With the release of WooCommerce 3.6 – along with eight new WooCommerce product blocks and a ton of performance upgrades – we’re launching a new feature making it easier for you to find extensions that help grow your store.
Introducing Marketplace Suggestions
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.
After plenty of planning, design, and early customer feedback, we’re adding Suggestions to specific places and pages throughout WooCommerce. They will always have contextual relevance: for example, on the Edit Product meta box, suggestions are all geared towards modifying the product page and are only shown to users who have permission to add plugins.
This is the first iteration, and we’ll continue to make them more relevant and helpful as time goes by.
DIY State of Mind
We want WooCommerce to give you the flexibility you need to build your store, your way.
Ultimately, Marketplace Suggestions are likely to be the most helpful to those who are building a store for their own business or “DIYing”. Such folks want relevant extension suggestions where and when they need them. They want to be the first to know when new extensions related to their business are released.
Alongside flexibility, part of what people love about WooCommerce is the freedom to make their way. For developers building sites for others and taking on the responsibility of purchasing extensions for their clients, these suggestions may not be a good fit.
For this reason, we’re providing various options for managing suggestions.
Managing Suggestions
If a suggestion isn’t relevant at the moment, dismiss it by selecting the “x” icon to the right of it.
If you don’t want to see any suggestions at all – or if you’d like to remove them for a client – disable them permanently in WP Admin by going to WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > WooCommerce.com.
Diving into the details
Here are some answers to questions that we’ve been getting so far:
What About GDPR Tracking?
We don’t collect user data unless someone has opted in to share usage data with us. We don’t track sites that opt out or have no connection to WooCommerce.com, and we offer a setting in WP Admin under WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > WooCommerce.com to change preferences at any time. If you’re opted-in, here’s what we track.
All suggestions are dismissable and can be disabled as per the WordPress.org plugin repository guidelines. For the more technically-minded, full details around how Suggestions are fetched can be seen here.
Why Opt-out vs. Opt-in?
From customer surveys, we know that the majority of WooCommerce users set up new stores themselves and need guidance choosing extensions. We’ve decided to have the suggestions on by default to help these users. As mentioned above, we also offer the option to opt out.
Why only Official Extensions?
There are many excellent WooCommerce extensions available on the WordPress.org repository and elsewhere on the web, but there are also many that are not audited and put stores at risk.
It’s ultimately the customer’s choice as to which extensions to use and up to them to determine what best suits their business. As their eCommerce platform provider, we can serve them by making sure they’re aware first and foremost of the vetted and trusted options available.
We chose to only include extensions from the official WooCommerce.com Marketplace – which is open for submissions and lists extensions written by Automattic as well as by trusted partners and third-party developers.
Where will I see ads?
As this is our first iteration of Marketplace Suggestions, we are continuing to experiment with where to show suggestions. In one version, we included them in the Products List, but we have now removed suggestions from that screen following feedback that this was too much of an interruption.
That’s how we want this to work – keep sending us your feedback on Marketplace Suggestions, and we’ll keep improving it to make sure it’s useful.
Share Your Experience of Marketplace Suggestions
As with all things open source, the Marketplace Suggestions feature is subject to change. If there’s an extension from the official Marketplace that you find integral to running your WooCommerce store – and you can think of a place and time it would have been helpful to know about it – we’d love to hear from you in the comments!
There could be better inter-compatibility and features listed. I have many examples but two that come to mind.
Deposits plugin supports variations, but not composite products with bundles.
There is no report export I am aware of that lists a purchases product options in a readable format. They are all grouped in the options column row. When you are dealing with a composite product such as a t-shirt (gender, color, size, variation) there is not a way to export those orders to a spreadsheet to facilitating delivery.
I had to learn these the hard way, which is still much easier than writing the functions myself…
WooCoomerce is great but I have still using word press as front end and custom billing and automation script as backend..When it comes to store and payment processing,it is almost covered everything but you should maybe look to implement some backend features for auto provision and automation…I’m talking about integration with different auto provision scripts,control panels..etc
Woocommerce has extremely nice extensions. I use, for example, the BackWPup – WordPress Backup Plugin.