WooSesh 2023, the virtual conference for WooCommerce store builders, will be broadcast live on October 10-12. This year’s theme is “Next Generation Commerce.” Registration is not yet open, but the speaker lineup and broadcast schedule have just been published. Over the course of three days, WooSesh will feature 31 speakers across 23 sessions.
The event will kick off with the State of the Woo address, delivered by WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana and other product leaders from the company. Speakers will cover a wide range of topics like complexities of sales tax and product taxability, accessibility, block themes, security, AI tools, and automation, with case studies and workshops mixed in.
New in 2023: The Seshies
WooSesh organizer Brian Richards is launching “The Seshies” this year, a community awards ceremony that will recognize the best examples of the WooCommerce ecosystem across six categories: Innovation, Store, Extension, Agency, Developer, and Community Advocate.
The Seshies will include a community awards ceremony that will celebrate the winners. Anyone can nominate candidates for the awards, and participants can even nominate themselves and their own WooCommerce projects.
“These awards are something that have been on my heart for quite some time,” Richards said. “And now, after 6 years of hosting WooSesh and 10 years of running WPSessions, I think I’ve amassed enough authority and (critically) a wide enough reach to deliver awards, on your behalf, that have real meaning.”
The week before the event, Richards plans to publish the top three nominees in each category. The community will vote throughout the first two days of WooSesh and the winners will be announced on the final day. Winners will receive a digital badge of recognition and Richards said he is also working on producing physical awards to ship to winners anywhere in the world.
WooCommerce is experimenting with improving the store experience through the addition of the Interactivity API to the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The new API, which was announced earlier this year, will allow developers to build interactive blocks that support frontend experiences where visitors can interact with content without having to refresh the page. The WordPress contributors working on the API are encouraging developers to test it with their own blocks.
WooCommerce Blocks 10.9.0, released in mid-August, integrated the Product Button with the Interactivity API to support real-time counter updates for the mini-cart, smoother animations, and better transitions from ‘Add to Cart’ to ‘Loading’ status to show the quantity in the cart when a product is added.
The difference is subtle but creates a much smoother shopping experience with nearly instantaneous feedback for the user. Contributors are also exploring how the Interactivity API can be used to improve frontend filters, including the rating, price, stock, and attributes filters. The API will eventually land in Gutenberg and WordPress in the future, but in the meantime WooCommerce is experimenting to see how the plugin’s blocks can benefit from it.
Version 11.0.0 was released last week introducing the new Product Collection block in beta:
Like the Products block, you can choose what criteria affect the list of blocks displayed to shoppers and control the product layout in the list/grid by the various element blocks.
Unlike the Products block, which is a Query loop block variation, this block is a standalone block, enabling us to tailor the block further to better meet the merchant’s needs.
The Product Collection block is very similar to the Products block from which it was forked, except it is not built as a variation of the Query Loop. It comes with improvements around Inspector controls as compared to the current Products block, as well as a basic set of patterns. The block already has the Interactivity API integrated for the same improved frontend performance.
Version 11.0.0 also enables manual migration of Products to Product Collection. An upgrade notice will appear in the Inspector Controls, informing users that they will get more features with the Product Collection block:
As the Product Collection block is still in beta, WooCommerce Blocks has not yet changed existing templates that have Product blocks. The development team is looking for more feedback on this block before moving it out of beta. Check out the release post for more enhancements and bug fixes.
Setting up an online store has never been easier thanks to WooCommerce, the powerful e-commerce platform that seamlessly integrates with WordPress. With WooCommerce, you can transform your WordPress website into a fully functional online store and unleash the true potential of your business. In this article, we will guide you through the process of mastering WooCommerce setup and configuration, unlocking endless possibilities for your online business.
Setting Up WooCommerce: Harnessing the Power of WordPress!
Setting up WooCommerce is a breeze, especially if you already have a WordPress website up and running. First, you’ll need to install the WooCommerce plugin from the WordPress plugin directory. Once installed, activate the plugin and follow the simple setup wizard. This wizard will guide you through the essential steps, such as configuring your store’s location, currency, and payment gateways. Don’t forget to set up your shipping options too, as WooCommerce offers flexible shipping methods to suit your business needs. With just a few clicks, you’ll have your online store ready to go!
Next, customize your store’s appearance by selecting a theme that complements your business’s branding. There are numerous WooCommerce-specific themes available, designed to optimize the shopping experience for your customers. These themes offer features like product showcases, easy navigation, and mobile responsiveness. Choose a theme that best suits your needs and customize it further using WordPress’s powerful customization options. With WooCommerce and WordPress combined, you have complete control over the look and feel of your online store.
After setting up your WooCommerce store, it’s time to dive deeper into its configuration to fully unleash the potential of WordPress. WooCommerce offers a plethora of options to fine-tune your store’s functionality. Start by exploring the settings menu, where you can configure critical aspects of your store, such as taxes, inventory management, and product reviews. Take advantage of WooCommerce’s extension marketplace to add additional functionality to your store. From payment gateways to marketing tools, there’s an extension available for every need. Experiment with different extensions to enhance your customers’ shopping experience and boost your sales.
To maximize the effectiveness of your online store, leverage the power of WordPress plugins. With thousands of plugins available in the WordPress repository, you can easily integrate your WooCommerce store with powerful marketing tools, analytics platforms, and social media channels. Plugins like Yoast SEO can help optimize your product pages for search engines, while social media plugins enable seamless sharing of your products on various platforms. By exploring the vast array of WordPress plugins, you can take your WooCommerce store to a whole new level and stay ahead of the competition.
Setting up and mastering WooCommerce is the key to unlocking the full potential of your WordPress-powered online store. With its easy setup process, flexible customization options, and extensive configuration settings, WooCommerce provides you with the tools you need to create a successful e-commerce business. By harnessing the power of WordPress and exploring the vast array of plugins and extensions available, you can take your WooCommerce store to new heights, attract more customers, and increase your sales. So, what are you waiting for? Dive into the world of WooCommerce and unleash the power of WordPress for your online business today!
An e-commerce store that looks good can help bring new potential customers to you. However, you’ll need more than swish visuals to nail down a sale. The best WooCommerce WordPress themes all look good, sure – but they also help you create and manage your store too. For this post, we’ll look at a bunch of near-perfect WooCommerce WordPress themes….. Continue Reading
WooCommerce 7.7.0 was released this week with Multichannel Marketing now out of beta. This is the first thing store owners see when they visit the Marketing page in the dashboard. It allows users to connect additional sales channels, such as Google, Amazon, and eBay, and automatically manage inventory across storefronts.
This addition makes WooCommerce more competitive with platforms like Shopify Plus. Merchants can connect different channels to the store by installing plugins. WooCommerce has documentation, including a quick start guide, for configuring Multichannel Marketing.
Version 7.7.0 also introduces updated shopper notices with new, more consistent styles for Snackbar lists and Notice banners. More details on targeting the new CSS selectors is in the release post.
A few other highlights in this release include the following:
New Product Reviews block that can be inserted on the Single Product template
More customization options for Add to Cart button
Expanded Mini Cart block customization options
New option to “Upgrade to Blockified Single Product template†from a classic template
Check out the 7.7.0 release post to see all the new filters and template changes.
WooCommerce is also running its 2023 twice yearly Developer Survey. The survey was designed to capture confidential feedback from developers who build on the WooCommerce platform in order to better understand their needs and make improvements.
Do you want to add a currency converter to your blog?
A currency converter allows your website visitors to quickly calculate the exchange rate of different currencies without leaving your website.
In this article, we will show you how to easily add a currency converter in WordPress.
What Type of Websites Need a Currency Converter?
Whether you have an online store, a small business website, or a WordPress blog, as long as you have an international audience and you’re selling something, then you can use a currency converter.
Here are a few examples of websites that may need a currency calculator for WordPress:
Ecommerce stores: If you are running an ecommerce store with WordPress and selling products internationally, then a currency converter can help your users quickly calculate costs in their local currency.
Travel blogs: If you own a travel blog, then a currency calculator can help your users calculate travel costs in different currencies.
Business websites: A business website may also want its users to see the exchange rates of different currencies. Particularly, businesses with a presence in different countries.
Finance and banking websites: Websites in the finance and banking industries can add currency calculators for their visitors to calculate conversion rates without leaving their website.
Coin and forex exchange sites: There are many websites that blog or deal with crypto-currencies, forex trading, and similar niches. These websites need a currency converter so that their users can quickly calculate conversion rates.
There can be many other WordPress websites that may need a currency converter. That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily add a currency converter in WordPress.
We will show you 2 methods, including a way for WordPress site and WooCommerce store. You can click the links below to jump ahead to your preferred section:
You easily add a currency converter in WordPress using CBX Currency Converter. It is a free WordPress plugin that calculates and displays up to 117 currencies.
The first thing you need to do is to install and activate the CBX Currency Converter plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to go to Settings » Currency Converter page in your WordPress admin area. From here, you can manage general settings, like choosing a layout for your currency converter and selecting your API source to fetch the exchange rates.
By default, the plugin will use Exchangerate.host, which doesn’t requires an API key. However, you can click the dropdown menu and choose other sources, like Alphavantage, Openexchangerates, and Currencylayer.
After adding the API key, you can select a layout for the currency converter.
There are 4 layouts to choose from. Using these layouts, you can display a currency calculator, exchange rate list, or both. You can also define the decimal point position.
Besides that, you can further edit the settings for each currency converter layout.
For instance, in the ‘Calculator Default’ tab, you can set the default values for the currency calculator. It allows you to enable currencies, set default options for from and to currencies, and more.
After the calculator layout, you can go to the ‘List Default’ tab for currency rate list default settings.
You can select the primary currency and then add a list of other currencies to display in the rate list.
Once you are done with the settings, click the ‘Save Changes’ button. Make sure to perform this step whenever you change any settings in the above tabs.
Displaying the Currency Converter on Your Site
You can easily display the currency converter anywhere on your website using the CBX Currency Converter block.
First, you can create a new page or edit an existing one. Once you’re in the content editor, simply click the ‘+’ button and add the CBX Currency Converter block.
Alternatively, you can also display the currency converter in the sidebar of your website.
You can go to Appearance» Widgets from your WordPress dashboard. After that, you can simply add the ‘CBX Currency Converter’ widget block to the sidebar area.
After adding the widget block, you can edit the title, select a layout, change the decimal points, choose the default currency, and more.
Once you’re done, simply click the ‘Update’ button.
Simply visit your website to see the currency converter in the sidebar widget or WordPress page.
Your users will be able to enter an amount, select the currency they want to check, and then click the ‘Convert’ button to have the results displayed right there.
You can also integrate a currency converter in your WooCommerce or any other WordPress ecommerce site. For this, you will need the Currency Converter Pro plugin.
However, other multi-currency plugins will also get the job done, most of which are free. Let’s look at how you can add a currency converter in WooCommerce.
Adding a Currency Converter in WooCommerce
If you have a WooCommerce store that attracts customers from different parts of the world, then a currency converter can show prices in local currencies and boost conversions.
The easiest way of adding a currency converter in WooCommerce is by using the CURCY plugin. It is a free WooCommerce plugin that is easy to use and offers multi-currency support.
First, you will need to install and activate the CURCY plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you can head to the Multi Currency page from the WordPress dashboard and view the General settings tab.
Here, you can click the ‘Enable’ toggle to activate currency converter options for WooCommerce. Besides that, the plugin also lets you fix the prices.
Next, you can scroll down and add different currencies. Simply click the ‘Add Currency’ button. Do remember that in the free plugin, you can only add 2 currencies at a time.
After that, you can switch to the ‘Location’ tab.
Here, you’ll find options to auto-detect currencies and show a particular currency for visitors from different locations.
Next, you can head to the ‘Design’ tab and edit your currency converter’s appearance.
The plugin lets you choose its position, add a title, change the text color, style, main and background color, and much more.
Once that’s done, you can save your changes.
You can now visit your WooCommerce store to see the currency converter in action.
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WooCommerce has launched Woo Express, a new managed hosting product that uses WordPress.com’s infrastructure and relieves store owners of the responsibilities of hosting and maintenance. The company soft-launched Woo Express in early March with a small selection of visitors but has concluded that phase and opened it up to the public.
Woo Express provides a selection of extensions already installed and professionally-designed themes but is built with the same open source platform that allows store owners to install any plugin or theme. Merchants can use WooCommerce Payments or any other payment gateway they choose. The plans also include automated backups, security scanning, and a custom domain and SSL certificate.
At WooSesh in October 2022, the company announced it was working on a hosted WooCommerce solution just as GoDaddy had launched an open access preview of Managed WooCommerce Stores to US-based customers, and Bluehost launched its WooCommerce offering a month prior. The drive to provide a more customized, user-friendly onboarding experience beyond simply having WooCommerce pre-installed, is getting more competitive.
Pricing for Woo Express’ hosting plans comes in slightly more expensive than GoDaddy’s introductory $20.99/mo pricing (renews at $29.99/mo) for the most basic plan, but cheaper than GoDaddy’s mid-tier and upper-tier plans which start at$99.99/mo and $149.99/mo.
Bluehost sits at the budget end of the WooCommerce hosting spectrum with plans starting at $9.95/mo (renews at $24.95/mo) and an upper end plan at $12.95/mo (renews at $39.95) that adds the ability to manage product inventory across Etsy, Amazon, and eBay from a consolidated dashboard via Ecomdash.
Woo Express pricing on 4/19/2023
Comparing plans across managed WooCommerce hosts isn’t straightforward as they all offer different features for a variety of stores at different pricing tiers. One major differentiator is the extensions bundled with the plan.
Although WooCommerce may be late to the game in offering a managed hosting solution, the makers of the e-commerce software have a clear advantage with their position in the WooCommerce ecosystem and a marketplace of more than 800 products. Woo Express has launched with a compelling set of commercial extensions bundled into the hosting plans, including product add-ons, product bundles, gift cards, min/max quantities, back in stock notifications, brands, product recommendations, subscriptions, in-person payments, shipment tracking, and more. Storeowners who were to purchase all of these extensions individually would spend far more than the annual cost of Woo Express hosting.
Woo Express Goes All-In on Block-Based Stores
WooCommerce is still working through the process of “blockifying” all aspects of store templates, and Woo Express is ready to carry the standard with a block theme as the default when customers sign up.
“One of our goals for Woo Express is to give new merchants the best of everything WordPress offers — the site editor and the blocks we’ve built for WooCommerce mean you can create a beautiful site to express your brand without coding knowledge,” WooCommerce COO Warren Holmes said.
“Woo Express ships with Tsubaki as the default, a modern, commerce-focused, block-based theme. We’ve made it easier for new merchants to get started with this theme by creating default content powered by our blocks. That includes the new cart and checkout blocks, which provides a more delightful experience for shoppers and better conversions for merchants.”
A few other commercial themes Automattic designed for Woo Express include Amulet, Zaino, Tazza, and Thriving Artist. Store owners are also free to install any theme from the wide world of WooCommerce themes, not just the ones included in the hosting plan.
Woo Express has a 14-day free trial so prospective hosting customers can try out the bundled extensions, themes, and the environment to see if it will fit their needs. The onboarding experience was designed to be friendly for merchants but developers still have access to everything under the hood.
“With every managed WordPress.com environment, you get access to a native GitHub integration, you can run WP-CLI commands, check server logs, access to DBs directly and set up your workflows through SSH and SFTP, and much more,” WooCommerce developer advocate Stephanie Pi said in a post outlining the new product on the company’s Developer blog.
As WooCommerce has become the most used open source e-commerce software, powering 23% of the top million online stores, managed hosting products have the potential to drive this growth even further. Users have an expectation that things will just work, but the reality is that much of WooCommerce’s open source ecosystem has grown up like wildflowers in a field. There are many great solutions out there but they don’t all work harmoniously together, which can drive people to proprietary, turnkey e-commerce solutions.
On a recent Do the Woo podcast episode, WooCommerce Head of Engineering Beau Lebens discussed how curated solutions like Woo Express bring some uniformity to the WooCommerce ecosystem. Putting a bunch of disparate solutions together hasn’t always provided the best experience for merchants, and it introduces complexity that can drive users away.
WooCommerce announced its intention to collaborate with hosting partners in October 2022 with WordPress.com as the first to pilot the new managed hosting solution. At that time Lebens said “details like different versions and white-labeling are still under consideration” but WooCommerce is interested in making customization available to suit the specific needs of hosts and their customers.
Holmes said his team is also currently in the process of evaluating an affiliate program to enable developers and the broader community to spread the word about Woo Express.
When asked about the status of other hosting partners offering Woo Express on their own infrastructure, Holmes said WooCommerce is still evaluating the possibilities.
“Many merchants experience WooCommerce with the help of one of hundreds of amazing independent WordPress / Woo hosts around the world, and we regard that as an indispensable part of Woo’s success and place in the e-commerce landscape,” Holmes said. “We’re hard at work on a way to expand our collaboration with hosts in the future through Woo Express. At the moment we don’t have anything specific to announce, but we do currently have multiple teams looking into this.”Â
Launching a managed hosting product puts WooCommerce in a unique position to tailor the core software to better serve the needs of store owners and hosting partners that are furthering its adoption, benefiting all who are using WooCommerce and building products for it.
“We’re very much using this as a way to drive improvements on the merchant experience in WooCommerce Core,” Lebens said on the Do the Woo podcast. “So that will be available to everyone, including all other hosts.
“But it also means that, as a package, we can start to say, because we do partner with other hosts, we work with them very directly, and we can say, ‘Hey, look, this stuff works better.’ If you bundle all of this together, if you offer this with a free trial, if you keep your pricing in this range, whatever it is, the learnings that we have from doing this ourselves, absolutely we intend to share this with hosts and work with other hosts to implement this for the whole ecosystem.”
WooCommerce 7.6 was released today with two new blocks merged from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin. The Single Product Details block and the “Add to Cart” Form block are now available to store owners who want to use the Site Editor to design their own Single Product Templates.
Along with the button, the “Add to Cart” form block will automatically display additional options, depending on if the product has a set available quantity or variations.
In templates where store owners are displaying multiple products, attributes filtering has been improved for the Products block. Inside the editor, there is now a collapsible menu for selecting attributes and filtering the display. It also shows a live preview of the products that will be included in this view.
For those who are designing pages and templates with patterns, WooCommerce 7.6 makes it much easier to get a consistent design with improved, scalable margins for patterns using the Products block.
This release also improves the Mini Cart block’s performance, with content preloaded, and an appearance that more closely matches the site’s active theme.
WooCommerce 7.6 includes several important updates for developers, including the following:
Clearer, renamed event names in block-based Checkout
Reintroduced cache for orders (after it was reverted due to causing an infinite loop on activation) when custom tables are enabled
Added an encoding selector to the product importer
Add/Remove order coupon actions are now logged in notes
Products widget can now be sorted by menu_order
For a more detailed look at the 673 commits in 7.6, check out the full changelog, which references each pull request included in the release.
WooCommerce has also released its Contributor Day Guide today for the upcoming 24-hour virtual event on April 19, 2023. There are instructions for how to get your development environment set up for contributing and how to join the Woo Community Slack. The guide outlines specific topics and tickets that will be addressed, with dedicated Slack channels for each.
WooCommerce Payments, a plugin that allows WooCommerce store owners to accept credit and debit card payments and manage transactions inside the WordPress dashboard, has patched an Authentication Bypass and Privilege Escalation vulnerability with a 9.8 (Critical) CVSS score. The plugin is active on more than 500,000 websites.
Beau Lebens, WooCommerce’s Head of Engineering, published an advisory about the vulnerability today, which he said “could permit unauthorized admin access to impacted stores” if exploited. It was discovered by a security researcher participating in WooCommerce’s HackerOne program.
WooCommerce worked with WordPress.org to push out a forced update for sites running WooCommerce Payments versions 4.8.0 through 5.6.1 to patched versions. Many store owners have automatic updates turned off to ensure proper testing before updating. Now that the vulnerability has been made public, it is imperative that all stores running version 4.8.0+ of the plugin update manually as soon as possible. WooCommerce sites hosted on WordPress.com, Pressable, and WPVIP have already been patched.
At this time WooCommerce does not have any evidence of the vulnerability being exploited but the plugin’s engineers recommend checking for any unexpected admin users or posts addd to the site. The advisory includes further details of what to do if you believe your site has been impacted. As a cautionary measure, WooCommerce has temporarily disabled the WooPay beta program since the vulnerability impacts this new checkout service they have been beta testing.
WooCommerce 7.5.0 was released this week with three new blocks for the Product Archive templates. These include a new Store Breadcrumb block, Product Results Count block, and a Catalog Sorting block, all seen in action below.
These blocks were released as part of an effort to “blockify” Product Archive templates so that they can more easily be customized with a block experience.
“We also want to account for the extensibility within this project by researching the mechanism for extensions to extend the templates and implementing a compatibility layer to keep as many extensions as possible working with blockified templates while giving time for extension developers to update and blockify their extensions,” WooCommerce engineer Tung Du said.
This project also includes support for a Notices block so merchants can display store notices to customers as well as determine where they appear.
WooCommerce 7.5.0 has expanded support for Global Styles, so that the Product Button, Product Rating, and Product Price blocks can now be customized more easily in the Site Editor. The Product Rating block now supports padding controls in Global Styles so that store owners can add more spacing around the blocks.
This release also brings in expanded support for the Style Book, which has been available since the WooCommerce Blocks 9.5.0 release. The Featured Product and Featured Category blocks can now be previewed in the Style Book and have Global Style changes applied.
WooCommerce 7.5.0 includes two database updates, 278 commits to WooCommerce Core, and rolls in 170 commits from the WooCommerce Blocks plugin.
