WooCommerce: Why Variable Products Are Too Limited (and How Add-Ons Can Help)

WooCommerce is rich with customization options for different kinds of eCommerce businesses. However, it’s quite limited when it comes to certain shopping solutions your online business may need – such as displaying product variations.

For instance, a customer may need to choose RAM size, storage size, and device color before buying a mobile phone. In this case, using the default WooCommerce variations will require you to create a variable product with hundreds if not thousands of attribute combinations.

This can be exhausting, and despite all that work, the result is often a slow and difficult to manage product backend due to a huge number of variations . Besides, your customers would have a hard time finding the exact variation when the only option they have are dropdowns with dozens of options.

The best way to give your customers a seamless user experience is to allow them to customize their products on the same page without using variations. Now, you can’t do that with WooCommerce alone. This is where WooCommerce product add-ons plugins come in.

In this article, we’ll show you the easiest way to create and sell variable WooCommerce products using WooCommerce Product Options. But before that, let’s talk about why you need additional product options in your store.

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WooCommerce: Upload File @ Checkout Page

No matter what you try, but simply adding an HTML input type=”file” won’t work on the WooCommerce Checkout page. I believe this is a security measure and as such, we need to find a workaround.

The only possible solution is to upload the file BEFORE the checkout is submitted, so that upon “Place Order”, the file is already available in the Media section and can be attached to the order as a simple string (URL).

Such upload can happen via Ajax, so that the customer won’t notice anything on the Checkout page – they are actually uploading a file to your website without even noticing it (yes, you need to apply some security measures, of course).

Here’s how it’s done – enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Donation / Fundraising Plugins

Are you looking for ways to raise funds for a charity event or a non-profit organization? There are a multitude number of ways to go about it.

You can host an exclusive or virtual fundraising event, run email campaigns to collect funds, or even encourage friends and families to contribute their parts to the fund. However, these ways require a lot of legwork, including finding a place to host fundraising events, inviting guests, or hiring an email strategist to run marketing campaigns – which is time-consuming and expensive. 

The solution? Collecting online donations via WordPress or WooCommerce plugins to effectively raise funds for special causes, such as charities, non-profits, or relief funds. 

This article shares the best, easy-to-use, affordable WooCommerce fundraising and donations plugins you can use. Let’s get started!

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WooCommerce: Populate Checkout Fields From URL

On top of adding products to cart via URL and redirect to checkout, there is a way to also fill out the Checkout page input fields within the same link.

This could be super handy when you know the billing/shipping details of a registered or guest customer and want to speed up the order process.

It’s important to note that the URL will need to contain personal data e.g. email address, billing address, phone number, and so on; you need to make sure the URL is only shared with the specific customer (in an email, for example, as content is tailored to the subscriber; or only when the WooCommerce customer is logged in if you’re using the URL behind a website button).

Once that’s clear, let’s go ahead, and let’s see how my WooCommerce snippet works. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Why & How to Improve Product Filters

Many times, ecommerce customers are unable to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. There are plenty of reasons for this, ranging from poor site design to a lack of search and filtering options.

By improving product filters in your WooCommerce online store, you can help customers narrow down their search. This makes it easier for them to find the products they’re looking for.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to add advanced product filters, and explain why you should.

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WooCommerce: Flatsome Theme Review

A remarkable and flawless user experience is the key to building a successful online presence for eCommerce businesses. How often do your customers enter your website, get distracted from running other errands, or abandon your store because of confusing age layouts?  

According to the statistics, 38% of site visitors stop engaging with websites due to unattractive content and page layout. Thus, attracting customers’ attention and offering a quality experience through an appealing and intuitive page design is important to ensure customer retention and increase sales.  

And your store’s theme is one important element that helps hold visitors’ interest and assist their page navigation. While you can choose from multiple themes for your WooCommerce website, choosing a multipurpose theme that delivers great performance, offers high customization abilities, and facilitates user experience is what you need to deliver a quality experience. 

This article reviews one such important theme – the Flatsome WordPress theme. We’ll start with its brief overview and see its interface, features, benefits, and cost to help you determine whether it’s the right choice for your eCommerce store. Let’s go!

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WooCommerce: How to Set Up a Multi Vendor / Marketplace Website

Are you looking to build a marketplace where multiple vendors advertise and sell their own products?

Would you like to build the next eBay, or perhaps Etsy, while earning commissions or fees for each vendor or marketplace transaction?

In this article we’ll take a look at the main features, challenges and advantages of building a multivendor platform based on WooCommerce. 

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WooCommerce: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) Discounts

Since… today, Business Bloomer online courses are affordable for everyone.

It’s unfortunate that digital products (such as our WooCommerce online courses) are priced in USD dollars but there is no adjustment for less privileged countries.

This is a pity because content should be accessible to ALL WooCommerce developers around the world, no matter their income level. I receive dozens of emails per month from amazing people who can’t really afford a USD 397 course because they make that amount of money in 4 months if they’re lucky.

So, let’s change this. Here comes Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) to the rescue.

PPP is a special metric that tells us the real “purchasing power” of a given country. Take a basket of identical goods, pay in your local currency in your own country; purchase the same items in USD in the United States. Compare that difference to the actual exchange rate. Now you really have an idea of how much a country can afford to pay for that basket of goods.

Let’s talk in plain English. Are you from India? You may get up to 75% off our online courses. Are you from South Africa? Maybe a 59% discount! Are you from Argentina? 61% off on average. Are you from Norway? No discount, sorry (it seems you do better than the US). And so on…

In this post, I’ll go through a quick PPP math example to give you some context, and then I’ll tell you how I implemented PPP discounts in this same WooCommerce website.

Want to help me test the PPP discount functionality which is currently in beta? Add a course to cart e.g. CustomizeWoo PRO, select your billing country at checkout, and leave a comment below with the discount you got, if any.

Enjoy!

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WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Do you intend to create an online store? Cannot pick between self-hosted WooCommerce and cloud-powered BigCommerce? Don’t worry, you are not on your own. 

The only way to truly determine which of these two eCommerce solutions is more suitable, is to compare them side by side – we will take a look at their features, price, convenience of use, cost, support, security, customization, and many other factors.

In this article, we’ll help you determine which ecommerce solution more appropriate for your business requirements. Self-hosted or cloud? Subscription or free in theory? Customization or integrations? Huge or small community? There are lots of questions you may have.

So, are you ready for the battle of WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce? Let’s get started.

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WooCommerce: How to Send Newsletters to Your Customers

Sending emails (newsletters, broadcasts or similar) to customers is an integral part of a WooCommerce marketing strategy. Email marketing is an outstanding tool that allows you to connect with your customers, keep them informed about your products, services, or discounts, get them to return to your site, and drive new sales. 

Unlike other popular channels, like social media – emails provide a personal touch and let you reach your target consumers directly in their inboxes. Statistics suggest that while 87% of B2B marketers leverage email as a distribution channel – 79% of B2C marketers use emails to promote their new blog posts and articles. 

And one such critical email marketing solution is email newsletters. They are extremely beneficial to stay in touch and build trustworthy relationships with existing and potential customers. 

So, if you’re looking for solutions to send automated newsletters to your WooCommerce customers – you’re at the right place. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of actually sending newsletters. 

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WooCommerce: File Upload Plugins For Order Personalization

One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a WooCommerce store owner is offering limited product customization abilities. Product personalization is a critical component of online shopping that helps provide a better customer experience and results in a high retention rate.

75% of customers appreciate businesses that offer personalized offerings, and a Deloitte consumer review suggests that 1 in every 5 customers are willing to pay 20% more for a custom-designed and personalized product. 

A great way to do this is by offering an image upload solution for products for your customers to improve customer satisfaction and generate more revenue for your store. 

This article shows the top solutions that make uploading images for products for customers a breeze and enhance their customization abilities. But before we get into them, let’s look at more benefits of offering this capability in your store and how it affects your business bottom line. 

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WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today. 

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation. 

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions. 

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability. 

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

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WooCommerce: How To Enable Stripe Payments

Providing payment options on your WooCommerce store that your customers trust and meet their needs is the key to ensuring a satisfied customer journey and eliminating cart abandonments. 

According to the Baymard Institute’s research, the average cart abandonment rate amongst buyers is 69.8%, and 6 out of 10 times, it’s because of issues related to payments. 

While some shoppers abandon carts because of long checkout processes and the lack of simple payment options, others don’t find the payment site legitimate enough to provide their credit card information. Thus, the payment method plays a huge role in customers’ buying decisions. 

Stripe is a great option. It’s simple-to-use, flexible, and one of the most popular payment solutions for WooCommerce. It makes accepting and processing credit card payments a breeze and leaves your customers with a fast checkout process. 

This article takes you through some of the best free and premium WooCommerce Stripe plugins for your store. But first, let’s learn more about the advantages of using Stripe as a payment option for WooCommerce. 

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WooCommerce: 10 Most Popular Free Plugins

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to launch your online business, build high-functionality online stores for your clients, or take your brick-and-mortar store online.  

Powering over 28.19% of all online stores, WooCommerce’s versatility and open-source nature allow businesses to build their dream store, add unlimited products and consumers, take orders, and increase sales.

The core WooCommerce plugin holds 68% of the usage distribution – the highest on the internet. However, despite its popularity, the official WooCommerce plugin lacks several features you might need for your eCommerce store. But to make up for that, it offers several plugins that allow you to enhance your store’s functionality and improve customer experience. 

But choosing from over 4228 WooCommerce plugins from WordPress.org can get overwhelming. So, to make your job easier, we’ve hand-picked the best free WooCommerce plugins you can use on your store to take it to the next level. Let’s dive in!

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WooCommerce: How to Enable WooCommerce Payments

Payments on your eCommerce store are the most important touchpoint between your customers and business sales. Hence, an optimum payment solution that’s seamless, quick, and secure plays a critical role in ensuring a quality customer experience.

Over 17% of customers abandon their carts because of concerns with payment security, and 13% abandon them because the price is in a foreign currency. Thus, it’s vital to choose a payment method that accepts global currencies and ensures a secure checkout – while making the checkout process easy for your customers. 

However, from including digital wallets to third-party payment solutions and managing transactions – choosing a suitable payment solution that facilitates this process for your WooCommerce store can get challenging. This is where WooCommerce Payments comes into the picture. 

In early May 2020, WooCommerce released its new version WooCommerce 4.1, with two new features – including WooCommerce Payments, which provides a simplified way to accept and manage payments in your store. 

This article shares more about WooCommerce Payments, their pros and cons, and an easy way to enable them on your WooCommerce store. 

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WooCommerce: Why Use A Product Configurator Instead of Variations

One of the biggest marketing trends in recent years is the increasing shift towards delivering customized and personalized product experiences to customers. 

Customers are increasingly looking for online and eCommerce stores that provide order customization options for gifting purposes and the ability to add their personal and unique touch to their orders. While 90% of the U.S. customers find the idea of personalization appealing – impersonal shopping experiences frustrate 71% of customers

Thus, as a WooCommerce store owner – it’s important to strive and meet the increasing consumer demands to prevent dissatisfaction, improve their shopping experiences and increase the overall sales.  

This article will see some easy yet impactful ways to deliver a personalized customer experience and order customization. But first, let’s see how it can benefit your WooCommerce store. 

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WooCommerce: Enable Advanced Coupon Features

While as a WooCommerce store owner, you keep looking for ways to increase your store’s sales and revenue – the same way, your customers also consistently look for opportunities to save money when purchasing online.  

And in this situation, offering coupons and discounts acts as a win-win for your business and customers. 

Statistics suggest that 51% of U.S. buyers search for coupons online before making an online purchase, and over 80% of millennials use coupon codes when shopping online. 

Every online shopper loves a good deal. You can tap into this consumer behavior to attract buyers and increase sales through coupons on your WooCommerce store. 

So, in this article, we see the top WooCommerce coupon plugins you can use. But first, let’s learn more about the benefits of offering coupons to your customers. 

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WooCommerce: Retain Field Values @ Checkout Reload

Go to WooCommerce Checkout as a logged out user. Fill out billing name, surname, address, email and phone. Change your mind and go back to Cart. Return to Checkout. Billing name, surname, email and phone (basically everything but the address) are gone!

But hey, this annoying WooCommerce flaw is about to go away with a few lines of code. Either reload the Checkout page or go back to it later – your info will still be there (as long as you haven’t cleared your cache/cookies and the WooCommerce session hasn’t expired of course).

Enhoy!

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