Running a successful business is tough. There are transactions to track, products to update and restock, new customers to onboard, support tickets to manage—and the list goes on. Plus, with your store open for business 24/7, the pressure is on to deliver a top-notch experience for customers around the clock.

Luckily there’s a way for you to take some of that pressure off. With WooCommerce’s Zapier plugin, you can create Zaps – Zapier lingo for automations – that direct routine tasks to automatically run in the background.

You’ll spend less time entering new customer data, sending personalized emails, and managing tasks, and more time on important projects that matter to you and your customers.

Need ideas on how to get started? Below are three popular ways that business owners are using Zaps to change the way they send emails, interact with customers, and organize data.

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“What got us here won’t get us there… I want to have design leading the way. A lot more user research. A lot more mockups.”
– Matt Mullenweg

At WordCamp US 2016, Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word outlined a vision for WordPress being design-led. Since then, WooCommerce has doubled down on our efforts to follow suit.

From growing our one-person design team to five (and still hiring!) to talking more to our customers — hearing what’s most important to them, and how eCommerce fits into their lives – we’re just getting started on our journey to make this transition, and we’re learning a lot!

Our hope is that you can take some of the lessons we’re learning and apply them to your business, no matter how big or small.

It’s never too soon or too late to start talking to your customers, understanding who they are, and how they made their way to you today.

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Conferences have a few important features, two of them being content and people. Yes, a great venue, beautiful city, and awesome swag all add to it, but at the end of the day it needs to count to invest time and money in going somewhere.

We get this. Excellence has consistently been top priority at WooConfs over the years, and 2017 will be no different.

Our schedule puts the spotlight on the best content delivered by people you’ll be glad you got to spend time with.

Here’s what you can expect at WooConf 2017.

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Sometimes we’re under the impression that finishing a WooCommerce development project is the end of the road, but that’s really just the beginning. When you hand over a site it’s the start of that store’s life cycle and, as a developer, you likely will not be the most important person on the store anymore. The store owner and their customers will be.

At least, they should be.

Upon chatting to a lot of developers, it becomes clear quite fast that it can be challenging to transfer a project successfully. What does that even mean in the first place?

Read on for tips on handing over a store successfully to your customers.

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Until yesterday if you needed to transfer a WooCommerce.com subscription to a client or another WooCommerce.com user you had to submit a ticket and one of our Happiness Engineers would transfer it on your behalf.

But no longer! You can now self-initiate a WooCommerce.com subscription transfer which can then be accepted or rejected by the user you nominate. Read on to learn more.

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Part of the celebrations around our ninth birthday have taken stock of how Woo has evolved and grown over the years.

Because support is a foundational part of our business and service, what better way to pause and review than through the voices of three of our longest serving happiness engineers.

Stuart Duff, Sven Hutchinson, and Daniel Dudzic are out on the front lines of  Woo support each day, helping to solve a wide range of requests and queries for our customers.

All three joined a budding WooThemes at similar times back in 2011, when theming was still the main source of revenue and eCommerce was just a glint in our eye, and had a lot to say about their journey so far, as well as what they feel is essential for someone wanting to take up the task of helping their customers in support.

Read on for what they had to share.

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WooCommerce is used by store owners from all over the world – store owners such as Tshegofatso Tlhong. Tshego is a young woman from Botswana with a strong entrepreneurial spirit, and is also the managing director and founder of Ziigie.com.

We sat down with Tshego to find out more about how WooCommerce is helping her to ship ideas, along with the unique challenges she faces as an eCommerce entrepreneur in southern Africa.

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Imagine you live in a major city but WordPress is virtually unknown. Websites with presence are run by the government, there’s no WordCamp or meetup or startup culture, and people think you make keyboards when you say you’re a computer engineer.

Now imagine that same city five years later. A multitude of diversified voices can be heard via blogs and websites, the most recent WordCamp attracts 300+ attendees, its online WordPress community has 5000+ registered members, at least 10 new WordPress business are born each year, and WooCommerce helps dozens of businesses start in living rooms and garages. And the shift began when everyone said a task was impossible.

This is the story of Kathmandu and Sakin Shrestha.

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Since our 3.0 release in April, we’ve been working on a slew of improvements to make it faster and simpler to get up and running with WooCommerce:

• Save time with the new, built-in import/export feature to add and update product information
• Manage WooCommerce.com subscriptions directly in WooCommerce
• Ship products more easily in the US and Canada by setting up WooCommerce Shipping

Existing stores also have new features to enhance their online storefronts — inline ‘Terms and Conditions’ in checkout, embedded videos and more in short descriptions — and improve their workflow — assigning an order to a customer for payment, updating stock status for all variations at once. And we added search helpers for developers.

That’s a lot!l Let’s dig into details.

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Our annual Golden Ticket Competition picks one lucky person for a trip to WooConf, on us! This year the WooCommerce Developers Conference is in Seattle, and we’re pleased to announce our winner is Kevin Eulenberg. Woo!

Kevin  is a  frontend developer , UX interface designer , co-founder of Froux.co, passionate musician and vinyl lover and, of course, fan of open eCommerce. His story of relaunching Canvasco.de on WooCommerce stood out, and we can’t wait for you to meet him at WooConf in October.

Read on for more about Kevin, his WooCommerce story and why he landed the golden ticket.

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Owning a Cinnabon at the mall means you’re only competing against the cookie store that’s also in that same mall. People who like cinnamon will stop by your store, and people who like oatmeal will probably visit the cookie store. You need not do much marketing because you’re only competing against one or two stores.

It’s very different online — you’re competing against the world. There isn’t just one store that sells a competing product. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, and some have big wallets, such as Amazon and Walmart.

So if you launch your online store and neglect to do any marketing, you lose your customers to established competitors.

Read on for why you need to pick a marketing channel.

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The Gold Coast of Australia is a highly sought-after tourist destination with its sunny sub-tropical climate, perfect beaches, surf culture, and buzzing nightlife.

Tourism aside, it’s a major film production hub and – the home of Thrive, a digital agency integrating WooCommerce beautifully into their clients’ stores.

Read on for our Q&A interview with Thrive’s founder, including why they chose WordPress, some projects they’ve taken on and their advice for people new to WooCommerce.

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WooCommerce Bookings can help you do amazing things, whether your goal is to sell time, accept appointments online, or rent products.

Today we’re shining a light on some creative, fun businesses that are using Bookings to power stores and bring their unique ideas to life — ice cream on demand, yes, please! We’re also excited to announce our new WooBookings Bundle!

Read on to learn four ways this extension is being used out in the wild.

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One of our longtime favorite extensions for WooCommerce is WooCommerce Bookings. It’s packed with functionality that helps businesses of all types function, from agencies to boutiques to restaurants.

But if you’ve never taken a good look at Bookings, you might not realize everything it’s capable of. This powerful extension can do much more than reserve hotel rooms or book appointments for their next haircut. Even better – if you’re setting up a new store it’s available in one of our potent bundles – check out the WooBookings Bundle.

Let’s look at how you can use WooCommerce Bookings to sell your time, organize events, and even rent products — and how these amazing options might translate into more money for your (yes, your) business.

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One of the most common things we hear from customers contacting us for support is that you really, really hate updating your store.

We get it. It’s not fun. It’s kind of nerve-wracking, right? You don’t always know what things are going to look like on the other side of the update.

But updating WooCommerce, its extensions, and WordPress itself doesn’t have to be a pain in the you-know-where. It might never be a pleasant experience, but if you know how to handle it, you can all but eliminate those “my product pages look weird” and “this plugin isn’t working right” experiences.

Today we’re going to show you four ways to better manage updates to your WooCommerce store, and how handling updates in these ways can save you time, keep your store running smoothly, and completely eliminate the pounding headache you seem to get every time you see the phrase “an update is available” in your WordPress dashboard.

Let’s get started.

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Backups — it’s a daunting word, isn’t it? Just hearing it probably makes you think of your valuable time wasted on a bunch of complicated, manual processes involving databases and FTP directories.

But all of this is a myth we’re happy to bust. The truth is this: thanks to modern plugins, it’s now fast and incredibly easy to make backups for WooCommerce — and restore them if the need arises.

You already know you need to be making backups of your store and its data. But what you might not know is how to create and manage those backups without giving yourself a headache.

Today we’re going to show you how. Read on to find out how you can get your store backed up for any situation, and how to properly use backups in the event of an emergency.

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