The US Supreme Court decided this week that each state can now require sales tax to be collected on internet sales. This ruling opens the door for states to do something that they haven’t been able to before: tax a lot of internet sales.

While WooCommerce can’t advise you on which taxes your business needs — that’s a question for your accountant — you can configure settings in WooCommerce to either manually or automatically calculate taxes based on the requirements of the new rules.

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WooCommerce is one of a number of eCommerce platforms you could choose to build a store. Why WooCommerce? Our verified WooExperts will tell you it’s for the customizability, flexibility, and love of open source.

Neuralab are one of our WooExperts. I chatted with Neuralab CEO Krešimir Končić about building WooCommerce enterprise sites from Zagreb to New York City, tips for winning enterprise clients, tool recommendations for remote collaboration, and some of their recent inspiring projects.

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Is your WooCommerce site slow? It’s good that you’re looking into it. $1.6 billion is the amount Amazon.com would lose in sales every year if their page load slowed down by just one second.

Fast loading pages boost conversions and SEO, reduce cart abandonment, increase page views, and keep customers engaged.

The good news is that, in most cases, you can fix a slow WooCommerce site by checking a few key things.

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When shoot day arrives, there are a few steps you need to keep in mind when it comes to styling, lighting, and camera settings.

Styling and backdrop

Traditional product images are shot with a seamless white or neutral backdrop. This simplifies the editing process and gives the product a clean and focused appearance.

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Have you ever found yourself browsing an online store because a beautiful image showed up in your Twitter feed? Welcome to the power of eCommerce product photography!

If you’re launching a WooCommerce store, photos are one of your most impactful sales tools.

Good eCommerce photography attracts the right customers, tells a story, and lifts the overall quality of a store. Bad eCommerce photography can erode trust, turn customers off, and even be misleading, causing returns and hurting your bottom line.

What if you know nothing about product photography?

Then you’re in the right place — learn how to plan a photo shoot and get publish-ready photos.

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Neil Whippey and Shami Radia, the founders of Eat Grub, are on a mission to “change the way the West eats”. With their successful eCommerce business, this London-based duo is promoting insects as a sustainable and nutritious source of food – one delicious snack at a time.

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If you’re getting started shipping physical goods with WooCommerce, and you’re based in the United States or Canada, try WooCommerce Shipping – a free service, built into WooCommerce itself, with shortcuts like live postage rates and at-home label printing to make order fulfilment easier.

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If you’re going to sell physical goods online, shipping orders will be an important part of your process. There are a few key tasks new store owners need to complete, including configuring settings and choosing a carrier and delivery options.

Fortunately, there are WooCommerce extensions to save you some time — and for WooCommerce stores in the United States and Canada, WooCommerce Shipping simplifies order fulfillment.

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Customer engagement comes from the emotional connection between your customer and your brand. The more engaged your customers, the more likely they are to buy more, promote your brand, and become repeat customers.

You want every customer touchpoint to provide a consistent, inviting experience, so people want to come back for more. In a brick-and-mortar store, you have real-time, human connection. Online, you don’t have a chance to get in touch with a website visitor until they buy something, and your automations and triggers kick in. Right?

Wrong! Modern communication applications let you communicate with website visitors, drive conversions, and build longer-lasting relationships. One great way that you can build right into WooCommerce? Live chat.

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We hope you’ve enjoyed this four part series on email marketing! To wrap it up, we want to leave you with some inspiration. Here are some emails that stand out from the crowd, from across every stage of the email lifecycle.

Onboarding

Welcome Emails: Paul Smith’s welcome email thanks their new subscribers and highlights core features of their online shop. They also include clear links to their social media profiles, so people can connect with them across the web.

Getting Started / User Guide emails: If you sell a one-of-a-kind product that customers may have trouble using, a “getting started” email gives you a chance to set them up for success by explaining its features and sharing basic how-tos. In this helpful email, Google highlights the unique selling propositions of its product, Chromecast:

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Email marketing is all about building a relationship with your customers by sending the right communication at the right time. This gets harder as your customer base grows. You probably don’t have time to send one-on-one messages to each one of your subscribers, so how do you scale relationship-building? Email automation.

Now that you have a sense of the email lifecycle and recommended tools, let’s look at five best practices for building customer relationships with email automations.

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

• GDPR compliance tools and settings
• GeoLite2 integration

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, working with customers to do managed updates, and running 3.4 on WooCommerce.com.

WooCommerce 3.4 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 3.4

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This week we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing for WooCommerce: understanding the email lifecycle, emails best practices, and helpful tools and integrations.

WooCommerce has robust email tools built right into core. To send a greater range of messages, you can integrate your store with leading email services like MailChimp, and add email marketing extensions.

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The Sequoia Data Corporation introduced Compumarket, the first internet-based system for eCommerce, in 1989. Barely 20 years later, eCommerce sales are predicted to reach $2.84 billion.

But unless you pull customers towards your business, you won’t generate sales — and that’s where email comes in. According to a joint survey by DMA and eConsultancy, 80% of marketers think email is the best marketing channel for customer acquisition, and 81% consider it best for customer retention.

For the next few days we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing to look at four key topics, starting with understanding the email marketing lifecycle.

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Over the past week we’ve answered some key questions about GDPR compliance. You’ve read about the changes coming to eCommerce (and the internet in general), the importance of putting someone in charge, and how to craft a privacy policy. You learned the basics of responding to Right of Access and Right to Erasure requests, and the importance of keeping your data — and your customers’ data — secure.

There’s also a larger issue at play: privacy isn’t a one time effort. It’s part of the ongoing maintenance for your business.

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Google blacklists around 10,000 websites every day for malware, removing them from search results — and more importantly, malware can infiltrate customer data and expose your customers (and you!) to fraud and identity theft. Security breaches are a serious business.

To raise the bar on how companies respond to security issues, the GDPR introduces new rules governing what merchants must do when an EU resident’s data is exposed in a breach. 

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