going wholesaling online is a great way to re-engage your clients whom you have lost touch with. Besides, online wholesale trashes the antiquated system of wholesalers having to buy from a catalog or worse — a line sheet.The above stated plugins can give you the perfect start to your online store on WooCommerce. Have any questions before getting started? Ask away, in the comment section below! 🙂

Are Your WooCommerce Store Leads Slipping Away?

December 6, 2016 by Sagar Sheral Leave a Comment

Building the perfect online store for your customers is a time-consuming task. There are a hundred and one things that you need to take into consideration as you work on the process, not to mention the constant updates and offers to be maintained to keep the store fresh. Despite these measures, consumers are lost due to various reasons, lack of efficient service, unavailability of products, new buying options, insufficient follow-ups, you name it.

The loss of a customer, existing or potential, is always a blow. However, several small steps on your part can go a long way in making your past customers return, and converting your potential leads into regular customers.

How?

First, let’s understand why customers might consider shifting from your store in the first place. We shall assume here that leads are being lost despite the fact that your store is well-stocked, as lack of product availability is bound to drive your customers away to search for better shopping avenues. Having said that, there are plenty of other crucial reasons why they can be displeased with your store; some of these you might be familiar with, but a few might surprise you!

What Leads to the Loss of Customers?

Unwieldy Site Design

The very first thing a potential customer sees when he logs on to your website is one of your main pages. Depending on the point of entry (organic search/direct product search), customers can see your Home, About, or Product Page. Naturally, once they are in, they will want to explore the site, which can become quickly off-putting if you’ve designed it arbitrarily.

Customers appreciate consistency, logical pathways, and clear calls-to-action that let them know exactly where they are within the site; if your website falls short of those standards, they are bound to get frustrated and walk off!

Lack of Efficient Service

The next most important aspect that customers consider is how well the service is executed. People familiar with the art of online shopping expect the path of least resistance as they make their purchase. However, if this is impeded by constant delays, incorrect data submission and delivery and unnecessary complications in the service process, they are definitely not going to be happy.

There is always a small margin of error which is acceptable, but beyond that, you are going to start losing customers at an exponential rate.

No Point of Contact

The one drawback of online store as compared to real ones is that they are not conducive to human contact. In a regular store, you can simply walk up to the salesperson and make an enquiry about the product you are intending to buy; in an online store this becomes slightly more difficult. This problem can be mitigated to some extent if you have clear content that answers most of the questions your customers could have about the product. However, if they need to make a specialized enquiry and there is no point of contact, they are simply going to walk out.

Ambiguous Content

If you are serious about setting up shop online, this is one area you should never ignore. The content of your website plays a huge role in converting potential leads into customers, provided it is clear and complete. Beating around the bush in your product descriptions, lack of important information like taxes and shipping costs, overly promotional content or excessive marketing techniques, and only stellar reviews do nothing but make customers suspicious if this is spam. A better option is to avoid ambiguous content and keep it simple and clear.

Complex Checkout Process

The checkout process plays an important role in impacting your conversion rate. Depending on the type of website, the process can be either short or long, there is no specific length that defines a perfect checkout process. That said, customers appreciate it when they need to fill in minimal details and receive confirmation that their confidential information is completely secure. An unnecessarily long process, compounded by longer site upload times can effectively frustrate your potential buyers and cause them to abandon their shopping cart halfway.

So much for the causes of lead-loss; let us now discuss the various measures that you can employ, as the store owner, to minimise this to the maximum extent possible. The approach to this is two-fold; one, you recapture past customers by using reminders, discounts, offers, and the like, and two, you engage new ones by providing the specialized shopping options they are looking for.

How to Secure Leads for Your WooCommerce Store?

Send Regular Reminders

If the customer trial has gone cold after a few purchases, you can renew it by sending out email-reminders that inform them about updates on your store. People like knowing that you care about your customers. Encourage this feeling by sending newsletters, posts, and personalized messages that might interest them based on their previous purchases, to gradually nudge them back towards your store.

You can use several newsletter and email marketing plugins that are available for WooCommerce, such as MailChimp for WordPress, Newsletter, MailPoet, and others, to this end.

Create a Point of Contact

Create a point of contact for your customers by adding an Enquiry button to your Product Pages. This lets them immediately send an enquiry they might want to make about your product, to which you can reply via email. Adding a Product Enquiry button helps potential customers get the exact information they are looking for, which in turn boosts the likelihood of completing the purchase. You can use plugins like Product Enquiry Pro for incorporating this functionality.

Offer Incentives

There is nothing like discounts and coupons to engage customers. A tried-and-tested strategy, discounts help in successfully capturing and sustaining the attention of consumers, especially if there is a significant margin of savings involved. You can also consider issuing coupons to new customers to encourage recurring purchases. Another good idea is to bundle products and then add a discount for the package which generates more sales.

There are several customer or user role specific discount plugins such as WooCommerce Customer Specific Pricing plugin, to help you with this. In addition, WooCommerce has a built-in functionality to enable the usage of coupons during checkout.

Simplify Processes

Easy navigation around the website and simplification of the ordering and checkout process is a good way to completing the purchase. It helps to keep the content concise and ensure that all the customer queries are successfully addressed.

Revamp Your Site

Optimizing your site is extremely helpful in retaining customers once they have reengaged. Generate feedback from your clients, find out what do they like and what they do not, about your website, and redesign it accordingly. It might take a lot of trial and error to get the site optimized for the web, but the end result will be worth the time and effort you spend on it. We’ve got a detailed WooCommerce Optimization Guide to get you started. If site optimization becomes too out-of-depth for you, you can always opt for professional services to get it done for you.

Conclusion

These are some of the ways you can use to prevent your WooCommerce leads from slipping away. Of course, as the customer psyche varies from individual to individual, there is no one, single solution for capturing customers.

However, these measures address the basic requirements any potential customer looks for in an online store, and work towards optimizing them accordingly.

What other methods do you think could be used? Let us know in the comments section below!

How To Integrate Product Brands In WooCommerce Store

October 19, 2016 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Saud Razzak. If you’d like to feature your content here, feel free to get in touch with us.

The WooCommerce Product Brands extension permits you to create a brand for your Woo shop. So if you want to be creative, you can use your creativity in different ways depending on your business type. This may include your portfolio, your client list and also your projects.

Product Brands can be listed, indexed on a page using A-Z shortcode
Product Brands can be shown as thumbnails with the help of a shortcode
Product Brands can be displayed on the sidebar with the help of shortcode
Product Brands can be used to filter products with the help of layered nav widget

It’s a great plugin which allows you to list your brands on a web page and makes brand searching a piece of cake.

So now, without further ado, let’s begin with installation and configuration of this WooCommerce extension on your sites.

Products Brand Installation & Configuration

You need to follow the simple steps below for the installation of the Product Brands for WooCommerce plugin.

First things first, you need to install Product Brands For WooCommerce
To add the plugin using your wp-admin dashboard side panel, just go to Plugins >> Add New and then search for Product Brands For WooCommerce
Install and activate the plugin

Product Brands Setting

In this section, I am going to educate you about the Product Brands plugin settings. You need to go to WooCommerce >> Settings >> Products. Under this tab, you will see Product Brand Shortcode, Product Brand Settings, as well as Product Brand Images.

Enter the values as per your requirement.

Creating Brands in Product Brands for WooCommerce

To add a brand, you need to go to Products >> Product Brands. Under the tab, you will see “Add New Product Brand”. Here you can add your brands; and once you are done, the brand will be listed in the list right beside it. This works the same as adding product attributes, categories or tags.

You can add the brand name, slug, description and assign a brand logo. Also, you can edit or delete any of your previous brands added.

Below is all your listed brands on the list.

Assign Brand to Product

To assign a brand to your product, you need to go to Products >> Add Products, or edit an existing product. Under the product add/edit screen, you will see the Product Brand tab on the left side of your page.

After clicking the publish button you will see the result on your WooCommerce web store. The image below represents how your WooCommerce online store will look like with the featured brand.

Final Words

Including products under certain brands and those brands in the navigation can enhance the user experience of a customer on your site. If you have a WooCommerce store that offers multiple brands, then this strategy will be useful.

And that’s not all, if you want your WooCommerce store to stand alone in the market, here is a list of my top favourite WooCommerce Plugins of 2016.

Got questions? Comment away!

Author Bio:

Saud Razzak is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways – A Managed WordPress Hosting Platform. Saud is responsible for creating a buzz, spreading knowledge and educating people about WordPress in the WordPress Community around the globe. In his free time, he likes to play cricket and learn new things on the Internet.

How to Create a Members-Only Store on WooCommerce

July 29, 2016 by Sagar Sheral Leave a Comment

A members-only store on WooCommerce is an exclusive entity where only registered users can view content and make purchases.

With online business booming on WooCommerce, creating a store where you can selectively decide what products ought to be shown to whom can be a great asset. In addition to controlling product display, you can also offer free trials, coupons and other discounts to premium users.

Members-only stores not only give customers the satisfaction of belonging to an exclusive group, but are also useful for generating funds.

Why do we need a Members-Only Store?

There are several reasons why opting for a members-only store on WooCommerce is a better option instead of developing a public one. Building separate public and private areas of your store can be beneficial if your site hosts products that you sell exclusively to members.

Consider an online learning course or a college website for that matter. While everyone might be able to view a particular course on your site, only a member with a particular membership plan can enrol or even avail of discounts for the said course.

With some information generally available to the public and the rest to logged-in members only, it is possible to reach users in a more targeted manner.

Creating a Members-Only Store on WooCommerce

There are three different ways to convert your WooCommerce store into a members-only store, viz.

Without the use of external plugins
Using a Membership plugin
Using a Pricing Plugin

Let us discuss the pros and cons of each further.

WooCommerce Store without External Plugins

After creating your store, you add products to product pages as usual and add a password-protection field for user access.

This can be done by changing the privacy settings while editing the page and publishing it.

Perhaps the most trivial way of limiting product views for users, this ensures that you need not download and install any other plugin for hiding your products.

This functionality can be extended to Product Categories and Posts. Several WordPress themes from WooThemes and ThemeForest are compatible with WooCommerce and provide various display options for product images and layouts.

A drawback is that this is suitable if your product list is small or clientele limited. Handling a large number of products becomes tedious when every page has to be encrypted, managed and accessed separately. Also, data access is only limited to a password, the sharing of which, can’t be controlled.

Using a Membership Plugin

Membership plugins are the most logical choice for setting up a members-only store.

Plugins like WooCommerce Memberships and Paid Memberships Pro let you create several membership tiers, each with its own set of perks and prohibitions.

With varied content visibility and access as per the membership plan, you can effectively control what your members and non-members see. This can range from an exclusively all-member store where it is mandatory to purchase a plan before any content can be viewed or product purchased, to an open site where all products are visible and freely purchasable for everyone.

A good option is to offer free trials for new users for, say a fortnight, with additional access possible only on the purchase of a membership.

The drawback here is that it is fairly difficult to grasp creating membership plans, adding products to these and assigning members, immediately. The process takes a while and even then is not completely manageable.

Also, membership plugins are immensely useful for mega-stores with a lot of subscribers, but for smaller stores, having a limited clientele, too many functionalities can be largely useless. The plugins are also priced rather steeply and though the service is worth the cost, investing in them is economically feasible only after your store has established a decent profit margin.

Using a Pricing Plugin

Membership plugins allow for restricting content access and purchase according to the membership plan purchased. However, to assign special discounts to premium users or specific clients, a separate plan needs to be created and assigned every time.

To avoid this hassle, we can use a pricing plugin like Customer Specific Pricing for WooCommerce to decide distinct product costs for individual customers, different user roles or for groups.

The way the plugin works is that, you can add as many products as you want to your store and then assign different product values for individual customers, roles or groups.

Product prices can be updated by importing bulk values rather than updating them manually.

The advantage of setting up a members-only store with a pricing plugin rather than a membership plugin is that specific prices can be allotted without having to create membership plans and adding members to it. User roles can be employed for this purpose. Special prices can be offered to certain customers.

A more compact solution, it is ideal for small to medium stores alike, though it falls short of advanced functionalities that a membership plugin might offer.

Conclusion

If we have to lay down a rule of thumb,

Password protecting products is suitable for a personal website or blog, where you sell a handful of products
Using a membership plugin is suitable for high-end stores where you want track member purchases and want to award member rewards
A pricing plugin is for small to medium scale businesses which want to offer member-only access while still maintaining pricing flexibility for certain users

Well, these were my thoughts.

I’d like to hear yours. What path would you prefer?

WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons: The Heart of a Smashing Trio

July 7, 2016 by Vinita Lobo Leave a Comment

Image Courtesy Google

Gravity Forms is by far the most popular forms plugin on WordPress.

Originally developed for advanced contact forms, it has since allowed site owners to conditionally build forms to collect all kinds of data from its users.

WooCommerce– the leading e-commerce plugin on WordPress- has all the functionality you need to build an online store.

And these two plugins are brought together using the Gravity Forms Product Add-ons.

WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-ons Plugin

Built by Lucas Stark, what this plugin does, is link custom forms to any product in your WooCommerce store, to request additional information from the shopper. As the store owner, you can either request shopper information or product customization specification depending upon your product or service.

You can build advanced product configuration forms using Gravity Forms and link them to any product in your WooCommerce site.

These forms can contain mandatory or optional fields. Form fields can be created to gather information about the quantity and pricing, associate services, or set parameters, while choosing the product. The information can be then used to generate a total purchase amount for the product.

Additionally, multiple Gravity Forms one for each product individually can be built or you can assign a single standard form to all products.

Side-note: Gravity Forms Add-On vs Product Add-Ons for WooCommerce

While the Product Add-Ons extension for WooCommerce is seemingly familiar to the Gravity Forms Add-on extension, there is a fair amount of difference.

Product Add-Ons provide simple add-on fields. With the Gravity Forms add-on plugin, you can create advanced forms with conditional pricing. Also, form entries are saved in backend and can be easily accessed if needed.

Exploring the WooCommerce Gravity Forms Product Add-Ons

Once you install Gravity Forms and the add-ons plugin on your WooCommerce store, you’ll notice a ‘Pricing Fields’ section in Gravity Forms.

These are additional fields which can be used when creating a form that is linked to a product.

Regardless of how your Gravity Form is set-up, you need the ‘Product’ and the ‘Total’ fields to be present, when using any of the Pricing Fields.

Product Field

You can use the field to mention the name of the product and also enter the base price (keep it 0 if you don’t have a base price). This field will not be shown on your WooCommerce product page, but will still be processed during purchase.

The Product Field comes with a ‘single window’, ‘drop down menu’, ‘radio list’ features to let users determine product quantity or variable product options.

Quantity field

Quantity field is always tied to the product field and you have to select the product you want to link it to, in case you’ve added multiple products. Field Types include ‘Number’, ‘Drop-down’ or ‘Hidden’.

Number- Use it to let customers determine quantity while setting a limit using ‘Range’.
Drop Down menu- Set predefined quantities using the ‘Drop-down’ menu.
Hidden- Useful when setting a quantity without it being visible or editable by the user.

An interesting Gravity Forms feature that can be coupled with the ‘Quantity Field’ is ‘Conditional Logic’. With conditional logic, you can choose to display or hide this quantity field based on values of other fields.

Option Field

The Option Fields are usually applied to provide options in products. They have the ability to add costs for add-on services to the product on sale. Options like a variation in color, size etc. or customization services can be listed using this field.

For example, if you’re selling a basic spa package, you can add services like manicure, hot stone massage etc. to your package according to your needs, and the associated cost will be added to the total.

Shipping Field

Product delivery prices are something that cannot be discounted.

Shipping field adds the amount associated with shipping, to the total price of the product during purchase.

This could be set as a standard rate for products or you could go for a drop-down menu or radio button field, where customers can pick their shipping options, and set a varying price. This field can be integrated with the WooCommerce Per Product Shipping Add-on.

Total field

Another mandatory field for the Gravity Fields add-on is the Total Field. It automatically calculates the total price of the product, including all the options prices, shipping rates, quantity etc. This field then displays the total cost of the product after which it’s added to the cart.

Adding a Gravity Form to WooCommerce

Adding the form to a WooCommerce Product is a rather simple process.

You create a form in Gravity Forms and add the needed fields
Under a WooCommerce Product, you should notice a ‘Gravity Forms Product Add-ons‘ section. Use this section to select a form and link it to the product
Update the product, and you’re set!

The Catch?

Gravity Forms has several options which might confuse a newbie user. Since Gravity Forms is a premium extension, the price of the plugin $39 and the add-on $99–$199, make this extension one pricey package!

But given the benefits it brings to your store, the expense is nevertheless worth every penny.

Apart from such minor issues, this trio (WooCommerce + Gravity Forms + Add-on) has no major drawbacks, only numerous benefits!

Also, the add-on ensures that no matter how complex your product form, only unique configurations are added to the cart and duplicates are incremented in quantity.

Endnote

Gravity Forms is a handy extension for most WordPress websites, and with this add-on, they can be integrated into WooCommerce stores as well. Commercial sites that sell made-to-order products would benefit immensely from this extension, as it allows them to accept custom values from shoppers.

Got anything more to say about this plugin?! Leave your comments in the section below!

Designing Custom Products with WooCommerce Product Designer

June 10, 2016 by Tarun Rai Leave a Comment

Customers today are spoilt for choice.

There are at least ten different permutations of the product one intends to buy, yet that is not enough.

Buyers love it if they can add a personal touch to the product, something that makes it uniquely theirs!

In WordPress, there are two ways of managing this functionality,

The customer sends you the changes or additions that are to be made to the product; you create a virtual copy of how the product would look like and send it to the customer for approval.
You let the customer decide for himself the changes that are to be made and send the final, customized product to you, leaving you to handle only the manufacturing and shipping part of it.

The first method is ideal for select stores, where a lot of major and minor modifications are to be incorporated. The buying cycle in this case is longer.

However, if we speak of making minor changes to generic products like t-shirts, mugs, shoes, phone covers, business cards and such, assessing every client requirement and then drawing up a suitable solution is not always feasible.

The latter option is preferable here, since the customers themselves can come up with a satisfactory product as required.

So much for the method, now for the medium. 🙂

A simple yet effective extension that allows your customers to add self-designed logos to your products on WooCommerce is the WooCommerce Product Designer.

A product customization plugin developed by ORION Developers, WooCommerce Product Designer empowers the buyers to make whatever modifications they wish to make to simple/ variable products , prior to placing their order in a woocommerce shop.

The process is simple:

The customer chooses the product he intends to buy
He then begins designing from the beginning or chooses an existing template or uploads his pre-processed content
Once that is done, he can print out the PDF file for the final product and sends it to the vendor
The vendor manufactures the product and dispatches it

However, these seemingly simplistic tasks involve a lot of work for which the many features of the plugin need to be leveraged.

Here is a look at some of those.

Plugin Features

User Templates

Users can select a blank product to begin with and modify it along the way. Vendors can add as many products as they want, for user customization.

In addition to letting the customers design the product modification from scratch, WooCommerce Product Designer also provides for setting up templates which can be used by the customers as a point of reference.

An infinite number of templates can be added, which the customers can pick and choose from and build upon.

Fonts and Filters

The plugin has an integrated Google Fonts uploader which allows you to select Google Fonts and add them for customer use. WooCommerce Product Designer has a very simple user interface so changing fonts, font colors, font sizes and more is pretty straightforward during text customization.

For the image processing part,customers can choose to blur, sharpen, invert, emboss or choose from a number of tones and filters available to edit the available images.

The image is the users’ playground!

Product Editor

Apart from the individual text and image edits, the product can be personalized as a whole, using custom color palettes built into the plugin. Clipart images can also be inserted and categorized here for customer use.

WooCommerce Product Designer allows purchasers to create and upload their own logos to the product, however, it provides you with the option for limiting the minimum and maximum file size for the same.

Vector Graphics Integration

Vector graphics have become an indelible part of the e-commerce industry and the web-to-print sector is no exception.

WooCommerce Product Designer supports vector graphics integration during product customization and allows the customers to upload and modify the SVG vector files from the editing panel itself.

Variable Pricing

WooCommerce Product Designer has a dynamic pricing policy which lets you specify a price range for a given product. Starting with the base price, it adds fixed charges (that you’ve specified) as per the modifications made to the product. Different prices can be set for text, image and clipart add-ons.

Social Network Integration

The product modification plugin integrates with social networking sites like Facebook and Instagram for importing pictures. These can be then used to be imprinted on t-shirts and the like.

Order Output and Order History

The final, customized product can be configured to display in high-definition with a maximum width of 15000px. These can be printed out as PDF files in landscape and portrait file formats too.

One of the strengths of the WooCommerce Product Designer plugin is that it allows customers to save their work so that they can begin from where they left off, the next time they log in. Also, current designs can be duplicated and stored for later use.

Conclusion

WooCommerce Product Designer is a vendor-and-customer-friendly product customization plugin that is responsive and easily manageable. The drag-and-drop editor used makes editing designs a piece of cake; and you can always upload your own, previously created one if need be. You can checkout a demo of the plugin here.

The functionalities themselves are pretty straightforward, so accessibility and operation isn’t very difficult.

WooCommerce Product Designer is configured to work with all themes of WordPress and all versions of WooCommerce.

The basic features of the plugin are available for free, and the more advanced features like configurable color palettes, custom price settings, template generation and more are available in the premium version, for $34.

Prepped with all the tools necessary to help your clients personalize their purchases, WooCommerce Product Designer is a great option for product customization.

What are your thoughts about the WooCommerce Product Designer? Are there any other plugins you would recommend for this functionality?

Let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments section below!

How To Set Minimum Cart Amount For User Roles In WooCommerce

May 20, 2016 by Nirav Mehta 1 Comment

As a software developer who often deals with support requests of all shapes and sizes, a satisfied client is my ticket to a good night’s sleep. But a loyal and a recurring customer is what makes me get up the next morning and strive harder, learning and bettering myself in the process.

Customer loyalty is sign of confidence that what you’re doing is right, and the people who you’re doing it for, they like and trust your work. And expect you to keep doing it. Shep Hyken was absolutely on point when he said:

Image Courtesy: Pinterest

WooCommerce is an exceptional e-commerce platform when it comes to tapping into features that build trust amongst your customers, and bring returns in the form of recurring customers and of course, more sales.

One way to do this is to price your products differently for customers belonging to varying membership levels or groups, the principle that led to the creation of one of our most successful products. This actually works on two levels:

Setting low prices for recurring customers ensures more conversions; a customer would be more than happy to buy a product at a much lower price than his peers.
Advertising that such a scheme exists on your WooStore acts as an incentive for fresh customers to turn into loyal shoppers and thus avail the low price scheme.

Set Minimum Order Amount for User Roles In WooCommerce

As an extension to this practice, you may also want to set different cart value limits for customers belonging to different user roles. This is particularly useful for when your store sells products in wholesale, and you only want to allow a user to go through with the purchase if the order amount exceeds a predefined value.

Conversely, you may let the users of select user roles to purchase products on your store, no matter the order amount.

Here’s how you can map different user roles to a minimum purchase cart amount on WooCommerce.

Step 1: Cart Page Validations:

Go to wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/templates/cart directory and look up for cart-totals.php file
Copy this file and go to your theme/child theme, create a folder woocommerce/cart and paste cart-total.php file here.
The structure will be something like /wp-content/themes/{Your-theme-name}/woocommerce/cart/cart-totals.php
After copy pasting the file, open the file in the editor and look for the code line:

<div class="wc-proceed-to-checkout">
      <?php do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' ); ?>
 </div>

Replace the above code with the lines below.

   <div class="wc-proceed-to-checkout"> <?php
   //Get current user and check the user role.

   $current_screen_user = wp_get_current_user();

// In my scenario “wholesale_buyer” is the user role for which I want this validation. You can add your user roles.

    if( in_array( 'wholesale_buyer', $current_screen_user->roles ) ) {

      $minimum = 50; // Set the minimum amt.
      $cart_amt = WC()->cart->subtotal; // cart sub_total, this is actual total excluding discounts and shipping.

                if ( $cart_amt < $minimum ) {
          if( is_cart() ) {
        //Added notices for cart page.
              wc_print_notice(
                  sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,
                      wc_price( $minimum ),
                      wc_price( $cart_amt )
                  ), 'error'
              );
          } else {
        //Added notice msg for checkout page.

              wc_add_notice(
                  sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,
                      wc_price( $minimum ),
                      wc_price( $cart_amt)
                  ), 'error'
              );
          }
      } else {
          do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' );
      }
    } else {
      do_action( 'woocommerce_proceed_to_checkout' );
    }
    ?>
   </div>

Step 2: Checkout Page Validations:

From the above code snippet, we hide the Proceed To Checkout button on cart page and add validations on cart page.

For the purpose of fool-proofing, we will also have to add the validations on checkout page, since a users with a little technical background could simply type in the URL of the page and bypass validations.

To do this, place the below code snippet in your themes -> functions.php file.

<?php
add_action( 'woocommerce_checkout_process', 'wdm_wu_minimum_order_amount' );

function wdm_wu_minimum_order_amount() {

    $current_screen_user = wp_get_current_user();
    if( in_array( 'wholesale_buyer', $current_screen_user->roles ) ) {

      $minimum = 50;

    if ( WC()->cart->subtotal < $minimum ) {
       if( is_cart() ) {
           wc_print_notice(
               sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,

                   wc_price( $minimum ),
                   wc_price( WC()->cart->subtotal )
               ), 'error'
           );

       } else {
           wc_add_notice(
               sprintf( 'You must have an order with a minimum of %s to place your order, your current order total is %s.' ,

                   wc_price( $minimum ),
                   wc_price( WC()->cart->subtotal )

               ), 'error'
           );
       } } } }

And that’s about it. Every user belonging to the specified user role will now be restricted to a minimum cart value while shopping on your website. Here’s how it would look in practice:

What’s amazing is that this needn not be limited to a single user role; play around with the code a bit and you can assign a minimum cart limit, and even create a settings page on the back end that would let you map user roles to minimum cart limits.

Found this article helpful? Let us know in the comment section below. Your feedback is what keeps us going. 🙂

The Truth about WooCommerce Maintenance

May 6, 2016 by Namrata Leave a Comment

WooCommerce is one of the most popular plugins on WordPress, and the most popular e-commerce platform powering over 29% of online stores.

WooCommerce is both store owner and developer friendly, and contains a large amount of functionality. The team at WooThemes maintains the plugin well, with constant fixes and tweaks. But this also means more updates for the WooCommerce user.

Now, I know updates are good, but WooCommerce seems to roll out updates more often than I would prefer. The minor updates are okay.

It’s the major updates that worry me. They come packed with a warning and a lot of stress!

But you see, I can’t ignore these updates.

Maintaining Your WooCommerce Store

Updating your WooCommerce plugin is part of maintaining your WooCommerce store.

Sure the features are something to look forward to. But updates also make your store more secure.

Of course maintenance does not end at updates, there is a lot more. You have backups, security checks, product inventory updates, handling out of stock products, fixing broken links, and so on.

Maintenance not only wards off malicious attackers but helps improve user experience.
Keeping product information updated, reinforces customer trust.
Uptime monitoring helps track how well your hosting is working out for you.
Regular backups come to rescue in code black situations.

What is WooCommerce Maintenance

Similar to maintaining your WordPress website, WooCommerce maintenance involves performing a regular set of tasks on a timely basis.

#1 Backup, Backup, Backup

Your WooCommerce store contains a lot of important information. You have product details, customer details, order details and so on.

Imagine if a hacker or an erroneous update deleted these details.

A regular backup of your WooCommerce site (the files) and the data can save your store from such a situation.

A plugin like BackWPup or BackupBuddy can be used here to schedule regular updates. Make sure that the content is saved off of your server on an external file hosting or storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

#2 Updating WooCommerce, Plugins, Theme, WordPress

Updating your WooCommerce, plugins, theme and WordPress are a way of ensuring that you are running the latest version of the software. And if you’ve heard of the Mossack Fonseca case, you’ll know how important software updates really are. Every improved version of the software contains security fixes to ward off attackers.

Ideally updates should not break the rest of your site, but this isn’t always the case. Since the plugins you use might not be by the same author or might not be tested with each other, a conflict could arise.

So are auto-updates a ‘no’?

WordPress provides an automatic background updates concept. This enables you to allow WordPress to update the core, plugins and themes on its own. I’d say for a WooCommerce website, auto-updates might not be the best option. However, minor updates can be automatically enabled by adding the below line in wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', 'minor' );

To avoid this the recommended steps to updating WooCommerce, WordPress core and other software on your site, is to first test your updates on a staging site and then update them on the live site.

(A staging site is a replica of your live site, and is used to test and review newer versions before the changes are moved into production.)

What if you don’t have a staging site?

Backup the older version of the plugin/theme, and update them one at a time. Remember, updates introduce a newer version of the software. If this version breaks your site, a backup can help you roll back to a stable version.

Do you update WordPress first or the plugins?

Although there is no fixed rule here, I recommend updating the core first, then WooCommerce, then the supporting plugins and the theme.

#3 Updating Product Information & Inventory

Product information is key to the success of any e-commerce store.

Let’s take the example of WisdmLabs’ store. We sell premium WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. We update these plugins quite regularly, and the only way we can communicate new features to interested customers is by updating the feature lists of these products. We update the documentation as well to improve an existing customer’s experience.

Keeping information updated ensures customers that you take care of your products and will care for their interests too.

Updating product information involves:
Updating product description and attributes
Adding available variations
Updating stock information
Handling out of stock products
Updating product images

How to delete products from a WooCommerce store?

Say you have a product in your store, you no longer sell. It’s been out of stock for weeks, and now during your maintenance routine, you decide you want to remove it from your store.

Now ideally, you’d just have to delete the product from your admin panel and all would be well. But this would mean the original product URL would now not exist. Customers who visit the URL would get a page not found error. Or if the product was linked from any other page, the link would now be broken. Broken link errors on your site, would affect your search engine ranking.

To prevent this from happening:

You could always, add a notice on the product page, and set the catalog visibility to ‘Hidden’.
Or, you could redirect the URL to another page using a plugin like Simple 301 Redirects.

#4 Uptime Monitoring

Shoppers can only make a purchase from your WooCommerce website, when they can access it. So you need to make sure your server functions well and can handle your website traffic, by monitoring server uptime.

There are several external uptime monitoring services like Uptime Robot and WordPress plugins which connect your website to such services which you can use to monitor server uptime.

Remember search engines penalize websites with considerable downtime. So if your server’s not performing well, it might be time to change your hosting plan or find a new host altogether.

#5 Handling Security Breach Notifications

Using plugins like Wordfence Security or iThemes Security handle security monitoring for you. But what happens when you receive security breach notifications?!

Usually a plugin handles most of attacks, but as a general security practice you could change your admin passwords, and prompt customers to change their passwords as well.

It’s quite astounding that several users still use older versions of the WooCommerce plugin and are at risk of an attack!

WooCommerce Versions and the Percentage of Users

Letting a Professional Handle Maintenance

WooCommerce maintenance is not a one time task. You’d have to dedicate time and effort to perform the needed tasks on a regular basis.

And if you’d rather spend this time on growing your business, then you can always hand over maintenance to professionals.

Letting WooCommerce maintenance specialists handle this can result in long term improvements. You see, experienced professionals not only do what’s needed, they also suggest improvements.

How do You Handle Maintenance?

Do you maintain your WooCommerce website yourself or have you employed a maintenance service? Are there any maintenance tips and tricks you’d like to share with our readers?

WooCommerce Memberships: A Comprehensive Membership Plugin for WordPress

May 2, 2016 by Akshaya Rane Leave a Comment

WooCommerce Memberships- a membership plugin developed by SkyVerge– essentially integrates your WooCommerce shop, WordPress website and memberships into a harmonious whole.

The core of WooCommerce Memberships plugin revolves around successfully protecting your content and WooCommerce products, by restricting access to it.

To this end, one can create several kinds of memberships which can be sold or granted manually to customers.

WooCommerce Memberships – Plugin Features

The plugin is imbued with a lot of features, extensions and integrations that provide everything you require for setting up a full-fledged membership system.

Here is a look at some of these:

Flexible Membership Plans

WooCommerce Memberships lets you create unlimited membership plans, each with different incentives. These can be multi-tiered, free or paid entities, wherein you can assign rules to control access to the content for each level.

Memberships can also be tied to various products, as a part of the purchase, on your WooCommerce store. Members-only products can be created which necessitate the customer to become a member before product purchase can be enabled.

Memberships granting access to your site can be bought by customers for a fixed amount of time or can be subscribed to (more on that later), on a monthly basis. Additionally, special membership plans, with an invitation-only functionality can be created using WooCommerce Memberships.

The best part is, once you have created the perfect plan, you can duplicate it multiple times and add new rules without losing any of those already prescribed for it.

Content Access Restriction

Based on the membership plan purchased, content visibility and access can be varied. WooCommerce Memberships lets you decide which posts, pages, custom post types, feeds and products can be seen by viewers with a given plan. Moreover, you can limit access to all the content added under taxonomies like ‘Categories’, ‘Tags’, etc.

Restrict Product Access

There are flexible options for showing only an excerpt or part of the product description to non-members, withholding access to the complete article. At the other end of the spectrum, you can completely lock your site to non-members, with an exclusive members-only approach.

And if you wanted to capture leads from non-members, a plugin like Product Enquiry Pro can be used for interested customers to get in touch with you.

An added advantage is that drip feeding of content is enabled. This lets you control how often content is to be dripped out to members, whether immediately on joining, a week later or after subsequent upgradations.

This can be further customized so that some content can be made available during the trial period of the plugin, while access to the rest is approved after purchasing a more permanent plan.

Variable Discounts

Memberships is not merely store owner friendly, it helps you keep your customers happy too. It empowers you to authorize differential discounts for customers according to their membership plan, which can be calculated based on percentage or a given, fixed amount.

These can be enabled for individual products or entire product categories. Furthermore, existing members can be gifted rewards and bonuses which can be redeemed at your shop.

You can also gift trial memberships to customers, offer discounted rates for continuing members during membership renewal or bundle discounts with specific product purchases!

Members Area

The Members Area is where the member sees all of his accessible content, products, discounts, rewards and subscriptions. This is accessible only for current memberships and not for paused, expired or cancelled ones.

Time Bound Membership

On the store owner’s end, you can manually change a member’s plan or alter their tiers from the Members Area. Also, apart from displaying the contact information available in your database, WooCommerce Memberships allows you to add Membership Notes wherein you can record specific information pertaining to the member.

These notes can be shared with the member via e-mail.

Plentiful Integrations

WooCommerce Memberships has several integrations like:

Subscriptions Integration
bbPress Integration
Groups Integration
Product Vendors Integration
User Switching Integration

Integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions

The integration of WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions requires a special mention because this combination increases the power of your membership system manifold.

The WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin allows you to enable subscription-based registration for your members. This includes using recurring membership schemes instead of those for a fixed time period.

Free trials can be made available to customers and drip feeding content can be enabled too, so that newer avenues open up gradually once the trial period starts.

Members can pause or cancel subscriptions on their own, which in turn affects the memberships associated with those. Note that once a subscription is paused, the membership is too, which is why members cannot access any restricted data which was previously available.

Also, generally if a subscription is cancelled, the membership is too, unless you code membership and subscription lengths to be different.

WooCommerce Memberships avails the WooCommerce Subscriptions functionality to upgrade or downgrade membership plans by using subscription switching. You can also prorate membership costs while switching. Note that if the end-user changes the subscription, the membership is changed automatically too, but if you are changing the subscription manually at the administrator end, you will need to change the membership plan separately.

That said, WooCommerce Memberships is a relatively new plugin and consequently has a few areas where it could be better.

WooCommerce Memberships- Plugin Limitations

Though few and far between, these shortcomings need to be taken heed of.

Heavily Dependent on Subscriptions

WooCommerce Memberships depends on Subscriptions for functionalities like free trials, recurring billing and membership upgrades and downgrades. Although this might not be a problem as such, the cost factor does feature, since WooCommerce Subscriptions is also a premium extension.

Import/Export Member Lists

There is no inbuilt functionality for importing or exporting contacts directly into WordPress Memberships, a separate plugin needs to be installed for the same.

Conclusion

The features provided by WooCommerce Memberships certainly outweigh its limitations.

Memberships is an excellent plugin for creating and managing all kinds of memberships. Essentially used to sell memberships to customers on your WooCommerce store, the plugin lets you associate membership with all kinds of products, content, courses, data, basically anything and everything under the sun!

Priced at $199 for a single site license (currently $149 per site) for a year’s worth of updates, might seem a little steep, but it is worth every cent.

Built for WooCommerce, it has robust extensions and integrates efficiently with payment gateways for smooth transactions. With a simple, easy-to-understand user interface, I believe managing multiple memberships using the WooCommerce Memberships plugin is easy and straightforward.

Your thoughts?