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.

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.

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.

You may need to have all your invoices and credit notes certified if you’re based in France and have an online store using WooCommerce.

You’re probably asking yourself:

• Why must invoices and credit notes be certified?
• Do these rules apply to me?
• How can I ensure I’m in good standing?

We have answers.

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

• Redesigned Orders screen for easier order management.
• Simpler and more intuitive stock management.
• Image sizing and theme compatibility improvements.
• Shop customization features.

To ensure this update is stable, we’ve been doing plenty of testing and QA on our side with an extended beta period, increased unit and integration test coverage, compatibility testing with our extensions, working with customers to do managed updates, and running 3.3 on WooCommerce.com.

WooCommerce 3.3 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 3.3

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Since our last minor release back in June, we’ve been working on a multitude of improvements to improve the WooCommerce admin experience:

• Apply discounts to orders using coupons, without the chore of doing manual calculations.
• See which versions of extensions are tested with new WooCommerce updates, before updating.
• Improved management features for WooCommerce.com extensions.
• A simpler, unified shortcode for listing multiple products on pages.

To ensure this update is indeed stable, we’ve been doing plenty of testing on our side; releasing beta versions, testing our own library of extensions and themes, working with customers to do managed updates, and running 3.2 on WooCommerce.com. 👏

WooCommerce 3.2 is also a minor release, meaning it should be fully backwards compatible with 3.1 and 3.0. However, it’s still considered best practice, and recommended, to backup before updating.

Here are some more details on what’s new in 3.2!

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The Gold Coast of Australia is a highly sought-after tourist destination with its sunny sub-tropical climate, perfect beaches, surf culture, and buzzing nightlife.

Tourism aside, it’s a major film production hub and – the home of Thrive, a digital agency integrating WooCommerce beautifully into their clients’ stores.

Read on for our Q&A interview with Thrive’s founder, including why they chose WordPress, some projects they’ve taken on and their advice for people new to WooCommerce.

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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. 🙂

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If the sight of the “updates available” notification in your WordPress dashboard fills you with a sense of dread, you’re not alone.

Updating your WordPress plugins and themes or WooCommerce and its extensions can sometimes be an easy process — just a few seconds of waiting and you’re set. But it can also involve backups, testing, additional updates, and even support requests. Basically, the hassles no one likes.

But avoiding or putting off these occasional hassles can put your site at risk, and even potentially affect your customers. So while you may not always like to go through the process of keeping your WooCommerce store 100% updated, there are many reasons to do it.

Let’s take a look at why it’s important to update your store in a timely manner, starting with some background on why we update WooCommerce and its extensions in the first place.

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Just starting out with WooCommerce? Or are you a seasoned pro?

Regardless of your level of experience with WooCommerce or eCommerce in general, its potential may surprise you. There are hidden features in the core plugin that may come in handy, powerful options enabled via extensions, and unrecognized productivity hacks you can try out to make your day easier.

The beauty of WooCommerce is that its potential for growth and expansion enables you — either as a store owner or developer — to build amazing things. And the more you know about the platform’s capabilities, the more you can create with it!

Our aim today is to give both you newbies and pros a look at 10 things you might not have known you could accomplish with WooCommerce. From on-page features to automation, here are a few tips and tricks you’ll love to be “in the know” about.

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It’s been a few months since our last major update, and in that time, we’ve been working on a veritable smorgasbord of improvements to WooCommerce. For 2.6, we’ve:

• Added shipping zones
• Improved the cart experience
• Created a new My Account area design
• Added new options for filtering products
• Made updates to the payment options available through the onboarding wizard
• Thrown in some goodies for developers, including a new payment tokenization and the alignment of our API with the WordPress REST API

That’s a lot of stuff for you to explore in the release of Zipping Zebra, so let’s dig into the details.

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With the release of WooCommerce 2.6 on the horizon, we imagine you’re all excited to explore the newest features available for running your online store. And a bit apprehensive, perhaps, to go through the update process once more.

The beauty of the open source world of WordPress development is that it allows virtually anyone to create virtually anything for this platform we call home. The downside is that it’s nearly impossible to predict what will happen when you put any given combination of those thousands upon thousands of creations in different environments under different circumstances.

We pride ourselves on thoroughly testing WooCommerce and its extensions, but the unfortunate reality is this: conflicts still happen. That’s why we recommend being prepared in advance for releases and major updates, so in the event of an issue, you can roll right back.

“But how do you get prepared?” We’re so happy you asked. Here’s how to efficiently set up backups and testing for your WooCommerce store so you’re ready for anything.

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A few weeks ago at WooConf, Matt Mullenweg gave a sneak peek at a project we’ve been excitedly working on. Now, we’re ready to share it with the world.

WooCommerce Connect is a big part of our vision for the future of WooCommerce. Right now, Connect has just started alpha testing as a feature extension. If all goes well, we hope to make it part of WooCommerce core and available to everyone.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into what we’re trying to accomplish with Connect, how it all works, where the feature currently stands and how you can get involved.

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It’s a new year and we have a new version of WooCommerce for you. The last version of WooCommerce focused on the onboarding experience to help store owners get up and running quickly.

This latest version focuses on getting the store itself to run quickly, and is aptly named Dashing Dolphin.

Let’s take a closer look at WooCommerce 2.5.

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Bookings 1.8 comes packed with a ton of new features that help your business run smoothly. Here they are in a nutshell:

With this release, you can now accept bookings that span multiple days. We’ve also added the ability to offer discounts when multiple people make a single booking together, and add buffer time between each of your bookings.

Here’s a closer look at some of the great new features in WooCommerce Bookings version 1.8.

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