When Chris Harvan and his wife – both artists – went through a painful season, losing a number of people close to them in a short space of time, their response was to make art.

Woodwork, sculpture, and creative expression helped them navigate their grief, and they decided to find a way to share this discovery. Today, Memento’s striking cremation urns and commemorative products can be purchased in funeral homes and online.

There’s a rocket-shaped child urn that will stop you in your tracks. It is incomprehensible how someone in a position to need a child urn must feel – yet these are Chris’s customers.

His mission is “to nourish human need and hopefully ease even the smallest bit of anguish in times of loss.”

Here’s the story of how this empathetic and inspiring deathcare industry business came to be – including learnings, challenges faced, and the power of shared experience.

Expanding product sales to a global customer base can be a great avenue to increase volume and revenue. But selling across borders brings a host of questions. One of the areas most impacted is shipping. Let’s dive right in!

Quick WooCommerce settings

General settings
In selecting locations, you can choose to sell to all countries or to specific countries. Similarly, you can choose to ship to only those countries you sell to or to specific countries.

Shipping zones
WooCommerce 2.6 introduced shipping zones: a geographic region that allows you to customize shipping methods and options based on a customer’s location. Each zone can contain multiple shipping methods.

For example, you can offer free shipping for a domestic zone and flat rate shipping for an international zone. Learn how to set up zones at WooCommerce Shipping Zone.

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Charlotte Mason revolutionized education 100 years ago and is still having an impact today, especially in homeschooling. A British educator from the late 1800s, she left an impressive legacy in the form of extensively documented materials for home education.

I think Charlotte Mason would have loved simplycharlottemason.com, the passion project of two homeschooling families and an online hub for homeschooling books, lesson plans, discussion forums, and more.

In a nutshell, the openness and flexibility of WooCommerce enabled two homeschooling families to build a thriving online bookstore and subscription business that impacts both their local community and thousands of families worldwide. Their vision is far greater than selling books and the bottom line.

I spoke with Doug, one of the site’s founders and the person who built and maintains the site. Read on for the full story, including the list of extensions and plugins that power their store.

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Venture to either end of Pearl Street in downtown Boulder, Colorado and you’ll find one half of the same treat: Cured, a shop that has set its focus on “preserving a personal connection to food” through the sale of fine meats, cheeses, wine, and other unique grocery items.

Opened in 2011 by Will and Coral Frischkorn, a former competitive cyclist and graphic designer respectively, Cured has grown from a single store to a multi-channel business. Their team of 24 now operates two physical locations, an online store, and even offers catering plus courier delivery to hungry locals looking for same-day snacks or party supplies.

We sat down for a chat with Will and Coral about how they’ve grown from a single store to a veritable meet-and-cheese empire, and their story is truly inspiring. Have a read to learn about how Cured began, how they successfully began selling online with WooCommerce and Square, and what it’s like to run a business as busy as theirs.

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Visiting Japan anytime soon? Have an interest in photography? Let EYExplore Tokyo be your guide to the wonders of Japan as seen from behind a camera lens. This provider of photo tours and workshops has been delighting tourists since 2014, and they’re doing it all with WooCommerce.

With the help of the WooCommerce Bookings extension, EYExplore Tokyo is able to book tours online from visitors who have an interest in photographing Japan’s unique and sometimes unusual scenery. These bookings are quick and easy for customers, not to mention the photographers who guide the tours.

We caught up with EYExplore Tokyo’s founder, Axel, to chat a bit about what has brought them success since they started last year. We also took a look at how they’re using WooCommerce Bookings, plus some other extensions, to offer a seamless experience for visitors booking a tour online.

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PagePink is a beauty and wellness portal for women in Singapore. It offers local shoppers access to the top salons, spas, and wellness studios, and allows vouchers and appointments to be purchased online for future redemption.

The website lists beauty and wellness service providers in Singapore, and allows users to write reviews and provide useful information for others. Consumers can purchase beauty and wellness services online through a gift voucher, as well as book appointments. The website also provides editorial content related to beauty and wellness trends and tips.

PagePink was created when its two founders realized that there was a need for better information related to beauty and wellness service providers in Singapore. After all, no one wants a bad haircut or a massage that causes an allergic reaction! This is what led to the original website, which provided reviews and information on local salons and beauty services.

However, PagePink wanted to make it easier for consumers to discover, buy, and gift these pampering services. They wanted to do this through the use of convenient virtual vouchers or online bookings. This led to the discovery and implementation of WooCommerce on their site.

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Pro4mance is an Australian sports nutrition company that specializes in manufacturing products specifically for athletic endurance. The company was founded to bring athletes research-backed, Australian-made products at the highest quality, and at competitive prices that could not be found in retail outlets.

The Pro4mance range of sports nutrition products includes several flavors and styles of powdered drinks and gels. The products are simple to use, and complement each other before, during, and after endurance sports.

According to CEO Andrew Jacobs, Pro4mance is about more than the products:

We aimed to change the endurance sports nutrition industry. We didn’t just want to make products and sell them — we wanted to build a community for athletes, who could interact and benefit from using a product range that was specifically developed for endurance sports.

The website was designed and built by the Australian agency Online Store Guys, who have become local experts in the utilization of WooCommerce. The site uses a highly customized design with our Storefront theme as its framework.

Read on to learn more about how Online Store Guys helped Pro4mance create a store suited to their specific needs.

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One of the first hassles people associate with online stores is shipping and, while there are now ways to make it pain-free one surefire approach is to go with a digital product: no storage, no breakage and instantly shippable worldwide.

Mike Moloney lives in Boston, MA and started FilterGrade after having way too much fun editing photos. The idea? To sell ‘high quality Photoshop actions for creatives’ and a good (if abstract) idea it was. We hope you enjoy the story.

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Rotimatic is the world’s first fully automated robot roti-maker. While it looks like an oversized bread maker it’s actually a fascinating piece of engineering that combines motors, sensors and hundreds of parts to spit out baked rotis at a pace of about one per minute.

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Given the importance of the moment a prospective employer opens a job application and reviews a resume it’s mind-blowing how many are badly formatted, vanilla or stuck in the nineties.

Trendy Resumes are offering a solution in the form of a user-friendly, online platform powered by WooCommerce  and we chatted to Antonio Iacopino, Trendy Resumes CEO.

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WooThemes tend to have a soft spot for anything South African and Dark Horse is no exception. I met co-founder, Jarrad Nelson at The Old Biscuit Mill in Cape Town last year and heard a little of their story (whilst drooling over a very beautiful leather satchel). Dark Horse were early adopters of WooCommerce and our company journeys have tracked over the years. We caught up to hear about their recent site overhaul.

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Perhaps this sounds familiar:

You’ve always wanted to start your own business and finally have some time to make the dream a reality. A slick website to showcase and sell your products is the next step, but potentially costly, so you investigate setting it up yourself. With a little help from the internet you explore some CMS platforms – WordPress is mostly for blogging, right?

Wrong.

There are currently thousands of entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, large business, universities and more sorts worldwide relying on the power and flexibility of our free eCommerce plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce, on a daily basis. This month WooCommerce hit 5 million downloads and the futures looking bright.

We were delighted to hear from Arthur Lhermitte, a Parisian fashion designer who took the plunge to DIY his eCommerce and had Striiiipes.com up, running and shipping his products worldwide in under two days.

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Golf is as old as the hills so it’s pretty neat when it takes a bold and modern swing with some excellent tech. EM Golf UK makes it easy for people to book exclusive indoor golfing experiences and lessons with golfing pro, Ed Morton.

We asked Reuben Mansell of One Hundred Web Design a couple of questions about his experience building the comprehensive booking system the EM Golf UK site required. Read on to learn how they used WooCommerce Bookings to find great success.

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“Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.” – Abraham Lincoln

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When you’ve successfully turned your frustration into a passion shared with others, how do you focus on what you’re good at while still giving your customers the fulfillment they expect? Today we take a look at the story of Rift Labs and the massive win of having excellent outsourced fulfilment.

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Everyone loves a story, everyone loves a snack. And today we bring you a tale of world class food for athletes, available online through WooCommerce Subscriptions on THEFEED.com, a beautiful, friendly and engaging ecommerce site. We chatted to Becca and Matt to find out about how they got from A to awesome.

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