The most customizable eCommerce platform for building your online business. Get started today for free.
March 12, 2019 - 9 Comments
When Chris Sheldrick started a business organizing live music events, he noticed that people got physically lost all the time. It was so common, frustrating, and bad for business – you can’t afford bands or instruments being late to gigs and festivals! – that he met up with a mathematician friend to come up with a solution.
From a daily frustration came a digital solution for organizing physical presence, now on its way to becoming a global addressing standard: here’s the what3words story.
October 11, 2018 - 14 Comments
Subscriptions can be a fantastic gift option, and with the new WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting a customer can easily share their love for your store with their friends and family this holiday season.
My parents are both in their eighties and are notoriously hard to buy presents for. Giving them anything remotely technological results in a Christmas Day filled with exclamations of ‘How do you turn it on again?’ or ‘What! What! It’s broken!’ So most years Mum just gets her normal gardening gear and Dad gets a bottle of gin; they each have their own interests 😉
However, one year I won the ‘best gift’ award.
Historic houses are my parents’ one joint love. While my budget is yet to stretch to buying them the real Downton Abbey, a monthly subscription to the organization that runs sites of interest in the UK, the National Trust, was within reach. So my parents could go any time and visit as many places as they wished. They loved it.
I felt pretty smug with my inspired gift idea back then, but now a subscription is a unique gift that any online store can provide – for any person, of any age.
It is a great way to stand out in the busy holiday market and give customers a chance to give something a little bit special. Also, the investment you made in getting your customers to go to your store for their holiday shopping pays dividends throughout the year. You have the chance to create the on-going relationship a subscription gets, so both you, the customer and the recipient continue to benefit, long after the heartburn from holiday overindulgence has faded. A subscription may not necessarily be for life – but it is not just for a moment either!
So WooCommerce Subscriptions allows you to create a holiday gift that lasts all year, and with WooCommerce Subscriptions Gifting it’s now possible for one person to buy a subscription product for somebody else.
Customers can choose to purchase subscriptions for others by entering the recipient’s email on the product page, cart, or checkout.
April 10, 2018 - 12 Comments
“I’m building a membership site.”
Those five words can have drastically different meanings. A membership site can mean many things, including:
There are a lot of different models for a membership site, so it can be difficult to know how you should set it up. What types of setups are possible? What tools are available for your desired setup?
To determine what setup is best for your WordPress membership site, you’ll need to define what your site should do, how you interact with members, and what the interaction between members looks like.
June 6, 2017 - 13 Comments
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.
May 30, 2017 - 14 Comments
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.
January 23, 2017 - 9 Comments
Resources are limited for many nonprofit organizations. It’s crucial for these companies to do their best work while making the most of what they have.
Since WooCommerce is free to use, open source, and works with WordPress, it’s the platform of choice for many nonprofits. WooCommerce lets these businesses accept donations online, sell products to support their cause, or both.
Building a robust, fully functional nonprofit website with WooCommerce isn’t hard — but you have to know what you really need. Which extensions will increase your donations, spread the word about your cause, and get more people involved with your organization? You don’t want to spend money on something only to find out it won’t help.
In thise post, we’ve collected seven extensions that we think will help nonprofits using WooCommerce be more successful online. Keep reading to find out what they are and how you can start using them now.
November 11, 2016 - 12 Comments
You want, we’re sure, every customer who purchases a product from your store to have an enjoyable shopping experience. You want to avoid broken links, slow pages, and abandoned carts.
The stakes get even higher for the shoppers who aren’t just browsing, but are creating the products they plan to purchase. Custom-created or personalized products can increase sales dramatically, but with their presence comes a need for product pages that go above and beyond the standard image gallery and add to cart button.
Whether you’re already selling products with optional personalization or are considering adding some custom creations for your store, we thought a little inspiration might prove useful. And, thanks to the WooCommerce Showcase, inspiration is never hard to find.
Here’s a look at three stores with some amazing customization options on their product pages, plus tips and extensions that will help you pull this off on your own store.
September 20, 2016 - 5 Comments
Towards the end of last year I happened upon a massive traffic jam caused by cab drivers who’d climbed out of their vehicles to gridlock central London protesting Uber. Similar protests took place in France and mostly recently in Indonesia. Why the fuss?
Disruption by the sharing economy.
You can rue the day someone bumps you out of the market with their great idea, but you can’t stop them by simply shaking a fist.
A shift in societal values and advances in technology birthed this new way of doing business, and it’s shaking up established practices. The teenage tech wizards with their laptops and bright ideas are coming, and no one can afford to sit back and smile derisively.
Interested in learning more about the shared economy and the implications for eCommerce?
The world has revealed its voracious appetite for the sharing-based economy, and here’s where this gets interesting for WooCommerce store owners: the means of despatch is most frequently eCommerce.
If you’ve got an online store, there is a way that the sharing economy will or could impact your business. Maybe you need to shape up so you don’t get disrupted, maybe there is a missed opportunity — either way, it’s worth your attention.
Read on as we take a deep dive into the evolution of the sharing economy with lessons from pioneers in the fashion industry, tips for capitalising on opportunity and mitigating risk for consumer goods, and how to apply these learnings to your own store.
September 2, 2016 - 11 Comments
When we say you can sell anything with WooCommerce, we really do mean anything. Physical products, digital goods, monthly subscriptions, content available only to paying members, event tickets, bookings for hotels or even your time — it’s all possible.
We occasionally stumble across stores that have taken this sell-anything-anywhere philosophy to a new level. Sometimes they’re using one of our extensions in a clever or unexpected way. Sometimes what they’re selling is unusual, smart, or just makes us shout “wow!” at our screens.
To give you a little inspiration (or perhaps an idea for a holiday gift?), we’ve gathered up ten WooCommerce-powered stores selling awesome and unusual things. And believe me — it was hard to choose only ten!
Have a look at how these ten stores are taking WooCommerce to the next level, delighting their customers, and offering something you can’t find anywhere else.
August 25, 2016 - Leave a comment
Selling electronics online is fun, you have to admit. Adding the newest and best technology to your store and watching customers scoop it up, thinking about what they’re going to accomplish with it, imagining their happy faces when they open the box — how can you not grin at that?
Still, it’s a challenge to get your store to the point where you’re selling to enough of those happy customers. There are a lot of things you can do to market your electronics or spread the word about your shop, but sometimes it all comes down to adding more helpful content.
There are a few basic pages that you can add to your consumer electronics store to drive more interest, increase purchases, and boost customer happiness. You might already have some of these pages, in fact! But some of them might be brand new to you, and worth pulling into your lineup.
Let’s take a look at the pages we recommend for electronics stores, and how a few real WooCommerce stores are using them in awesome and interesting ways.
August 22, 2016 - 20 Comments
According to the most recent report from BuiltWith, 39% of all eCommerce sites are powered by WooCommerce and WordPress — over 1.5 million active stores. Add in the usage of additional eCommerce platforms powered by WordPress and the CMS’s own 17.6 million live sites (over 26% of the entire internet!), and, well… that’s a lot of sites.
Developers and store builders don’t just choose to work with WordPress because it’s free (although it is) or because “everyone else is using it” (although they are). There are some pretty convincing reasons why WordPress has climbed to the top of the charts, and why WooCommerce has soared in popularity right along with it.
Stores backed by WordPress have multiple advantages over those on other platforms. And these advantages allow them to work faster, spend less money, and ultimately become more successful than their counterparts.
Let’s take a look at a few convincing reasons why shops running on WordPress have a competitive edge — and why you should join their ranks, if you’re not already among them. 🙂
July 21, 2016 - Leave a comment
A person’s home is a very personal thing — it’s where someone spends much of their time, meets with friends and family, and makes memories that will last for many years. So it only makes sense that decorating this home is a personal activity.
When a shopper comes to your furniture, wall decor, or home goods store in search of an addition to their home, they’re embarking on a process that probably feels very personal to them, and far more important than buying groceries or perhaps even clothing. If this feeling isn’t acknowledged, you’re likely to lose more customers than you gain.
One of the ways that you can better support the customers who are going through this personal journey is with strong on-site content. This content is most helpful when it takes the form of pages designed to make the purchasing process easier.
Let’s go over some of the basic pages you should consider adding to a home goods site, what purpose they serve in a customer’s journey, and how you can execute on them expertly.
July 13, 2016 - 2 Comments
Running a subscriptions-based business, or simply adding subscriptions to your existing online store, can result in some amazing things — higher revenue, happier customers, and a unique value proposition that helps you stand out in your industry.
Less amazing than the results, though? All the time you’ll need to spend making those things happen. Curating products for subscriptions can be time-consuming enough, not to mention the time it takes to engage with new and existing subscribers, manage renewals, print shipping labels, send orders out, improve your plans to gain more subscribers…
Phew. It’s tiring just reading that.
Before you convince yourself it’s too much work to run a subscriptions site or expand your existing subscriptions business, you should know that there’s a simple way to dramatically cut back on the amount of time you have to invest in it: automation.
Thanks to a few handy integrations and extensions that work with WooCommerce, plus Zapier’s added support for WooCommerce Subscriptions, it’s easier than ever to automate communication, order processing, and subscription management for your site. By setting up just one or two automations, you can save yourself hours of time, not to mention countless headaches and (perhaps most importantly) money.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can automate a site with WooCommerce Subscriptions to make your life a whole lot easier.
July 7, 2016 - 2 Comments
Selling food online — especially fresh or frozen items — is a bit of a new concept. Even as other industries embraced the concept of eCommerce with open arms, food sellers hesitated, and with good reason: there were some crucial logistics to figure out first.
Fortunately, shipping food isn’t a foreign concept any longer — it’s now easier than ever to pack up and ship out fresh, frozen, bottled, and packaged treats of all kinds. So the battle has become convincing shoppers that it’s worth buying edible goods online instead of in a local store.
One way you can convince shoppers to take the plunge is with pages that educate them on your products, their benefits, and what your company is capable of. These pages allow potential customers to gain confidence prior to making a purchase, and decrease the chance that they’ll walk away from your store empty-handed.
Let’s have a look at some of the most important pages an online food store can have, and how they’ll help you find success.
July 1, 2016 - 1 Comment
Building an epic fashion brand starts with, as you’d no doubt guess, epic products. There’s no fashion-savvy shopper alive who would settle for “decent-looking” shirts or jewelry that “sort of” holds up and wears well.
Building the epic store to match this brand and its products, though — that’s another thing altogether. No matter how incredible your clothing, jewelry, eyewear, or accessories are, a mediocre-looking and poorly constructed online store will drive more shoppers away than it will draw them in.
The components that go into your fashion store’s website have a bigger impact on your success than you might expect. One of those components is the pages you create to hold and convey information to potential customers — for example, details on your shipping times, the history of your company, how to get in touch with you, and so on. And it’s your duty as a store owner to be sure you’re not missing any of these crucial pages.
Today we’re going to take a look at some of the pages we think are must-haves for online fashion stores on their way to building an epic online presence. Whether you’re building a new store or doing a checkup on your current one, keep reading to find out which pages are crucial for you.
June 23, 2016 - 6 Comments
If your business is based on the subscription model, or you offer subscriptions on your store, this is a reality you already know: the path to acquiring a subscriber is a long and tedious one.
Shoppers can take a long time to make up their minds about spending money, but that goes double for an investment over many weeks or months. The task of convincing someone that they need your product or service on a recurring basis isn’t easy, either — even if it’s something they really enjoy, like chocolate or coffee.
So what’s a subscriptions site to do if they want to shorten this path to acquisition? For starters: take a long, hard look at your store’s homepage and the role it’s playing in convincing potential subscribers to sign up.
Your homepage is the first thing most potential customers see, after all. And if it’s not making a compelling enough argument about the benefits of your products, a subscription model, or your company, you can kiss the promise of recurring revenue goodbye.
Let’s explore some of the best practices you should follow for customizing the homepage of a subscription site, and discuss how they can ultimately help you secure more subscribers.
WooCommerce - the most customizable eCommerce platform for building your online business.
