I’m struggling to get creative writing these Thursday blog post titles, so I’m getting straight to the point.
Today see’s the release of WooCommerce 1.2.2 and 5 new extensions – and would you believe it none of them are payment gateways?!
We’re extremely excited by the amount of developers who have lept at the opportunity of developing for WooCommerce and creating a passive income stream whilst exploring the core of our offering. You’re going to like these extensions. Trust me.
WooCommerce 1.2.2
Firstly, let’s go over what you can expect in the latest version that just dropped.
We’ve added customer note email notifications where you can now send customers an update on the status of their order.
We’ve also added the ability to make layered nav have an “OR” query so you can expand your search rather than filter it.
After many requests, you can now display size/weight on the attributes tab of your product listing pages.
Another neat addition; users now have the ability to register on the Login/My Account page.
View the full changelog for WooCommerce 1.2.2 as there are far more tweaks, fixes and optimizations to the codebase.
We are working on a notifications system for much easier upgrades to extensions. Expect it really soon.
FedEx Shipping Module
The FedEx shipping module was developed by Andy Zhang and provides calculated shipping options based on FedEx rates to anywhere in the world. The extension does a realtime query to calculate the FedEx shipping rates. This is great for anyone wanting to provide FedEx shipping rates for their customers. Currently this only supports the US as the origin.
View the FedEx extensionCommission King
Developed by Winning Media, this extension allows you to track and pay commissions to users on any products within your store. It adds the ‘Commission Recipient’ user role, a custom write panel to your edit product pages and a settings panel of it’s own to administer and pay commissions.
View the Commission King extensionJigoshop to WooCommerce Converter
Last week was the CSV Product Importer, now we’ve taken it a step further and cater for people wanting to move from Jigoshop to WooCommerce. Developed by Agus MU, this extension puts all your products, categories and variations in the correct format for an easy import and switch to our platform. We hope to work on more of these converter facilities soon, and expect our competitors to do the same.
View the Jigoshop to WooCommerce converter extensionProduct Add-Ons
This one I’m particularly excited about. Developed in-house by Mike Jolley it allow your customers to customise their products by adding input boxes, dropdowns or a field set of checkboxes.
With the Product Add-ons extension, gift messages, donations, laser engraving and any other product which may require user input in some way is now an option for your customers! Think of all the possibilities.
View the Product add-ons extensionGoogle Product Feed extension
Developed by Lee Willis, the Google Product Feed extension allows you to easily configure data to be added to your Google Merchant Centre feed. This means your products will now appear on Googles product search. As the current king of Internet search, it is clearly a great advantage to have your products appear on Googles own product search engine.
The extension allows you to control which data is added to your Google Merchant Centre feed explicitly. You can also set store-wide defaults agains categories or provide information on specific product pages.
View the Google Product Feed extension
About
Nice, I came here specifically for “WooCommerce Thursdays”
Great core changes – Mainly excited about “We’ve also added the ability to make layered nav have an “OR†query so you can expand your search rather than filter it.”
Also these extensions – Google Product Feed & Product Add-Ons 😀
Good work all round!
WOW! So many goodies in one day… Is it Christmas??? Hot damn I will be busy today 🙂
Thought you’d be happy, Fred 🙂
Another WooHoo Thursday! Lots of great stuff. I am really excited about the Product Add-Ons by Mike. He is a great asset to the team! Great job Mike!
Is there any documentation on building some extensions?
Is it open to anyone or do you have to be approved first?
Cheers,
Aaron
Hey Aaron, send me a mail (jay[at]woocommerce.com) and we can discuss further 🙂
Rock on for WC Thursdays!
Just super work – great to see the constant push to make woo better and better 🙂
WooCommerce seems to be coming along very nicely indeed. I’m looking forward to giving a spin when I get the opportunity.
挺ä¸é”™ï¼Œè°¢è°¢
Very excited about the product extension. I have purchased it and am now looking for instructions to get it working (I.e. Do you use it just with simple products or variable? Are there new shortcodes to make this work?
Great progress moving forward for sure, I do have a couple questions though… Some of these paid extensions seem like they should be part of the core plugin itself. Product addons would be a prime example of this. Having so many functions outside the core plugin makes for more work keeping things updated as well.
Lastly, when is the “club upgrade” so many of us have been waiting for coming? I’ve put off (and will continue to do so) purchasing any extensions until this club upgrade is in place.
Hi,
There are no firm plans on when we’ll add a new extensions subscription unfortunately, as there are different factors and info that has to be established before we do so. We have to first see what the market is for extensions, then cater for all the development partners and figuring out a share, and then establish a price and monthly cost of the subscription.
My comment on the other woocommerce subscription update post addresses this as well but I will restate it here just to be thorough. You said that a “club addon” would be available to club subscribers in a “few months” and well, to me anything over 2 months is more than a few 🙂
I do understand your concerns, all that needs to go into calculating etc etc etc BUT once again, I take people at their word and maybe I am too overly critical of minor details but well, that’s just how I live my life.
If you had said “we might possibly maybe put out the option sometime in the next year or two” I would have just bought a few extensions that I could use and call it a day, however I have held off on doing so because “a few months” isn’t really that long and why pay twice for something you don’t need to right?
PS.. again, it’s not about value our $$ as I have no complaints for you at all in those departments.. its just the “details” again.
I’m sorry that we have not been more proactive in communicating our thoughts & decisions in this regard.
When we released WooCommerce, it was always our intention to eventually release a Commerce Add-on for our Club Subscriptions. We did however know (and maybe we weren’t clear in communicating this) that WooCommerce was a whole new kettle of fish for us and that we’d thus need to gather more data before we could make an accurate business decision with regards to that add-on.
As things stand at the moment, WooCommerce is gaining so much momentum and we’re pushing out a handful of extensions weekly. We’re postponing a decision on the Commerce Add-on for a couple of months, which allows us to figure out our eventual offering to club subscribers. It’s in the back of our minds to have something ready late Q1 or early Q2 2012, but we’ve not set those as our deadlines either.
I have to respectfully disagree, you were very clear with what you put out. You stated that there would be a club addon for extensions in a couple months.
I understand what is going on here, there is money flowing in and you see each extension sale as $$ in the bank but leading on long time club subscribers is wrong. You know how loyal we are but you also should know by now that we don’t take well to being misled.
If you wanted to have us all buy the “core” extensions that you know everyone will want before offering us an addon so you can maximize your revenue you should have never mentioned the addon in the first place.
I don’t mind spending the cash to get what I need but I do mind waiting patiently for something I was told was coming soon only to find out that it’s not coming until “sometime” in 2012.
How do you update to the latest?
Oh right, plugin updates 🙂
Would be nice if under “My Account” there was a LOGOUT option.
There’s a widget for that 😛
Ah, thank you. I see there’s a sidebar nav option for that widget, but what about in the main nav?
With the Google Product piece and the Fedex calculator, looks like I have no more excuses. I better get to work on the switch to WooCommerce.
Does the commission plugin let you just set it so they can use it as credit on the site towards future orders?
It just mentions on the page that you can pay commissions via cheque, bank transfer, or PayPal.
It is also a bit confusing as to what the commission is for, that is something normally paid out to affiliates. Is that what this is, rather than something that could be used as a loyalty scheme for customers?
That brings me onto another point, the plugin pages for woocommerce are pretty woeful at explaining what some of them actually do and what options they have. There doesn’t appear to be a link to documentation on how to use it, seems the only way to see more about it is to buy it and install it, but that sucks if it doesn’t do what you thought it was going to do.
There are no comments enabled on them either to ask questions publicly that may help others that are confused by the poor documentation and explanations.
“Once a commission value is assigned to a product, Commission King tracks all orders made through your store and prepares a list of pending payments.”
So is that commission for the buyer, or to an affiliate sending someone to your page who then buys it. If the latter how is that all tracked, how to sign up affiliates etc. It is just per product, can you not do it on basket value, setting up tiered discounts when they hit certain values?
This may be something that is really useful that I would buy straight away, but it isn’t clear at all what exactly it does. This isn’t the only plugin that suffers from the same problem. If you could address this that would be rather helpful.
Hi Jon, we’re working on videos for all our extensions to demonstrate them better, but they take a little time to script and shoot so please be patient 🙂
Regarding Commission King, it is not an affiliate system. Rather think of it as a way for you to sell products on behalf of a third party and provide them with commission (or they provide you with commission, whichever way you want to look at it).
Thanks Jay,
So it does neither of the two things I thought (loyalty or affiliate scheme). Perhaps you should add that to the page in the mean time until the videos are done.
That simple line just being more explicit on what you would use it for clears things right up.
As you’re getting a lot of extensions out at a pretty incredible rate, may I request you add another payment gateway: SecureTrading. This is a popular choice in the UK and I’d like to use it on a woocommerce site we’re launching soon.
thanks, Dan
You can suggest any payment gateway here (we’ll develop the top voted first)
Hi.
I wonder if there is a way to include a calender function so that a website visitor buys a product from a woocommerce site that they are able to choose delivery date via a calendar?