The fires in the WooLabs have been little more than glowing embers these last couple of weeks. We’ve put aside our lab coats and been up on deck helping steady the mothership. But in our time of need we heeded a great man who once prophetically exclaimed “I’ll be back!”… and now, so are we. And we’ve brought gifts!
This week we’re releasing 4 payment gateways (including the much anticipated PayPal Express), a brand new and much enhanced product importer suite, as well as two nifty product extensions.
PayPal Express
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PayPal Express is a gateway plugin that adds an Express Checkout button to your cart page. This lets you skip the WooCommerce checkout and use PayPal instead.
After the customer adds products to their cart they can go directly from the shopping cart page to PayPal to retrieve their shipping information and authorize payment.
Developed by Daniel Espinoza.
Force Sells
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The Force Sells extension allows you to link products together, so they will be added to the cart together. This can be useful for linking a service or required product to another product.
For example, if you are selling iPad glass repair as a service, you can link a new glass window as a forced sell product.
View this ExtensionProduct Image Watermark
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This premium WooCommerce plugin allows you to easy add watermarks to your WooCommerce product images. These watermarks can be an image copyright symbol, company logo or piece of branding text as a transparent PNG image.
Developed by dtbaker.
View this ExtensionGoCardless Gateway
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GoCardless (available in the UK) is a simple direct debit based payment gateway that features:
- Simple, transparent pricing – just 1% per transaction up to a maximum of £2.00.
- Collect payments without a merchant account, payment gateway or anything else.
- No application process, no set up fee. Start collecting payments instantly.
Product CSV Import Suite
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Mass import hundreds, even thousands of Products into your WooCommerce store with the CSV Import suite. CSV Import suite lets you import all types of products, even product variations!
The CSV import suite also has export and merge functionality making it very powerful for both new and established shops.
View this ExtensionIf you already purchased our Product Importer Deluxe extension you should already have access to Product CSV Import Suite which is it’s replacement.
e-Path Gateway (Australia)
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The e-Path service collects your customer’s credit card details with an approval to charge. You are notified by email so you can log in to securely view the credit card details and process the order offline using your manual merchant account.
Developed by James Collins.
View this ExtensionMyGate Payment Gateway
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The MyGate extension for WooCommerce is a South African payment gateway which supports payments from VISA, MasterCard, Diners Club and American Express credit card payments.
Developed by Gerhard Potgieter.
View this ExtensionWooCommerce 1.5.5
We’ve been beavering away adding new features in WooCommerce 1.5.5 which your going to love 🙂 Highlights include…
Drag and drop product sorting
A simple drag and drop solution for those of you who want to have products listed in a specific order has been added in this release. From the products screen you will be able to click the ‘Sort Products’ link and drag and drop to re-order products (you can also use the menu_order field when editing products).
On the frontend, and ‘default order’ option has been added to the sort options.
Change WooCommerce theme colours from the admin panel
For beginners sticking with the default WooCommerce styles, we’ve added some simple colour options to control buttons and other UI elements within WooCommerce easily:
Once selected, WooCommerce will generate the new styles based on your selections making it even easier to get started with theming.
A revamped integrations section + ShareYourCart integration
We’ve revamped the integrations setting in WooCommerce sections to make it extendable by plugins.
On top of that, we’ve added integration with ShareYourCart – a great way to get customers talking about your products in exchange for a discount.
And more…
- Stock display options – for example, an option to only show the quantity left in stock when it gets low. Entice customers to purchase before your stock is gone!
- Hide free products from the best sellers widget
- A more flexible cart.php for developers to hook into, used by our new force-sells plugin
- Several minor fixes and tweaks making 1.5.5 even more stable than its predecessor
We hope you like what we’ve been doing with 1.5.5 and enjoy the new extensions 🙂
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Great work wooteam! I will check these new add-ons soon.
Serg
Product variations… finally. I love Woo man! I will be checking this out.
Opens Excel – 20 mins later 11,122 variations added whoop!
Bye Bye Magento for my clients 🙂
WooHoo! We like to hear that! 😉
Yea, my clients aren’t big fans of Magento and neither am I although it is pretty robust. I think WC will make them very happy and me too.
Is ANYONE a fan of Magento? We are working on a migration from it as well.
@Tim I’m sorry to ask such a broad question – but what’s Magento like? What are your experiences? Is it a nightmare?
🙂
From my own experience being conditioned and comfortable with WordPress, Magento was hard to first understand.
This is strictly, installing and optimizing on a server.
I don’t know if I could say it was a nightmare, but much different from the famous 5 minute install and other parts of what makes it easy to understand WordPress.
Once understood Magento can be very powerful, but understanding it is half of the battle. That of course means the client needs to be able to understand Magento too.
Two different beasts I believe.
We’re biased in favor of WordPress obviously, and the guys in WooLabs are working hard to match the power of other e-commerce solutions and making it easy to manage your store of course. 😉
@DeepTitanic
My experiences have been good and bad. Mostly bad unfortunately. The theming structure is a nightmare until you figure it out.
Upgrades are unpredictable and many times break your site. Installation requires a high power server and you need to make sure the server company you go with has things optimized for Magento.
I actually had to switch my hosting company to run it for a client because it was so slow due to not having appropriate extensions installed on the server to optimize speed.
The extensions for Magento can be expensive and many of the developers do not update them when Magento has an upgrade and then they don’t work in new versions.
The CMS functions of Magento aren’t that dynamic. Ease of use is tough for clients.
I can go on and on 🙂 Feel free to email me offline if you want more.
It’s a robust system and works very good, but you really need to know what you are doing in it or things will break. It can be a high maintenance system if you let it.
I’m happy WC came along. It’s just what I was looking for in terms of ease of use and clients who need simple solutions and easy ways to update products and pages.
It’s good to hear from people who’ve used both systems, especially as it gets mentioned every time someone talks about ecommerce.
I definitely don’t like the sound of the upgrades issues you described – that sounds like a possible nightmare at least.
Thanks for the perspective guys, cheers!
I agree with Tim.
I used to love Magento…until you have to go through a major upgrade.
I made the strategic decision to focus on WP ecommerce because of the ease of upgrade. When you’re getting started upgrading seems so insignificant, but having failures during upgrades once your business has some momentum is catastrophic.
WP, as long as it’s a true one-button upgrade process, will win out long term.
Good stuff.
Any plans for beefed-up reporting capability? That seems to be the one weak spot compared to the dedicated shopping cart we migrated from. I’d love to have the ability to deep query the data for marketing purposes.
What sort of stuff would you like to see? Which cart did you migrate over from?
Please submit full details here and we can take a look 😉
Thanks…will do.
Actually, I looked at the suggestion board and there is no lack of requests for robust reporting. A good reporting system should be able to give you stats based on just about any needed query: gross sales by date range, specific product sales by date range, specific customer, etc., sortable and filterable. At a minimum, there should be downloadable data to put into Excel. I’ve been wondering if the lack of these features is due to the custom post type structure.
You guys have put so much thought into the features and extensions, it just hasn’t made any sense to me why the dirth of reporting.
Take a look at Smart Reporter – originally for WP eCommerce it’s now running on WooCommerce. We’re just about to implement it. For 3 clients all at once.
http://www.storeapps.org/smart-reporter-for-wp-e-commerce/
Their store manager is amazing too.
http://www.storeapps.org/features/
There’s a link in the WooCommerce extensions market place.
Thanks…I’ll check it out.
Great news lads! I’ve been waiting for ‘Drag and drop product sorting’ from the beginning, thanks! Also paypal express is a huge step in the right direction as well. I’ve been turned down for a job before because I couldn’t offer the functionality of the e-path gateway, so it’s great news to have that as well.
You guys are going from strength to strength. Keep up the great customer support while you expand, it’s one of your best features and keeps me from ever considering anything else!
Good to hear, thanks for the compliments!
I like the share your cart addon!
Is it possible for The Force Sells extension to link product variations together and add them to the cart, or does the extension only link products?
Currently it is only possible to use Force Sells with products, yes. For future versions we’re planning to expand this some more and add variations and other product types.
I look forward to seeing variations in the future. I have a site where I am using woocommerce as a booking application with variations as time slots. In the future I’d like to be able to use Force Sells to book all time slots in one go.
The revamped integrations section looks great, but the option to show the ShareDaddy button is gone. I’ve been reading through the changelog and did not see that it got removed.
Now I’m stuck without sharing buttons 🙁
Its there – if you have ShareDaddy turned on that is (it detects jetpack)
Thanks for your extremely fast reply. Before I was using the stand alone version of ShareDaddy, but that seems not to be working anymore.
Anyway, Installed jetpack and now it works again!
Thanks!
Awesome update.
Been looking forward to the GoCardless extension since I suggested it a while ago. However the implementation as far as I can see simply enables it as an additional payment gateway on a store wide basis collecting one off payments on an order by order basis. This is not what GoCardless is all about. It is primarily intended to facilitate the low cost collection of recurring payments like membership subscriptions and is not at all ideal for payment for physical stock as it takes 10 to 14 days for a supplier to get paid in cleared funds.
I hope I am missing something but how does the extension approach the GoCardless recurring payment and pre-authorisation options. There really needs to be a way of configuring these on a product by product basis. This would then make WooCommerce a viable membership management option.
I upgraded my 1.5.4 to 1.5.5 (Windows Server 2008) IIS 7.0 and since that moment Woocommerce is not anymore working and causes php5.dll, version : 5.3.10.0 errors 🙁
Please do use the forums for technical issues and help! – http://woocommerce.com/support-forum/
Drag and drop product sorting is very cool, but it’s very strange because i must wait beetween 10 and 15 seconds after the admin-ajax.php finish to reorder product, and some times for specific product, there are no effect.
I just upgraded 1.5.4 to 1.5.5 but when I click check out button, Its redirect me to my homepage, something wrong?
Hey updates look amazing, good work – just one question, do you have any plans to implement a downloadable report of orders which can be used to create address labels etc? Example of what I mean is the csv that ebay allows you to download listing the name, shipping address line, town, country, postcode, country so that they can be imported into a label mail merge. It makes order fulfilment MUCH easier. I love how amazing the woocommerce looks, and the likelihood of getting orders looks so much higher with this kind of platform – BUT I need to be able to fulfill the orders too 😉
We’d love to have your idea submitted here for community voting! – http://woo.uservoice.com/forums/133476-woocommerce
Thanks Jessica. 🙂
Great will do, thanks Ryan!
watermarks is a great extension – it’s exactly what I need for my little shop presenting images…
Good Work!
I have one question.
Featured image doesn’t appear on the New Product or Edit Product admin page, neither on the Screen Option checkboxes.
Other posts and pages work good but not with products.
Any Ideas?
Thanks!
Sorry the trouble here! Can you post in the forums for some help here. They can hopefully help clarify the issue. 🙂