As a small business owner, adapting to your customers’ needs is key to success. The current economic climate is a perfect example — companies have shifted the way they offer services, deliver products, and interact with shoppers practically overnight.

If you sell physical products or food, it’s important to deliver them in a way that’s safe and healthy for you, your employees, and your customers, which may mean modifying your current processes. WooCommerce provides two simple ways to get your products safely into buyers’ hands: USPS package pickup and local pickup.

Running your online store just got a little easier thanks to our new service, WooCommerce Payments: a payment processor, managed right in your WordPress dashboard.

Now everything you need to run your online store is in one place: One login, one customer service department, and one platform to learn.

WooCommerce Payments is also good for your bottom line. Customers can pay for products and services without leaving your site, which means more of them will complete their purchase. That’s a win for your business!

Shipping products successfully is one of the most important parts of the customer experience. Shoppers expect to pay as little as possible for shipping, receive their order quickly, and find all their products in perfect condition.

While there are a lot of moving pieces, shipping doesn’t have to be complicated. Let’s take a step back and define some common shipping terms: carriers, methods, and fulfillment solutions.

TL;DR: A new update is available for WooCommerce! When you’re ready, update via your WordPress Dashboard. To make the process as smooth as possible, view our documentation on how to update, make a backup, update your extensions, and then update WooCommerce.

WooCommerce 4.1 has arrived! This release represents the next step in our mission to democratize commerce. In March we released WooCommerce 4.0, which brought major changes both aesthetically and under-the-hood, and provided a glimpse into the future of WooCommerce. Going forward, we will be releasing updates for WooCommerce every 4 weeks — striving to: 

• Create a powerful, usable WooCommerce experience for store owners,
• Build an extensible, customizable WooCommerce core platform for our developer ecosystem,
• Expand the WooCommerce.com marketplace to support the discovery and sale of extensions, and
• Support the WooCommerce Community of developers, builders, agencies, freelancers, and store owners.

We are excited to announce the next step in our journey: WooCommerce 4.1 —This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with WooCommerce 4.0.

Here’s what’s new: 

It’s always a treat to sit down with entrepreneurs from the WooCommerce community. They come from every walk of life but have one thing in common: a commitment to helping people grow their businesses.

Cody Landefeld lives in Phoenix, Arizona, where he’s the Director of Mode Effect, a digital agency specializing in WooCommerce and WordPress. Cody started the agency in 2010, after more than a decade in the industry, and now heads a team of designers, developers, strategists, and copywriters.

Cody gave us a peek into his life as a business leader, Twitter junkie, family man, vinyl collector, Christian, and sneakerhead. Cody has a cool job and varied set of interests, so we didn’t just want to talk about Woo; we chatted about his professional and personal tech stacks — the software, apps, podcasts, and social media platforms he leverages to make his life more efficient, fun, and inspired.

Whether you sell products and services online or have a physical location, you’re likely looking for ways to increase revenue. People are currently staying home and looking for new hobbies or ways to improve themselves. One smart way to make money while you also stay safely at home is by selling online courses.

Online courses are a great solution for any business that can teach a new skill: cooking, exercising, painting, playing an instrument, writing, meal prepping, and more. Since courses don’t require physical product development or shipping, they’re affordable, fast to create, and can generate passive income for years to come. 

But how do you sell online courses and make sure that they’re the right fit for your business?

As more people have been shopping online to support local businesses and fulfill their needs, the avalanche of orders can strain eCommerce companies — even those that have been around for a long time. 

With a few WooCommerce extensions, shop owners can avoid stress while keeping customers happy and informed. By Automating as much as possible and setting order limits, you can continue to provide excellent service without creating a backlog, confusing customers, or overworking employees.

People are shopping online more than ever, and shipping providers around the world are still operating. If you can safely package and ship products — or deliver services virtually — your business can survive, and even thrive! 

To help businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, Google is giving away $340 million in free Google Ads credits to small businesses that have used their platform since the beginning of 2019. You can redeem the credits any time through the end of 2020 and use them for all types of ads — search, display, YouTube, and Google Shopping.

Find answers to frequently asked questions here and check your Google Ads account for details specific to you.

To help even more, shops in the U.S. can now list their products on Google Shopping for free!

With COVID-19 causing many food businesses to close their doors, some are quickly adapting to support their employees, generate income, and deliver quality products and services to customers. It may seem overwhelming to suddenly move business models and operations online, but WooCommerce makes it doable for companies of any size.

Let’s take a look at how four small businesses used WooCommerce and WordPress to quickly and successfully shift to respond to the changing market.

With many businesses unable to operate offline, it’s more important than ever to have an online presence. You need a way to update loyal customers, bring in additional revenue (especially if your storefront is closed), and offer new options like virtual services or pickup scheduling. And you don’t have a lot of time — or money — to do it.

WooCommerce is a no-cost, fully-customizable Ecommerce tool for WordPress, the free website-building platform. It was designed to meet the needs of store owners regardless of technical expertise, so anyone can get a store up and running. And if you do run into any questions, there’s extensive documentation available along with a stellar support team.

Let’s take a look at how to create an online store in five steps.

If your offline business has been affected by stay-at-home orders or closures and you need to start selling online quickly, there’s good news:

WooCommerce has partnered with GoDaddy to help you move your business online for just $1.

GoDaddy’s WordPress Ecommerce hosting plan is priced at just $1 for your first three months to help small businesses like yours start selling online. And after the initial three-month period, it’s still only $29.99 a month — a bargain for the level of support and power you get.

You’ll also receive a bundle of 34 WooCommerce extensions – worth more than $1,000 – so you can build your online store exactly how you want.

To claim this offer, click here to head over to GoDaddy.

COVID-19 has many small business owners and their customers worried and confused. You might be tempted to limit communication with your audience because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. But now is not the time to go quiet. Your clientele needs to hear from you — not just now, but at any time of crisis. 

Your community wants clear information about new policies, programs, order statuses, shipping delays, and any sources of help. And new customers need to know if your business is open and if inventory is available.

There’s been an amazing outpouring of support for small and local business, and your repeat customers will sustain you during the shutdown period. While we might be isolating ourselves, there’s no need to isolate your business; you just need to take a closer look at your messaging.

If you’re looking to add a new revenue stream to your offline business because of the recent economic disruption caused by COVID-19, the clear choice is to start selling online. These days, many people are eager to support local and small businesses, from retail to restaurants to professional services. To give these potential patrons a way to buy your products online while they shelter-in-place, what you need is WooCommerce.

If you already have a WordPress site, WooCommerce is the seamless, trusted solution you’ve been looking for. Get ready to have some fun and, more importantly, to grow your business or give it some much-needed relief. 

As a WooCommerce store owner, you not only need to find new customers, but you need to make the most of the ones you have. You know you’ve got great products, but it often takes more than just great products to keep customers coming back to buy more.

The world’s going through significant changes and your customers have a lot of distractions and concerns. This doesn’t mean that you should go quiet; instead, it’s more important than ever to follow up with customers. They’ll appreciate the reminder or hearing a brief message from you. 

Fortunately, with AutomateWoo, you can create automated email workflows that will lead people back to your WooCommerce site again and again.

It’s always important to truly understand your customers. What do their day-to-day lives look like? What problems does your product or service solve for them? Why did they choose you over a competitor? 

This is especially true during periods of rapid change or uncertainty in the market and around the world. Your customers’ lives may look very different than they did even a few months ago. Knowing this about your customers will allow your store to adapt to changing needs and enjoy continued success.

When someone purchases from your store, you have the opportunity to communicate with your customer in a way that both delights them and makes them more likely to buy from you again.

According to advisory firm Bain & Company, increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%. Why? Because it’s anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than to keep current ones. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources finding new customers — you just have to keep existing ones happy.

Convincing someone to make their first purchase can be difficult, but once they’ve started doing business with you, they’re much more likely to come back. This is called the “foot in the door” philosophy, and it’s why post-sale emails are so effective.

Here are seven ways to engage customers with email after a sale. Best of all, you can automate these emails to nurture customer relationships (and repeat purchases!) with minimal time on your part.