6 new WooCommerce extensions and updates to 2 old favorites

Written by James Koster on May 23, 2013 Product News.

new-toys

Today we’re excited to announce 4 new gateways including PayU Turkey which is our first Turkish gateway. There’s also Minimum Advertised Price – perfect if you work with manufacturers that put restrictions on how pricing can be displayed on your WooCommerce store. PDF Product Vouchers which allows you to customize and sell downloadable PDF vouchers for products such as tours, events, classes & lessons. And finally, updates to our popular Product Add-Ons and Product CSV Import Suite extensions.

Buy now $79.00

Pin Payments Payment Gateway

Allows you to use Australian-based Pin Payments as a credit card processor without a bank merchant account

Buy now $129.00

PDF Product Vouchers

Customize and sell downloadable PDF vouchers for specific products or store credit.

Buy now $79.00

Paya for WooCommerce (formerly Sage Payments USA)

Give your customers the option to pay via Paya (formerly Sage Payments USA) at your WooCommerce store.

Major updates: Product-Add Ons 2.0 & CSV Import Suite 1.3

Product Add-Ons get’s a huge update including a new interface, global addons (add addons globally for all products, or products in a category), new inputs such as custom price inputs, live price display and other enhancements.

Screen Shot 2013-05-23 at 13.29.09
Enhanced add-ons interface

Product CSV Import Suite gets a nice performance/usability update including a brand new progress indicator, and the use of AJAX to overcome issues with memory usage and timeouts.

Both updates are now available.

Buy now $59.00

Product CSV Import Suite

Import, merge, and export products and variations to and from WooCommerce using a CSV file.

cta-banner-10-product-page-v2_2x

30 Responses

  1. Nathan Corbier
    May 23, 2013 at 3:56 pm #

    Its good to hear that the CSV Product Import Suite now uses AJAX, we’ve had issues in the past with the existing one and large product tables hitting the PHP time out. I loathe to turn that all the way up to unlimited, but sometimes its required to get everything in.

    At least we import to a development site that’s locked down via VPN.

    • mac-d
      May 24, 2013 at 1:43 pm #

      Yes… We have timeout issues also. Cant wait to test it.

  2. DianaHeuser
    May 23, 2013 at 4:04 pm #

    Loving the idea of PDF Product Vouchers.

  3. Chris
    May 23, 2013 at 5:02 pm #

    “Minimum Advertised Price” is cool, but it seems like it should just be a part of WooCommerce, rather than an extension. Kudos to the developer though. I’ve had to pay someone to custom-code a WooCommerce store for this functionality in the past. I wish we had some more screenshots to see how it functions.

    • maxrice
      May 23, 2013 at 5:23 pm #

      Hey Chris, there’s more screenshots available on the docs page: http://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-minimum-advertised-price/ 🙂

    • Ryan Ray
      May 23, 2013 at 8:40 pm #

      Our focus is always to keep the core as sparse as possible. It may be that not many people need a Minimum Advertised Price, but we of course see where you are coming from. It can be a tough call.

      It seemed more appropriate to have that functionality in an extension, an easy and quick add-on if needed. 🙂

    • James Koster
      May 24, 2013 at 10:08 am #

      Yup, just to echo Ryans comments, there’s no way the vast majority of WooCommerce stores require this functionality. So we feel releasing it as an extension is justified.

  4. weatherstation
    May 23, 2013 at 5:20 pm #

    I wish for short demo videos of every plugin/extension that highlights both the customers view and how it looks and works for us behind the scenes.

    • Ryan Ray
      May 23, 2013 at 8:41 pm #

      That would be the ideal goal, but it’s very hard for us to keep up video production at the pace of all our developers (3rd party and more) development of extensions.

      It takes quite a bit of time to prepare a video for each extension, I’d love to have that done though!

      • weatherstation
        May 24, 2013 at 9:44 am #

        I’m not talking Hollywood production…more like capturing the screen while using the extension. Ideally with narration, but I can live without that.
        As long as I can see how it works before buying it.

        Couldn’t be so hard to manage.

        Or, would it be possible for Woo to set up a “webshop” with all Your extensions working, where we can try them and see how it looks for our customers?

        • James Koster
          May 24, 2013 at 10:14 am #

          I’m not talking Hollywood production…more like capturing the screen while using the extension. Ideally with narration, but I can live without that.

          Even that takes time to create. And then there is the issue of having to update the video every time the extension/WordPress/WC is updated to keep it up to date. Imagine having to update 150+ videos O_O

          I think it’s best that videos are the responsibility the individual extension authors. Brent for example does an excellent job with his Subscriptions video(s).

  5. Chuck
    May 23, 2013 at 7:07 pm #

    What about subscriptions allowing multiple products?

    • thenbrent
      May 24, 2013 at 6:58 am #

      That’s still a ways off sorry Chuck.

  6. farrel
    May 24, 2013 at 1:21 am #

    The voucher plugin looks interesting and I’d like to buy it, but it should be compatible with variable products too. What happens if you have one course with 3 different options?

    Is the developer going to make it work with variable products?

    • woothemes@skyverge.com
      May 24, 2013 at 10:10 pm #

      Hey Farrel, it is somewhat compatible with product variations, just at the moment it assumes that all the variations have the same images/input fields for simplicity. Full variation support is on the roadmap and we’ll schedule it in based on the popularity of the plugin and the demand for it. Thanks for letting us know that this is something important for you!

  7. Frenkie
    May 24, 2013 at 7:34 am #

    I agree with Chris above. Most of these (paid!) extensions should be part of the core functionality of woocommerce. Of course this is your business model, giving something what appears to be for free (woocommerce itself) turns out to get a premium price if you add up all the costs of the extensions which a professional shop should have in the first place. Because you notice these gaps later on and you buy one extension at the time it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you look up your account it’s a different story.

    Also, a few days ago i worked with opencart for the first time and i couldn’t believe what i was seeing. Such a smooth and (even more important) fast experience while the package was running on a shitty hosting platform. I got even more excited when i saw the backend, which is really, really easy to use (means a lot less questions from clients). It’s just so obvious that the opencart platform is really build for ecommerce, and ecommerce alone. And that’s where you (at this stadium) see the difference compared to wordpress with woocommerce.

    Enough whining for today, was just a little negatively surprised when i saw all this opencart functionality and wanted to spit it out… Your doing a great job though, but there seems to be a long road ahead!

    • James Koster
      May 24, 2013 at 10:22 am #

      Don’t forget that WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. Not a dedicated eCommerce platform.

      Apples ‘n Oranges, and all that.

      • Leo
        June 4, 2013 at 11:04 am #

        Hi James. That’s true. But for folks trying to build an extensive catalog, could we still be on Woo? I’ve asked you before and you said that being a WP extension doesn’t make WooCommerce any less viable compared to dedicated shopping carts.

        Now, how do we ensure that WC becomes the leading shopping cart in terms of functionality and performance as compared to Opencart, Big Commerce, Shopify and the likes of TicTail? 🙂

        Btw, am loving the Superstore theme, but wish we’ve more professional looking themes soon, something along the likes of Shopify or like those on ThemeForest?

        Appreciate the awesome job James! And the Woo team as well! 🙂

    • aronwp
      May 24, 2013 at 10:51 pm #

      opencart has an extension store too. Depending on your needs it’s also cheaper to develop custom extensions for woocommerce than opencart due to the WordPress community.

      Anyways I agree that woo needs to add more features into woocommerce core rather than third party extensions. This will make the features more compatible with each other since its all suppose to work together and built by woo and not 3rd party devs. I can also see the need for 3rd party devs since they create the cool stuff most of the time. I guess it’s a tug of war with the business model since the end goal is always the profit. We have had more than a few cases where extensions dont play well together and we had to fix the code ourselves since it would be quicker than support. Some better QA with all the extensions installed on a test server would probably fix the issues. Especially if the test server was available for customers to preview the features with a bug report popup.

      I still cant understand why woo wont setup live previews of the extensions. Its a basic practice of most WordPress plugins. How bout having the 3rd party devs setup the demo site as a requirement if woo does not want to deal with the setup.

      Aronwp

    • raison
      May 30, 2013 at 3:48 pm #

      The extensions are not overpriced in our experience.

    • Leo
      June 4, 2013 at 11:14 am #

      Hey Frenkie! We also considered Opencart before deciding on Woocommerce, mainly because of the following

      1) Opencart is developed by 1 guy in Hong Kong. Within the past year, it has only gone from 1.4 or 1.5x to 1.5x. Thus, not much improvements nor supports

      2) Premium themes have no guarantee that they’ll work with new versions 😮 even if we hire a designer, the theme might not work on new versions?

      3) we were on Vaultpress, which stored hundreds and thousands of images of our website and database. And it only works for WordPress, of which WC is the leader. Opencart doesn’t have that

      4) We’re now on WP Engine, which has 1 click backup and 1 click restore. Only for WordPress too. If our store grows, we just need to upgrade our package with WPE. On the other hand, if we’re on Opencart, or Prestashop / Magento, this isn’t possible 🙁

      5) WordPress has plugins that compliments WC, like Joost’s WP Seo, which costs about USD 100 in Opencart and the likes of the competitors. Add in things like Gravity Forms / Formidable Forms and such, and WordPress + WooCommerce becomes an awesome solution

      Our worries are :
      1) Will the SQL database grow too big if we’ve tens of thousands of products?
      2) if we keep purchasing extensions, will the website have a lag from delay?

  8. weatherstation
    May 24, 2013 at 10:03 am #

    PDF Product vouchers.

    I may be stupid or something..

    Can I use the extension to work like this:

    Grandmother buys a voucher (in our clothes webshop) for her newly born granddaughter, sends it to the childs mother which finds a beautiful dress to buy from our webshop. Proceeding to checkout and enter the unique code from voucher and “pays” the order with voucher.

    Does it work like that?

    The unique voucher code. You state that it is sequential. Is there any randomly generated segment in that code? Or is it possible for a customer to guess another voucher code by looking at their own code?

    With a working demo, or short video showing how it works I would have figured the answers out myself… When writing documentation it is easy to leave out what is obvious for You that have made the ext.

    • jstern81
      May 24, 2013 at 10:40 pm #

      hey, thanks for the questions. Regarding using the voucher to pay for a later order; you can’t currently do it but that’s a great idea and I’ve added it to our roadmap for a future release.

      The unique voucher code is simply sequential at this time, though we can add the ability to customize that in the next release. Granted there’s not a whole lot a customer could do by guessing the next voucher code, as these are more meant to be presented off-line and in person, but when we implement the coupon idea you mentioned, we would generate a totally unique, randomized code to be used so nobody could guess it.

    • ztalk112
      June 3, 2013 at 12:50 am #

      +1 for this functionality (including unique voucher codes).

  9. mac-d
    May 24, 2013 at 1:54 pm #

    ==Minimum Advertised Price==
    “If you work with manufacturers that put restrictions on how pricing can be displayed on your WooCommerce store, this extension is the solution to your problem.”

    Guys, we also work with manufacturers that put restrictions on what country (countries) products can be sold too. And we have products with and without restrictions in the same shop. And its ok… its www e-shopping. But now with all extensions you offer we cant make it work on the same shop, We can only set Shop countries restrictions but not product country restrictions,
    Would you please consider creation such extension to make it possible, It would be ok to have it for $99 per site… ’cause shop-owners who really need it understand how helpful it definitely is!

  10. Nuno Morgadinho
    May 29, 2013 at 1:47 pm #

    We have several woocommerce custom plugins that we developed for our customers. Is it possible to talk and be considered to sell our extensions in the WooCommerce extension marketplace?

    • Leo
      June 4, 2013 at 11:00 am #

      Hi Nuno, guess you’ve to apply with Woo? 🙂 would be great to see more extensions as it matures the WooCommerce platform to something comparable to Shopify / BigCommerce / OS Commerce.

      It’s interesting though that most ecommerce gurus, including Andrew Bleakley doesn’t consider WooCommerce as something viable if you’ve a 10k products store or even more, 30k. Every one seems to be recommending BC or Shopify.

      We’ve invested in about 40 extensions and will continue to add. But will WC be a BC competitor in the long run?

  11. bexxie
    June 6, 2013 at 5:34 pm #

    OMG global product add-ons?? Yay! *does happy dance* I’ve been waiting for this for ages. Thanks WooThemes team!

  12. monteyn
    June 7, 2013 at 3:56 pm #

    Bought PDF Product Vouchers extension ($ 99) few days ago. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Even worse = no help provided. =(

  13. Chris @ClickWebDesign
    June 10, 2013 at 2:16 am #

    PDF Product Vouchers! That’s awesome, I have had that featured requested by a client:)