Expanding into new markets brings great opportunities and sometimes unexpected challenges. Here are some areas to research before deciding the next steps for your business.
Though the world has become more interconnected thanks to the internet, air travel, and other technological advancements, there are still many local cultural, economic, and geographic differences. And while tapping into new markets is important for growing your business, doing it the wrong way can be disastrous.
There are five key considerations for successfully going global: language, infrastructure, payments, legal requirements, and cultural norms.
From closed beta to successfully-funded Kickstarter to start-up with $1 million in funding, Timeular is on a mission to help people track their time and make it count with a multi-sided, customizable device.
Raise your hand if you could do with a little more data on how you spend your days! And read on for our Q&A with Manuel Bruschi, one of Timeular’s founders.
Much has been happening behind the scenes at WooCommerce since the release of 3.5 in October 2018. The team has been working hard on a variety of improvements that are now available in WooCommerce 3.6.
Two key features will make your store load faster and provide a more engaging experience for your customers:
Performance Improvements
WooCommerce Product Blocks
Throughout the build process of WooCommerce 3.6, our team focused heavily on both automated and manual testing, performing in-depth benchmarks of performance across a variety of database sizes.
As with all previous releases, we also ran tests against our extensions and popular themes – we’ve even been running WooCommerce 3.6 right here on WooCommerce.com.
WooCommerce 3.6 is considered a minor release, meaning it should be fully backwards compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0. We still highly recommend you follow best practices and back up your site prior to updating.
Talking to our customers, we know there are a lot of you that set up new stores yourselves and need guidance choosing extensions. There are over 400 extensions in the WooCommerce.com Marketplace, and digging through them all to find what you need can be daunting.
That’s why we’re including Suggestions directly in WooCommerce so you can easily find the extensions that would be helpful on your site.
Our team is proud to announce a ‘feature plugin’ that introduces a new dashboard for WooCommerce from which store owners can manage and monitor all key reporting metrics.
WooCommerce Admin is ready for the world so everyone can start benefiting from new reports, while we continue to build features. This is similar to WooCommerce Product Blocks, which started as a feature plugin and will now be part of WooCommerce core.
Highlighted below are key features of WooCommerce Admin.
Established in 1889, wine brand Brown Brothers have become renowned for not only their vintage wines, but their historic vineyard that hosts countless events for loyal customers. Naturally, the Brown family wanted their company’s online wine store to be just as striking. WooCommerce experts Emote Digital were happy to take on the task.
Alongside the new product blocks available in WooCommerce 3.6, we made a series of performance improvements in the front and back end to speed up performance.
Read on to see how these changes will improve both the management and shopping experience on WooCommerce stores.
Combining content and commerce has long been a benefit of using WooCommerce and WordPress. In WooCommerce 3.6, we are taking this a step further by introducing eight new product blocks that allow insertion of products on any post or page in the store.
What this means is store owners are no longer restricted to only showing products in the product archive and/or on individual product pages – they can now seamlessly integrate content and commerce offerings across their stores on any page.
Note: To use the new product blocks in WooCommerce 3.6, store owners need to be running WordPress 5.0 or higher.
How do you find a specific product you’re looking to purchase? Where do you start? If your answer to either of these questions is Google, continue reading below.
What is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is a platform that allows merchants the opportunity to get their store’s products found when shoppers are searching for them on Google. Unlike traditional Google Search text ads, Shopping ads show an eye catching ad that includes a product image and other valuable info. This gives shoppers a powerful preview to help them make purchase decisions directly as they search.
When Chris Sheldrick started a business organizing live music events, he noticed that people got physically lost all the time. It was so common, frustrating, and bad for business – you can’t afford bands or instruments being late to gigs and festivals! – that he met up with a mathematician friend to come up with a solution.
From a daily frustration came a digital solution for organizing physical presence, now on its way to becoming a global addressing standard: here’s the what3words story.
Restoring old cars is big business. It’s also art! Created by people with the ability to preserve heritage.
Pagoda Classics is a Croatia based car restoration and renovation company. With more than 25 years of experience and over 150 renovated vehicles, they’ve become a synonym for passion, individualism and perfection. CEO Karlo Beštak and his skilled team are devoted to fulfil the highest expectations in restoring classic cars to a better-than-new condition.
As the agency tasked with building their website, our job was to convey that message to the world and create the best possible online experience for their customers. Solution? WooCommerce paired with custom-made photo and video content.
Do your customers tell you that your eCommerce site is a joy to shop? Probably not! While some people really do love online shopping, few rave about the actual buying experience.
We shop for goods and services we need or want. Whether or not we enjoy the shopping experience is partly a personal preference, partly the ability of the merchant to read customers. Unlike brick and mortar store owners, eCommerce businesses don’t have the opportunity to judge body language and see if customers appear satisfied. At best, they can offer real-time or automated chat assistance.
When it comes to the ultimate shopping commitment, brick and mortar stores have it pretty easy. They take the payment, swipe (usually), and bag items small enough to be carried. Customers rarely change their minds and literally abandon a shopping cart once they get in line to buy.
If only eCommerce business owners had it this easy! Instead, they are presented with depressing website statistics that point out cart abandonment and site bounce rates. They don’t have a chance to turn the charm on customers who are about to make a quick exit.
While a creative, thoughtful designer can make an eCommerce site a straightforward and satisfying shopping experience, parting with your money is never fun. But there are ways to make the actual checkout process less of a hassle for customers, and maybe even lower the cart abandonment rate in the process.
Sometimes the best time to check your store isn’t the best time to be at your computer – on a train, in a corridor between meetings, on a beach. Enter the new WooCommerce Mobile App to make store management easier!
The Power of Millennials and Peer Recommendations in eCommerce
In 2019, millennials are looking to social sources for shopping inspiration.
Since 2019 has just kicked off, let’s take a look at the characteristics of one of the most coveted generations of shoppers who could influence your sales this year: millennials. Then, we’ll talk about how small businesses can use this knowledge to help generate brand interest and produce some incremental revenue.
Pricing physical products is easy. You know how much it cost to produce the product, and you base your price on how much profit you want to make. With digital products, it’s a whole different ballgame.
You can’t price your digital product the same way you sell physical products. They’re different beasts altogether. Many new merchants make this mistake, and it costs them, vital customers.
There’s an undeniable allure of digital products. There are no materials (other than digital applications needed, of course), no shipping costs, no manufacturing, no complex storage, etc. You make it once and you sell an unlimited supply.
With so many benefits, it’s easy to see why digital products are becoming a huge trend in eCommerce. So what are people selling? These are the digital products we’ve been seeing all over the web recently:
Online Courses
eBooks
Software
Graphics and Digital Arts
Photography
With so many options, how do you know where to begin when it comes to pricing? The go-to philosophy of pricing physical products doesn’t always translate. Where does that leave your online store?
If you’re trying to break into the world of eCommerce for digital products, you need to get your pricing strategy right. Pricing is one of the famous Four Ps of Marketing, so don’t overlook its role in your business.
Here are six strategies guaranteed to sell your digital product.
