If you’ve spent precious minutes in a supermarket trying to decipher which variety of near-identical dry pet food is right for your dog – and even if you haven’t – you’ll appreciate the simplicity of Scratch.

Founded by Mike Halligan and Doug Spiegelhauer in early 2018, this thoughtful Australian startup has three audacious goals: eliminate the guesswork, bureaucracy, and secrecy that dogs the pet food industry, to make customers smile, and to save the planet while they’re at it. And they do it all with WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions.

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Buyers today can choose products from nearly any place in the world, but language barriers still introduce friction into the online shopping experience.

One solution to this problem is a multilingual eCommerce store, where vendors can sell their products on the international market.

But how do you create a multilingual eCommerce store, and which eCommerce platform is the right one to build it on?

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Website performance is an essential aspect of web design that is often overlooked by agencies.  If your site responds and delivers content very quickly, you’ll receive many benefits – including an increase in conversions and better rankings in Google.

At Herdl, we fully appreciate the benefits that high performance can offer across multiple marketing channels and consider performance optimization an integral part of our process.

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If you’re based in the United States, get ready to expand internationally. Shipping internationally just got easier, faster, and cheaper: You can now print international USPS labels right in WooCommerce with WooCommerce Shipping.

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“Should I be selling on Amazon or through my own online store?”.

This is a common question asked by online sellers. The answer? Both.

Today, successful online sellers are those that are reaching out to meet their customers everywhere they shop online, embracing multi-channel selling and giving their products as many chances as possible to be seen, bought and loved by more customers and there’s no better way to get started than by adding Amazon to your channel mix.

Whether you’re just starting out or you already have your own successful online store, here are five reasons why you should consider selling on Amazon.

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Using the powerful WooCommerce platform, we’ve helped a host of businesses improve their existing stores and increase their online revenues.

We’ve also had a number of companies that have come to us for brand new sites in order to build their eCommerce presence from the ground up. Such was the case with Nuria Beauty, a worldly skincare brand dedicated to supporting girls’ education.

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In all the productivity and preparation for the holiday season, some important elements of your business can be overlooked. Over in WooCommerce.com Happiness, we identified four focal areas — two physical, two technical — that can sometimes cause a few bumps in the road, and put a checklist together to keep you covered.

So, here are the four areas to watch over in order to keep your store running smoothly this holiday season.

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Since our last minor release in May, we’ve been working on a variety of improvements to WooCommerce:

• REST API v3
• Improved copy for transactional emails

To ensure this update is stable, we’ve been doing plenty of testing and QA on our side including a public beta period, unit and integration testing, compatibility testing with our extensions and popular premium themes, running the latest version on WooCommerce.com, and working with customers to do managed updates.

WooCommerce 3.5 is a minor release, meaning it should be fully backwards compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0. However, it’s still considered best practice, and recommended, to backup before updating.

Here are some more details about what’s new in 3.5:

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Lots of posts about eCommerce over the holidays encourage you to get started early. We’ve published a number of these ourselves!

But the good news is it’s never too late to set up a sale, discount, or deal in your store. As long as the holidays are still happening, you can take a few minutes to get in on the holiday action.

Try these last-minute holiday sale ideas now, next month, or the next time a holiday rolls around.

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Once the holidays are over, you can breathe a long sigh of relief. Things can finally settle down and go back to normal, right?

Well… not exactly. With projected record-setting holiday sales come record-breaking returns in January and February. This past year, UPS alone expected to process 6 million returns in the week after Christmas.

After the holidays end, your top priority needs to be satisfying the customers who have ill-fitting, unsuitable, or defective merchandise that they’d like to send back to you. An estimated 25 to 30 percent of online purchases are sent back! This means you have to have a plan to handle post-holiday returns — and handle them so well that these gift recipients turn into bonafide customers.

Let’s take a look at how you can handle these returns and exchanges smoothly. We’ll start with what you can do now, before the season starts, to get your website ready. Then we’ll look at how to properly handle returns and unhappy giftees.

Ready? Let’s get a move on.

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Retailers acquire between 29% and 59% more customers during the holiday period, making the season make-or-break for you or your client’s year.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is this: can your site handle the increase in traffic? As an on-demand WooExpert, we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, when it comes to optimized sites, and we want to help you avoid the latter two.

There is no simple cure-all solution, but we’ve assembled a list of 6 proactive improvements you can make to your store right now. The more people that hit your site, the more noticeable the effect of these optimizations will be.

Let’s get started.

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When it comes to online shopping, the holiday season reigns supreme. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and general Christmas shopping, more people are going online to buy gifts for their friends and family. In fact, last holiday season, online shopping generated a record-setting $108.2 billion in revenue—almost a 15% increase from the 2016 holiday season.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of online shopping, you’d think running an eCommerce site was pretty easy, right? After all, nobody wants to deal with crowded malls and holiday traffic when they can order from the comfort of their own home.

But as the store owner, your job extends beyond helping the customer during their shopping journey. A large portion of your work should be spent not just attracting new customers, but also creating marketing and engagement campaigns that strengthen relationships with existing ones. And one of the best ways to boost retention rates is through post-purchase email marketing.

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If you run an online store, shipping is the one area where everything you do becomes tangible to your customer. At no time is this more critical to a positive customer experience than the holidays, when the product your customer is touching is likely to be a gift from a friend or family member.

But there are obstacles. If you don’t prepare, you can ruin someone’s holiday with a late or damaged shipment. Holidays offer opportunities to build your brand, increase customer loyalty, and acquire new customers…but they also offer benefits that will improve your bottom line.

The best way to ensure your business’s success is to learn how to prepare for some of the most common holiday shipping issues. In this post, we’ll cover how you can get ready for everything from lost shipments to weather delays to the general rush caused by an increase in packages.

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Customer service during the holidays is both an immense challenge and a huge opportunity. Retailers who deliver consistent, high quality service to their holiday customers can turn once-off purchasers into loyal return customers.

Here’s how to set your team up for holiday support success.

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Can you smell gingerbread, cinnamon, and pine? Or fruity fragrance of mulled wine?

While it might be a little early for these Christmas scents, the holiday shopping season in retail is already underway with eager shoppers getting started as early as September.

Last year’s online sales over the holidays hit a new record: In 2017, customers spent $108 billion online during the holiday season, which was 14.7% more than in 2016.

If you’re running an online store, here are some tips on how to make the most of increased holiday traffic with live chat.

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The holiday shopping season is a busy time for consumers, with a lot of eyeballs staring at computers and phones, researching gifts, and looking for the best deals online.

Even with increased competition and decreased organic reach, social media is still key for getting the attention of your potential customers. But, without a solid plan, success may pass your company by.

Here are eight steps for planning a holiday campaign across your social media channels, so that by the time the holidays arrive you can kick your feet back and enjoy a little more time with family.

Get ready to flex your creative genius!

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