We’re excited to announce the arrival of WooCommerce Bookings Availability, a new add-on extension for WooCommerce Bookings.

A long-time request from users on the ideas board, our team has worked tirelessly over the past few months to make it a reality. We hope this gives Bookings users a new way of marketing their availability while allowing their customers to quickly find a booking that works for their schedule.

What is SCA?

Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)* is a new regulation taking effect on September 14, 2019 that requires merchants to use multiple methods of verifying customers’ identities. To help you comply with the new requirements — and make sure your sales don’t take an unnecessary hit — you can lay the groundwork now.

Starting in September, merchants accepting online payments will need to use two independent authentication methods to verify that a customer is who they say they are.

If you’ve used WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell anything from pet food to nail polish; if you’ve automated your marketing with AutomateWoo; if you’ve tested checkout with Robot Ninja—then you’ve been served by the expertise and passion of the Prospress team.

Today we’re excited to announce that Prospress is joining Automattic to work closely with WooCommerce in creating a more unified subscriptions experience. We’ll also be supporting the continued development of Prospress’s other products.

There will be no change for existing users. Right now, we’re on-boarding, welcoming, and integrating. We will then begin collaborating on roadmaps for the future.

Keep reading below for a Q&A with Prospress Founder Brent Shepherd.

Reading has the power to spark children’s imaginations, transporting them to magical places where anything is possible.

Taking this idea a step further, Bang On Books personalized adventure books fully immerse kids in stories where they become the main character – the hero.

“Bang on” is a colloquial British term describing an item as being perfect or “spot on.”

Founders Simon and Hannah are aware of the impact that hand-crafted artwork and magical storytelling can still have on young minds in this digital, screen-based world.

Coming together to pen original stories for kids aged 2-10, their beautifully illustrated publications are full of fun and good morals, helping little ones fall in love with story time and grow into well-rounded people.

The process is pretty straightforward: Customers choose from several different stories online before customizing them in a three-step process:

• Upload a photo of their child to the “Magic Mirror”
• Pick a lead character, and enter the child’s name
• Write a special dedication, making the story a gift that each child can treasure forever

Simon, Hannah, and the rest of the team don’t only write and illustrate each story, they print, bind, and ship each soft-touch laminated book from the United Kingdom themselves.

With such a unique, customizable, and hands-on product, it’s no surprise that the open-source freedom of WooCommerce was a natural fit for this band of creators.

Read on for our Q&A with Jonathan Young, in-house web developer at Bang On Books.

It’s not easy to stand out on the internet these days. Wildlabs is a small web agency in New Zealand that’s passionate about helping businesses to be, in the truest sense of the word, outstanding.

Flwr is one such online store and business: Artem Verbo of Wildlabs customized WordPress and WooCommerce to create a platform for flwr founder and wife Elena Verbo to showcase her flower studio and sell bespoke bouquets with a special touch of digi-floral magic.

Do you know how to hire the right developer? This is the question VerifyWP shines some light on, with regards to technical WordPress developers.

According to a 2018 US Bank study, bad cash flow management and a poor understanding of accounting and finance are the leading roadblocks to business success.

Feel like you may be part of this statistic? This article aims to expand your knowledge by providing actionable solutions to understand, track, and manage your business accounting – without taking more time out of your day.

WooCommerce provides business owners with a fantastic platform to sell their products, and its customizability allows you to support and automate your business processes like no other. One of the most important of these processes is accounting.

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.

Here are some further details around what’s new in 3.6:

With the release of WooCommerce 3.6 – along with eight new WooCommerce product blocks and a ton of performance upgrades – we’re launching a new feature making it easier for you to find extensions that help grow your store.

Introducing Marketplace Suggestions

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 People Find Products Today?

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.