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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We’re hosting a conference this October for WooCommerce developers, the one and only WooConf! In fact early bird tickets went on sale just last week.

Our theme for this year is open eCommerce, and in the spirit of the gathering we’re running our golden ticket competition for the third time. One lucky person will win a paid trip to join us at WooConf for two days of talks, workshops, and learning.

In 2014 Sinisa from OVER Clothing won the golden ticket and joined us in San Francisco. Last year Steven Sashen of Xero Shoes and Chris from Advantage Learn were joint winners and made it all the way to Austin.

Perhaps this time it’ll be you who we see in Seattle? Read on to find out how you can enter.

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The last two WooCommerce Conferences were a treat, bringing the WooCommerce community to San Francisco and then Austin for multiple days of talks, workshops, and invaluable impromptu chats between sponsors, developers, and our support team.

We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing WooConf back for a third round in October 2017, this time in Seattle, Washington. And with this iteration we’re narrowing our focus to provide the best experience we can for developers, from agency owners to freelancers.

Keep reading to get more details on this year’s WooConf, plus find out how you can save $200 by buying your ticket now.

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It’s National Small Business Week here in the United States, a seven day period where we celebrate small businesses and all they do. Over half of Americans own or work for a small business, and about two thirds of the country’s new jobs come from them every year.

This week is a reminder for us that there’s more work to be done to support small businesses. Having a free, open-source platform and hundreds of extensions and integrations is definitely a step in the right direction. But we’re always looking for ways to do more for you and your business.

With that in goal mind, today we’re happy to announce PayPal Business in a Box, a brand new program from PayPal that’s designed to help small business owners quickly start or grow an online store.

Read on to learn what Business in a Box is, what’s included in the “box,” and how it can help you get your own small business up and running.

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Who doesn’t like spring? The sun is shining, birds are singing, and the flowers and trees are at their brightest. (Although if you have allergies, that last bit might not make the season seem so nice.)

It’s spring for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and we’re celebrating all it brings by collecting marketing extensions that will put a little bit of the season into your store.

From tools that help you grow your sales to extensions that will spruce up your product pages, here are twelve ways you can bring new life to any WooCommerce store.

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At WooCommerce we’re passionate about the idea of eCommerce being open. By that we mean open to all budgets and an array of development skill levels, open to all locations, and open to everything from the simplest to most customized business ideas you can throw at it.

Today we’re proud to announce Facebook for WooCommerce, a free integration that opens up Facebook’s audience of more than 1 billion people to Woo store owners. It’s a significant step in our quest to democratize commerce on WordPress.

Read on to learn more about the two powerful ways this extension helps grow businesses.

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