Here’s what’s new in WooCommerce 4.1

Written by Brent MacKinnon on May 13, 2020 Blog, News, Product News.

TL;DR: A new update is available for WooCommerce! When you’re ready, update via your WordPress Dashboard. To make the process as smooth as possible, view our documentation on how to update, make a backup, update your extensions, and then update WooCommerce.

WooCommerce 4.1 has arrived! This release represents the next step in our mission to democratize commerce. In March we released WooCommerce 4.0, which brought major changes both aesthetically and under-the-hood, and provided a glimpse into the future of WooCommerce. Going forward, we will be releasing updates for WooCommerce every 4 weeks — striving to: 

  • Create a powerful, usable WooCommerce experience for store owners,
  • Build an extensible, customizable WooCommerce core platform for our developer ecosystem,
  • Expand the Woo.com marketplace to support the discovery and sale of extensions, and
  • Support the WooCommerce Community of developers, builders, agencies, freelancers, and store owners.

We are excited to announce the next step in our journey: WooCommerce 4.1 —This is a minor release, which means everything is backward compatible with WooCommerce 4.0.

Here’s what’s new: 

For Store Owners

To improve the experience of store owners, WooCommerce 4.1 has a few features worth drawing special attention to:

  • A brand new Marketing Hub, where you will be able to launch, manage, and measure your marketing efforts, as well as discover extensions to help grow your business.
  • A brand new Setup Wizard, including the option to select our new WooCommerce Payments extension as an payment solution during setup (currently available only for US-based stores).

Grow your Business with the WooCommerce Marketing Hub

Now more than ever, store owners are wondering how they can reach more customers and drive growth. To help with this, we are committing to provide the tools and resources you need to promote your products, communicate with your customers, and grow and streamline your business. To help achieve this, we’ve built version 1 of a brand new marketing hub, which lives directly inside WooCommerce.

To start, we’re using this new space to recommend a small selection of marketing extensions and marketing-related content.

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In the future, we’ll be expanding toward our vision of a centralized hub where merchants will be able to launch, manage, and measure a variety of marketing efforts, including marketing automation, coupon management, and analytics.

Note: You won’t receive these suggestions if you have already opted-out of Marketplace Suggestions.

Simplifying payments management with WooCommerce Payments

After a successful beta, WooCommerce Payments is now available for all US customers. To help customers discover our payment solution, we’ve included it as an option in our updated setup wizard for new stores. 

In addition to enabling you to securely accept major cards, WooCommerce Payments features an integrated payments dashboard where you can manage charges, refunds, disputes, and deposits right from your WordPress dashboard.

Check out WooCommerce Payments to get started. 

For Developers

This release contains plenty of performance improvements and stability fixes: We’ve updated template files, added new hooks and functions, and prepared for future database updates and WordPress requirement upgrades. If you’re savvy, you can dig into these updates on our developer blog (first and second beta posts, announcement). 

Ready to get started?

As always, we recommend creating a backup of your site and making sure that themes and plugins are compatible before updating. See this guide for more details.

6 Responses

  1. limphus
    May 13, 2020 at 7:38 pm #

    Gostei das novidades e acho que o WooCommerce será num futuro próximo a melhor solução para E-commerces também aqui no Brasil.
    Precisa melhorar algumas coisas, como os plugins de meios de pagamentos que normalmente utilizamos por aqui, como Mercado Pago, PagSeguro, Pagar-me entre outros. Mas eu já gosto da plataforma e se conseguir integrar também com os Marketplaces ficaria ainda melhor.
    Mas parabéns a equipe WooCommerce pe,o belo trabalho.

  2. Angela
    May 13, 2020 at 10:26 pm #

    It would be nice if Woocommerce would include an update to send security notices to all customers through the website. It would maintain my branding. As of now, I can only send transactional emails to customers that don’t subscribe to my newsletter through Mailchimp. I should at least be able to notify all customers of changes to my store’s Privacy Policy, Terms, and Security issues. Oh, and this should be a free addition to Woocommerce.

  3. Shadrack Karanja
    May 13, 2020 at 10:49 pm #

    I thank you for the example you’ve given, but the writings are too small. I can’t read. If after payment it will be like that it will be illegible to most of us.

  4. Anthony Hortin
    May 14, 2020 at 7:42 am #

    Getting a bit sick of all these top-level menus that you’re adding in, especially when they’re primarily used for WC adverts. You could of very easily added this to the existing WooCommerce menu, rather than adding more clutter to our Dashboards 😡

    • Gary Murray
      May 18, 2020 at 11:12 am #

      Hi Anthony

      Putting it as a sub-menu item under WooCommerce limits the way we can include new features and functionality as we’d then end up with lots of tabs (i.e. the WooCommerce settings) which would not create the best user experience.

    • Ivan Lutrov
      May 21, 2020 at 3:30 am #

      Yeah, the marketing hub top-level menu item isn’t very useful. In most cases, I use a tool like _Admin Menu Editor_ by Janis Elsts to hide it.