From the outskirts it probably seems a little quiet compared to our usual lightening pace of WooCommerce development? Never fear though, inside WooLabs things are seriously heating up with a HUGE amount of time going into version 1.4, that will be one of our most noteworthy updates in our track history. That’s still a couple weeks away, with the exact release date kept mysteriously vague for now. We do however have something to tide you over. 4 exciting new extensions.
A teaser of what to expect in 1.4
As I’ve said it’s not ready yet, but you can start getting excited about it because of a number of reasons that include:
- A new default theme
- Much better and easier to use templating system for beginners
- Local and compound taxes
- Many code optimisations to improve loading time/memory
There’s loads more to it, but we can’t give away all the secrets now can we?
New WooCommerce extensions
This week sees an sms notification system for your online shop and 3 very different, equally powerful payment gateways.
 Clickatell SMS Notifications
The Clickatell SMS Notifications plugin for WooCommerce allows you to keep you customers updated on the progress of their orders by sending them SMS notifications when their order statuses change. This extension requires a Clickatell Central API account in order to send SMS.
You can also send custom one time SMS messages by going into an order; you have the ability to send the customer a one time SMS message with whatever text you wish.
Developed by Gerhard Potgieter.
View this WooCommerce extensionFeeFighters Samurai Gateway
This plugin allows you to take payments utilizing FeeFighters’ Samurai Payment Gateway.
Developed by Patrick Garman.
View this WooCommerce extensionAmazon FPS Gateway
Gain your customers trust by allowing them to securely pay using their Amazon account. Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) will allow you to accept payments via credit card, bank transfer, and even through your customers Amazon balance!
Developed by Patrick Garman.
View this WooCommerce extensionPayPal Digital Goods Gateway
This extension offers in-context payment of digital products so buyers never leave your site to pay for an order. After a buyer has purchased once with your site, they can choose to not be required to log in to PayPal for future purchases – one-click PayPal payment, but only with the PayPal Digital Goods extension.
Developed by Brent Shepherd.
View this WooCommerce extension
About
This is all well and good…. but where’s the Unsigned theme? Quick quick quick! Just teasing, great work!
Expect it soon. That is all. 🙂
Maybe I’m getting a leeetle bit spoilt here, but I’m kinda getting tired of the Payment Gateway releases now. Any plans ons launching new functional plugins like a currency convertor, affiliate marketing or even recurring payments?
I think you’re doing an awesome job, but the releases lately have been rather similar (plugin wise of course, not theme-wise)…
We’re getting 1.4 out of the door before releasing functionality plugins since some rely on new features and functionality 😉
I’ve been following you around (virtually of course, I’m not in the habit of actual stalking 😉 ) since your days at Appthemes – admittedly I’m secretly hoping you’ll be releasing a Woo Job Board theme that’s integrated with WooCommerce and it’s plethora of Payment Gateways; Is this wishful thinking or does it have some legs?
In any event, thanks for the hard work Mike – Hopefully you and James will consider moving to sunny SA; would be great to have you two on our doorstep 🙂
They may not be exciting but payment gateways are often deal breakers when choosing an eCommerce platform. One of our primary objectives is to make WooCommerce a realistic option for as many users, in as many regions as possible. Given our relative youth I think we can be excused for releasing a bunch of payment gateways 🙂
That said, there are a bunch of exciting extensions in the works, not to mention the 1.4 update which has some nifty new features of it’s own.
Hey James, I’d love so much that the “One of our primary objectives is to make WooCommerce a realistic option for as many users, in as many regions as possible” sentence was true! 🙂 I asked here http://woocommerce.com/support-forum/?viewtopic=64633#thepost294064 to have 2 (only two) additional fields for registering clients but Mike doesn’t think it’s necessary. In Italy it’s mandatory!!! 🙁 Can you try to make Mike change his mind?
Releasing the recurring payments and subscriptions is the ONE thing holding many of my clients back (and then me) from using this across many more sites. It is strange it has taken so long to release this extension as it will add tens of thousands of more sales.
I’d have to agree Peter, I personally manage alot of club websites and all are based on recurring billing. It would be nice to have this extension for WooCommerce soon. I know Gravity Charge maybe integrated soon for membership sites but really what I am after is simply the billing area, I dont need member protected area as such but rather a way to price membership plans and then charge per month while allowing discounts also. I look forward to seeing this each week but alas, il keep on keeping on 😉
This has been answered so many times now… it is extremely unlikely we’ll be adding subscription products to WooCommerce. Subscription sites and online stores are very different creatures.
Keep an eye on this instead; http://wpcandy.com/reports/gravity-charge-will-integrate-with-woocommerce
Looking forward to it James. Il keep an eye out.
So what about recurring billing? I’m not talking about a membership site with paid content with subscription, but selling physical products that are on reorder/recurring.
Hi James,
First off – thank you so much for weighing in on this, it’s awesome getting to know the guys and their thinking behind the products.
Although I appreciate your thoughts on this, as well as your misgivings, it doesn’t seem to be inline with what the community is looking for. Aside from the comments on blog posts, I’m sure you’re well aware of the campaign going on at your WooIdeas section (link: http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/2280795-recurring-billing-subscriptions). Truth be told, aside from PayPal Express it’s the MOST requested feature – I find it difficult to match this community drive to Woo’s disinterest in pursuing it.
I agree in that it’s two different beasts to tackle – but surely given Woo’s skill, standing and apetite for releasing game-changers, this would be a logical step?
That being said – I’m still a devoted fan :). Look forward to hearing your thoughts on this…
Looks great guys. Shame a potential showcase WooCommerce project I was working on didn’t work out but looking to use WooCommerce on some other projects soon. Keep up the great work!
Sorry to hear that then! Do hope you get to crank one out soon!
Hopefully it wasn’t WooThemes or WooCommerce that stopped that project! 🙂
No it was a ‘disagreement’ about a few fundamental parts of my contract. Real shame as it was a high profile site and I had done 90% of it.
I hope to see that the functionality was added to allow the GForms plugin to utilize multi page forms 😉
Id have to second this – multi-page form for membership type sites would be super
I’m using it to allow for custom computer options. As it stands the options make the page a mile long. Grouping them in pages is way easier. Make customizing the products kind of like customizing a computer on HP or Dell.
You could maybe write a little bit of jQuery to create an accordion of options? It’s an interesting idea but are there that many cases where forms are so long they need to be spread across multiple pages??
The answer is yes. I have been looking for a way to display situations where a product is configurable without creating an incredibly long option set.
For example, when configuring a custom computer you hay have a page for each main component.
Using a multi page form will allow you to shift through options like an image slider.
You can see a test product I created here.
http://www.warrtech.com/shop/sweet-speeds-x3/
As you can see, the page portion does not work, you can see the concept.
This is common for anyone selling complex products.
Computers
Custom kits (basically any industry)
Custom motorcycles
Multiple color selections for a complex product
The list goes on…
I’m not sure if you’re working on your site right now but it doesn’t look to long to me.
I still don’t think there are that many cases where multiple pages would be beneficial. I’ve configured many computers online and never felt confused by the process.
Pretty sure Apple don’t struggle to shift computers and their configurator is a single page and extremely long; http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD322LL/A?select=select&product=MD322LL%2FA
I wonder whether it’s more a question of the overall design.
Yes I am still working on it, but have put it on hold until functionality for multiple pages comes around. The final sheet will be about 20 pages.
Configuring an apple is much less complicated than configuring a full blown gaming computer.
This is the goal. http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dpcwnz3m&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&model_id=alienware-aurora-r4
Also this is something that looks as if it is possible just not added yet – http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/2480278-gravity-forms-extension-multi-page-forms-make-i
Multipage support, gravity forms validation, and gravity forms per variation are features on the roadmap for the add-on. I had to wait for some modifications to be added into WooCommerce 1.4. Once those are in place, an update for the Gravity Forms Product Add-ons will be released to address these features.
Super looking forward to multipage 😉
: )
Used woocommerce just recently on a coffee company with the Buro Theme (http://www.livingjava.com). After having built it on a completely different framework, I realized how much easier the whole process would have been if I started with a WooFramework. With two days till my deadline, I decided to port the whole thing onto Buro and WooCommerce and I could NOT ask for anything better. This just keeps getting better. Thanks !
Nice work Lenny, BOLD move too! 😛
I do love the site, you’ll have to excuse my pun!
Great work you are doing. After a time consuming investigation on ecommerce options, plugins, platforms, I decided to use WooCommerce, the simplest and easiest solution for a beginner and small business owner like me.
I really love WooCommerce, I know this might not be the right place for a feature request, but this is burning in my heart: Wish list feature, please!
Greetings from the south (Mexico).
Glad you are loving WooCommerce Gerson, feel free to pop the idea over here too. – http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/133476-woocommerce
I believe you’ll find other users wanting a wish list too. 🙂
Pssssst… also with WPML support for WooCommerce Multilingual?
We added the hooks 😉 WPML will provide a ‘glue’ plugin to make them work together.
http://wpml.org/2011/12/woocommerce-multilingual-in-beta/
Does FeeFighters + Shopify represent the first re-occurring payment solution for WooCommerce, or will that not work?
Shopify is a completely different shopping cart and is unrelated to WooCommerce.
In my opinion one of the reasons recurring billing simply will not work out of the box is the fact most of the gateway extensions have no secure way to store credit card data. This makes it hard to bill automatically every month because you don’t have a credit card to bill.
With Samurai I was able to incorporate saved credit cards where I hope to eventually add recurring billing (via an additional plugin). This will not go into core because as stated before Recurring/Subscription style purchases are not really what WooCommerce is designed for, but with storing tokens instead of credit cards numbers we can securely handle recurring billing. This is currently in the research phase so no eta yet.
Sounds like it will be a hot/much requested plugin 🙂
Sounds exciting Patrick, I have read into this with the Your Members plugin and a few others. The payment side of things seems to be the issue as you point out. Would be amazing to see developments on this as literally hundreds of products can be charged in this style if you look at some use cases around this. Certainly interested to hear how it goes, keep us posted 😉
I’m going to finish up a few more gateways that are ~80% done and send them over to be audited then I’ll work on a plugin for recurring billing. I’ve got a good idea on how to implement it 😉
Sounds great, god speed 😉 and keep us all posted. If it works with WooCommerce looks like it could be a hot gateway option indeed by the looks of wooIdeas area.
One thing that you may want to look into, since you are storing credit card numbers, is that the shop manager needs to be able to process transactions from the order on the dashboard side.
Right now, there is no way for an order to be created and processed through a payment gateway completely using the backend. This makes it very difficult for phoned-in orders to be placed. On top of that, many of those phoned-in orders are recurring.
Thanks for the awesome work, Patrick!
Patrick, you may just be my new best friend. I have already purchased the Samurai plugin to test out. I am looking forward to your next completed work.
Regarding the new templating system easier for beginners. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
We’ll let you know more about this when we release it, as we still have to draft up some documentation. But it will be much simpler than today 🙂
@James
This is my intended use of multi page gforms.
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=dpcwnz3m&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&model_id=alienware-aurora-r4
Simply combine all options from each tab into one. Each option that you slide through would be a page.
This should be available in a future update
http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/133476-woocommerce/suggestions/2480278-gravity-forms-extension-multi-page-forms-make-i
I’m another one for the multi page forms! 🙂
I hope you will add the 3 column product display, let user to change between 3-4 column in the setting. A bigger photo is a lot better for shopping experience.
When can we expect 1.4? Also where can we get more info on the new templating system?
Hi,
The blog post states a couple of weeks away 🙂 More info on new templating system will be out once 1.4 ships.
Hi,
any chance of getting Skrill/Moneybookers as a gateway. It’s one of the few that makes sense (in terms of costs/options) in the German speaking world. It would make me switch from Shopify
Thanks
Are you wanting something where they click checkout and then go to the Skrill website and pay there, or do you want it all to stay on your website. Looks like they have options for both, but some people are wary of entering financial account info on outside websites.
I second this, Moneybookers (Skrill) has Croatian Kuna as a currency unlike PayPal, so I am not able to use Woocommerce in Croatia at all due to the lack of support for our native currency, if I want my clients to be able to process credit cards, which kind of is the whole point of a web shop. Moneybookers, people, please!
Sagepay merchant account payment gateway of some sorts 😉
Is this what you are looking for? or does Sagepay have more than one method to pay and you want a different version.
http://woocommerce.com/extension/sagepay-form/
Nope unfortunately not – this takes the user away from the site and back. Sagepay merchant setup does all the work on the user site which requires an SSL etc. I think this extension is just for a standard account with sagepay.
I am very happy having switched from Cart66 to WooCommerce and Woothemes. Great integration between theme and plugin/s makes it easy to stay upgraded without worrying about fixing stuff. Great support. I’m pretty happy with all the payment gateway plugins/extensions, looking forward to seeing where WooCommerce goes next with more functionality. Love how my customers get notifications when their orders are updated/shipped. THANKS!
First of all, what a fantastic shop plugin!
Will the theme break layout also be fixed in this new version?
On many, many themes all sidebars are dissapeared to the footer area.
Thanks!
Please, please add an Export Orders/Sale to csv option.
Clients need a way to reconcile and/or import orders into there accounting software and currently there is no way to do this. Thanks.
We are doing a website for a very high profile client(Famous NYC Restaurant) and this is one of their requirements. I really want to use Woo for this.
this is a biggie … i too need to reconcile sales for a big brand in Selfridges london
Recurring billing will be an awsome feature, but I understand the question about how to store the credit card secure data. The token solution is a way to get this done in the core?
Thanks for the amazing Woocommerce and good luck!