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 compatiblewith all WooCommerce releases since 3.0.
Talking to our customers, we know there are a lot of you that set up new stores yourselves and need guidance choosing extensions. There are over 400 extensions in the WooCommerce.com Marketplace, and digging through them all to find what you need can be daunting.
That’s why we’re including Suggestions directly in WooCommerce so you can easily find the extensions that would be helpful on your site.
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.
When Chris Sheldrick started a business organizing live music events, he noticed that people got physically lost all the time. It was so common, frustrating, and bad for business – you can’t afford bands or instruments being late to gigs and festivals! – that he met up with a mathematician friend to come up with a solution.
From a daily frustration came a digital solution for organizing physical presence, now on its way to becoming a global addressing standard: here’s the what3words story.
Restoring old cars is big business. It’s also art! Created by people with the ability to preserve heritage.
Pagoda Classics is a Croatia based car restoration and renovation company. With more than 25 years of experience and over 150 renovated vehicles, they’ve become a synonym for passion, individualism and perfection. CEO Karlo Beštak and his skilled team are devoted to fulfil the highest expectations in restoring classic cars to a better-than-new condition.
As the agency tasked with building their website, our job was to convey that message to the world and create the best possible online experience for their customers. Solution? WooCommerce paired with custom-made photo and video content.
Sometimes the best time to check your store isn’t the best time to be at your computer – on a train, in a corridor between meetings, on a beach. Enter the new WooCommerce Mobile App to make store management easier!
Pricing physical products is easy. You know how much it cost to produce the product, and you base your price on how much profit you want to make. With digital products, it’s a whole different ballgame.
You can’t price your digital product the same way you sell physical products. They’re different beasts altogether. Many new merchants make this mistake, and it costs them, vital customers.
There’s an undeniable allure of digital products. There are no materials (other than digital applications needed, of course), no shipping costs, no manufacturing, no complex storage, etc. You make it once and you sell an unlimited supply.
With so many benefits, it’s easy to see why digital products are becoming a huge trend in eCommerce. So what are people selling? These are the digital products we’ve been seeing all over the web recently:
Online Courses
eBooks
Software
Graphics and Digital Arts
Photography
With so many options, how do you know where to begin when it comes to pricing? The go-to philosophy of pricing physical products doesn’t always translate. Where does that leave your online store?
If you’re trying to break into the world of eCommerce for digital products, you need to get your pricing strategy right. Pricing is one of the famous Four Ps of Marketing, so don’t overlook its role in your business.
Here are six strategies guaranteed to sell your digital product.
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.
If you’ve spent precious minutes in a supermarket trying to decipher which variety of near-identical dry pet food is right for your dog – and even if you haven’t – you’ll appreciate the simplicity of Scratch.
Founded by Mike Halligan and Doug Spiegelhauer in early 2018, this thoughtful Australian startup has three audacious goals: eliminate the guesswork, bureaucracy, and secrecy that dogs the pet food industry, to make customers smile, and to save the planet while they’re at it. And they do it all with WooCommerce and WooCommerce Subscriptions.
“Should I be selling on Amazon or through my own online store?”.
This is a common question asked by online sellers. The answer? Both.
Today, successful online sellers are those that are reaching out to meet their customers everywhere they shop online, embracing multi-channel selling and giving their products as many chances as possible to be seen, bought and loved by more customers and there’s no better way to get started than by adding Amazon to your channel mix.
Whether you’re just starting out or you already have your own successful online store, here are five reasons why you should consider selling on Amazon.
Using the powerful WooCommerce platform, we’ve helped a host of businesses improve their existing stores and increase their online revenues.
We’ve also had a number of companies that have come to us for brand new sites in order to build their eCommerce presence from the ground up. Such was the case with Nuria Beauty, a worldly skincare brand dedicated to supporting girls’ education.
In all the productivity and preparation for the holiday season, some important elements of your business can be overlooked. Over in WooCommerce.com Happiness, we identified four focal areas — two physical, two technical — that can sometimes cause a few bumps in the road, and put a checklist together to keep you covered.
So, here are the four areas to watch over in order to keep your store running smoothly this holiday season.
I love to give people gifts. There’s something so cool about finding the perfect item for someone based on an offhand comment, something you noticed, or something they didn’t realize they needed. But… finding a great gift is hard when you don’t have the perfect idea ready to go. I find giving gifts toughest to do around the holidays because I’m looking for gifts for a lot of people at once.
At this time of year, I want help to generate ideas. I’ll often know of a store that my gift recipient likes, but I might not have a particular item in mind. I find gift guides extremely useful in this situation — I’ll visit a store, see that they have “Gifts for brothers”, “Gifts for moms”, or similar, and check out a few guides to find something my recipient will like.
Gift guides are a really useful tool for new customers and can be key to encouraging that first order from a customer. Once someone has purchased once, you’re in a better position to market to them and encourage them to come back after the holidays — repeat customers have a 27% chance of returning, so gift guides are worth the initial investment to start a relationship with a customer.
For returning customers, gift guides also have value. They help focus customer attention on specific items and help existing customers who are already loyal to your shop find the perfect item even when they don’t have something specific in mind.
The holidays are your chance to test out all the new strategies and products you’ve been working on throughout the year.
The last thing you want to be during your busiest time of the year is uncertain. You need to go into the holiday season prepared. You need the data to back up each of the decisions you make. And you need to act quickly, or you’ll have to wait until next year to try again.
As the founder and developer of Metorik, I’ve worked with thousands of stores around the holiday season, helping them maximize and understand their results. In this post, I want to share with you some tips that will ensure you’re ready from a reporting perspective these holidays.
The holiday season can bring about something of a curious change in customer behavior:
Shoppers that might usually wait patiently for deliveries become frantic with delays. Out of stock notifications do not go down well. And your inbox might get some surprises!
The holidays also change the way shoppers navigate your store. If someone knows exactly what they want, they’ll probably turn to site search — but holiday shoppers are more likely to use your menus, widgets, footer, and other navigational options to browse.
If your store’s navigation isn’t useful for holiday shoppers, it can lead to them ditching you for a competitor. Shoppers just don’t have the time or the patience to struggle with confusing menus or missing pages this time of year… which means that your mistakes here could be costly.
Here are a few things navigational things to consider for best-serving busy holiday shoppers.
