We just wrapped the second annual WooSesh, a virtual conference that included more than 1,500 WooCommerce store owners and developers. It was a lot of fun, and in this post, we’re going to share just a few of our top takeaways.

Let’s take a look at nine things we learned from WooSesh 2019!

WooCommerce 3.8 delivers new WooCommerce Product Blocks and a few enhancements for all store owners, plus new hooks and tweaks for developers. We’ll break it down for you below.  

What’s new in 3.8

WooCommerce 3.8 is likely our last minor release of 2019 and should be fully backward compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0.

As always, we highly recommend following best practices and making a backup of your site before updating WooCommerce. More at: How to Update WooCommerce.

Recurring revenue. Monthly revenue. Passive income. Continuity. Subscriptions. All of these labels represent the same goal – to form a foundation of business income that arrives every month.

But no matter what you call it, it feels great to get paid each month without having to make a single new sale.

The merits of a recurring income approach to your business have inspired entire industries. 

Here are a few of the benefits:

• A baseline of income that arrives in your bank account before you’ve won a single new customer.
• Customers on subscription models stay loyal longer.
• Recurring customers have higher lifetime values.
• Recurring customers are more likely to make referrals.
• Subscriptions serve customers better by saving them time and reducing the effort required to buy.

And make no mistake, nearly every business is capable of creating a line of products or services that can be purchased on a subscription basis. Monthly payment models can be used to sell everything from software to smoothies, coffee to clothes, healthcare services to car care. 

The future of search is more intuitive, more natural, and more vocal. Voice search has been on the horizon for years, and some claim that by 2020, 50% of searches will be conducted using voice. 

It’s likely that this is already part of your everyday life. You can find voice search functionality in common places like:

• Windows 10 (Cortana)
• iPhone (Siri)
• MacOS (Siri)
• Android (Google Assistant)
• Google Home (Google Assistant)
• Amazon Echo (Alexa)

Voice can be used to control smart home devices, answer common questions, add a meeting to your calendar, or even order your favorite food delivery. 

It’s also improving accessibility by making it easier for users with visual or motor skill impairments to search and perform tasks. Improving your site’s accessibility should already be a top priority, and giving users the ability to find your site through voice will only help. 

Transactional emails are a key piece of your order fulfillment process. They update your customers on their order status, provide valuable information about policies and returns, and are opportunities to encourage repeat sales.

In fact, transactional emails receive four to eight times more opens and clicks than other types of emails but only 70% of companies personalize them.

It’s clear that customers value transactional emails. But if they’re generic, it’s likely that your shoppers will simply glance at the information they need and move on. This is a big missed opportunity!

Customizing the content of your emails helps build customer trust by providing helpful information that will enable them to make the most of your products. Using your own colors, fonts, and language reinforces your brand, provides consistency, and helps you be remembered. And including related products and coupon codes can even lead to additional purchases.

WooCommerce provides built-in functionality that automatically sends customer emails based on their order status. How can you adapt these to best fit your business and brand? 

How to Break Through the Clutter, Competition, and Customer Resistance 

The holiday season offers many businesses their best chance of the year to surpass annual revenue goals. But to do so, they must first be noticed by potential customers, who are likely overwhelmed by ads, emails, and discounts.

Some like to call the holiday marketing season the time of least resistance for consumers. They are willing to buy things they wouldn’t normally buy during this time of year, in part because they’re shopping for gifts. 

But they also increase their resistance to buying anything that doesn’t appear to be steeply discounted – hence the craziness of Black Friday. While you should try to capitalize on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there is much more to a successful holiday season. 

If everyone is offering the same kind of sales – 10% off everything, 20% off select items, up to 30% off, 25% off in-store purchases – do you think you’ll get attention with another discount by itself? You’ll probably just blend in with the noise. 

What follows are nine ways to get your business noticed and increase your holiday revenue, without having to discount all your products. You’ll learn how to draw people in without sacrificing your bottom line. 

A good navigation system helps customers find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently, and improves the overall success of your store. In fact, your website only has a few seconds to grab a site visitor’s attention, so you better guide them to the information they need right away!

Even small differences in your primary navigation can significantly impact your customers’ ability to find products that fit their needs. If they can’t figure out what to do or where to go when they get to your site, they’ll quickly leave and shop somewhere else.

But how can you create effective navigation for your online store that increases sales and decreases bounce rate?

Today, we’re excited to release some new features and improvements to the AutomateWoo – Refer A Friend add-on in version 2.5.

Share via WhatsApp 

Refer A Friend now includes a Share via WhatsApp feature that allows customers to refer their friends quickly via WhatsApp from a mobile or desktop browser.

When the integration is enabled the Share via WhatsApp button will be shown on the share page and in the share widget.

For many retailers, the holidays are responsible for a substantial portion of annual sales. And, this year, experts predict holiday spending will rise by about 3.7% to over $1 trillion. 

With the organic reach of social media on the decline and so many competitors trying to reach the same customers, be prepared to spend some money on advertising if you want to make the most of the season. 

But effective ads require a lot more than simply promoting a few of your normal posts on social media. You should have a firm grasp on the benefits of the products you offer and understand how they impact your target audience. Then, you can stand out from the competition by creating relevant, memorable ads that drive customer actions. 

Consider the following nine tips for designing great holiday ads and maximizing their impact.

While it’s always important to ship orders quickly and securely, it’s even more critical during the busy holiday season. After all, presents need to arrive early enough to be put under the tree, handed out at holiday parties, or shipped to loved ones.

Last holiday season, almost 16 billion pieces of mail and packages were delivered, which is more than a 4% increase over 2017. And, between UPS and Fedex alone, 8% of those were delayed. 

There are many factors that affect delivery time, some of which are outside of your control. Keep reading to learn how to prepare for holiday shipping, set up shipping rates with WooCommerce, and ensure that your packages arrive on time.

The year-end holiday season is no small event. We all know it’s one of the busiest seasons of the year for almost everyone: preparing for large meals, shopping for friends and family, decorating, and countless events. If you’re a business owner, getting ready for the holidays isn’t just about buying and wrapping presents. It’s about getting your business, online or brick and mortar, ready for holiday shopping. You might be wondering:

• Is it worth the time and effort to prepare my eCommerce store for the holiday season?
• What do I need to do to make sure my eCommerce business is ready for holiday shoppers?

Let’s take a look at each question and explore some ideas and resources for making sure you’re prepared.

If you’re a service provider, selling online can save you a lot of time, money, and hassle. It can also be more convenient for your clients, who may prefer to book appointments, conduct business, and make payments at the time and location of their choosing. But it can be difficult to figure out the best ways to list your offerings, collect payments from your clients, market to the right audience, and integrate with your existing tools.

WooCommerce provides the solution for all of those concerns with one platform. Even though you may envision online stores selling physical or digital products, there are many companies using WooCommerce to sell services, rent accommodations, and book appointments.

WooCommerce is a great fit for service-based businesses. Continue reading to learn how to sell services with WooCommerce and how to expand the functionality of your store to best reach your clients.

Last year we welcomed the inaugural WooSesh to the world – an entirely virtual event for WooCommerce professionals. More than 1,400 people attended live with another 1,400 joining afterwards to watch the event recordings. It was a lot of fun!

WooSesh returns on October 9-10, 2019, and we have five great reasons for you to attend.

Finding new customers is often one of the most difficult and expensive parts of owning a business. That’s why repeat customers are so valuable – it costs much less to sell to existing buyers than to attract and convert new ones.

Loyal customers not only make repeat purchases, they often talk to their friends and family about your business, leading to sales from referrals.

But how exactly do you build customer loyalty online?

WooCommerce created three extensions for your online store that will help keep your customers coming back time and time again.

We’re busy store owners. Every day is full of making sales, fulfilling orders, managing employees, developing products, marketing online – and the list goes on and on!

It’s important to take time away from smaller, daily tasks to focus on big-picture business goals, but if you’re over-scheduled like most ambitious people, that may seem impossible. 

Creating an efficient workflow helps you accomplish more in a shorter amount of time, allowing you to balance other important aspects of life and business. This means you can work more consistently over a longer period of time without getting burned out, and reach your goals faster.

WooCommerce offers several extensions designed to improve the workflow of your online store, saving you time and money, and giving you freedom to focus on other parts of running your business.  

Whether you’re a veteran store owner or you’ve just begun to list your products online, one of the most critical elements to your success is visibility. Your goal should be to reach as many shoppers as possible in the right place and at the right time – when they’re actively shopping! 

Before the Internet, a physical storefront with heavy retail foot traffic was perhaps the most critical piece to drawing crowds of shoppers. Then, you might hope to draw more attention to your store by advertising using magazines, newspapers, or even television. 

Though the same outlets still exist today, the Internet has broadened the number of places where stores can compete for attention and draw potential customers. And with a lower barrier to entry than magazine or TV ads, many store owners face the temptation of registering for every single one. 

Unfortunately, with each opportunity comes added work and longer hours. Many marketing professionals suggest that instead of spreading yourself thin over as many platforms as possible, you should instead focus your efforts on mastering a few.

Two of the best platforms for finding new retail customers are Google Shopping and Pinterest. As with anything, they still require a dedicated, steady effort to achieve profitable results. But with the help of two of WooCommerce’s most powerful extensions – Google Product Feed and Pinterest for WooCommerce – you can now sync your online store with Google Shopping and Pinterest and manage everything from your WooCommerce dashboard. There’s no need to log in and manage each one individually!

Let’s take a look at how to get your products seen on Google Shopping and Pinterest using these two extensions.