Master WooCommerce shortcodes to customize your e-commerce site effectively. Understand their types, usage, and benefits. Turn complexity into simplicity.
The post “Discovering the Power of WooCommerce Shortcodes” first appeared on WP Mayor.
Tag: WooCommerce Tips
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Thoughts on Translating the WooCommerce Plugin
Last year on a podcast host Abha Thakor had a chat with three Woo builders as they shared their stories around translation, meetups and sustainability. It’s great to reflect on past conversations as we need to keep these important elements of WooCommerce moving forward.
Translating WooCommerce as a plugin into your local language
When it comes to the WooCommerce plugin, there are thoughts around the importance of translating it into local languages. For example, Simon Kraft from Germany weighed in on this.
He started by stating that WooCommerce is similar to WordPress and any WordPress plugins because people often find their way around English strengths since English is the default in WooCommerce and many other plugins. But in cases like eCommerce, it’s very important to have that in your local language. This helps any user or developer to understand what you’re doing and find your way around a shop or a website. Luckily with WordPress there is a large community of volunteers pledging their time to translating enormous numbers of text to their local languages.
Translations in German
When it comes to Simon’s native language, German, he noted that they are a bit picky with having strange language strings in their websites and WooCommerce shops are no exception to that. Years ago when he started translating WooCommerce, he would find wrong or misleading translation, something that was translated with some automated software like Google Translate, but was not precisely on point in German. At that point he thought, “Hmm, we can do better than that.” So Simon moved over to the translation side of things and tried to fix it and not break stuff on my way there.
Getting started on translating the WooCommerce plugin
Vachan from India added how he started translating WooCommerce and how others can start. It started with his team and wanting to help the community. As a project translator the simplest way to do this is to go to the translation page on the WordPress official website. There you will be able to easily find what interests you in translation. Just select your language and you can select which project you want to work on. For WooCommerce, once you have chosen your language, search for it. There you will find a complete front end system where you can see what has been translated and what is pending.
In most cases, there are two primary places where you can help contribute to the translation. The first is the stable version, which is actually live and people are using it. Secondly, there’s a trunk, which is the future release, the immediate future release. Both are equally important because the current version helps whoever is already installed and working on that to ensure it gets updated whenever the user updates their website. And of course, the trunk is for the future release.
He goes on to say that working in both is a good idea. It’s about your fluency and how comfortable you are picking up any language. If you feel you’re confident enough to take any language, you can explore it. See what words, which phrases are requiring any translation and you can suggest that translation. And it’s as simple as just filling up that simple clicking on the word, clicking on that phrase and just in inputting your translated reply. That’s it.
Do you need to be a WooCommerce developer?
Vachan does not feel you need to be a developer. You just need to understand WooCommerce enough and have used it. It’ll help you because you understand where that phrase is being used. Because in some languages, what happens with the same word could mean something differently, such as a different context. So just being aware of the context is a good thing. You don’t have to be an expert in development as there isn’t any coding language required. It’s just the language you know. And understanding the context of where that phrase is going to get used in the software is important.
Challenges of translation
Everyone on the podcast gave a bit of insight to the challenges not only met with WooCommerce translations, but WordPress as well. Maja gave one example of translating a certain term like tab or field. Once this is done and you translate to a new deposit, this word in the glossary. For instance, if the tab is being translated into my language, if you go and Google that word in my language, you will not find anything actually that explains how to solve your problem. So it would be great if there would be a visual supporting articles explaining this or expanding on the glossary.
Simon, when revisiting translating German, added that here are cases where stuff like that happens. In German, it’s not so bad because German and English are quite close to a certain degree. The main issue with German is that German words are very long in many cases. Because in German it’s grammatically sane to just chain words and have like donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftsmützenfabrikant. That’s a valid word. It’s about a hat for a sea captain.
So in many, many cases, it’s actually an issue to find a translation that fits the context. For example, you have a button somewhere and the button cannot be huge. So you have to find a fitting word that meets the context. That’s hard sometimes.
When it comes to WooCommerce or any eCommerce context, translating with localizing the currency is important. WooCommerce, which is America-focused in many cases, we have examples in U.S. Dollars and similar currencies, which is perfectly fine. But if we translated for the German or European market, then we would replace those examples with Euros or Pound or whatever.
Final Thoughts
The overall conversation carried a theme as first mentioned. It is important for WooCommerce builders, who have the resources and capabilities, to get involved with helping to translate the WooCommerce plugin. From what I have seen, the growth of Woo is building in countries across the world and here at Do the Woo we want to help you to bring your translating skills to help that growth.
Again, you can listen to or read the full transcript here of the episode Stories of Translation, Community and Sustainability with Vachan, Maja and Simon
The post Thoughts on Translating the WooCommerce Plugin appeared first on BobWP.
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Breaking Into the WooCommerce Ecosystem as a Product Developer
If you are a product developer, you may be thinking of moving into the the Woo ecosystem. You may be starting a plugin or extension or have already built it. Maybe you are looking at a big player in the space to acquire it. Or reselling on the WooCommerce marketplace. Here are three good places to start.
Make Your Product Compelling
What is compelling about a product is when it’s really created with customer need in mind. Less breath, and more depth. By that have it focus on this one problem and just really introduce an elegant, simple, easy solution that reflects and understanding of the customer’s true need.
Everyone has seen products out there, plugins, extensions, consumer products that are just patched together, modified from one thing to suit a different need. What is important is the thing that you’re creating really does meet a real need in the market.
Introduce an Elegant Solution
This is looking at it from the customer perspective and not from a coding or development standpoint If the store owner uses your plugin , they want to with minimal guidance and to be able to feel confident in their use of it. That is the bigger picture.
This may not be feasible depending on the level of complexity of the problem that you’re trying to solve. But it can be bolstered by really great docs, videos, and how to’s. With Google these days, people can find guidance out there. If they are using something and it’s intuitive or it’s adapting to their skill level or needs, that is really beautiful.
Winning Hearts with Reviews
It’s not always about market share or numbers. It’s also about winning the hearts of those that you’re trying to serve. So the amount of passion that comes through reviews should reflect a love for a brand, or the story about “hey, it really made my work a lot easier,” or “It boosted my sales by 40 percent,” or, “it changed how I think about my business, and it changed the opportunity for me.”
These are just three examples that were shared with from Clara Lee who leads product marketing at WooCommerce.com. She has a lot of insights she shares more behind the scenes via marketing the WooCommerce marketplace and other products. You can listen to the full podcast. Or if you would like to hear my perspective on breaking into the Woo ecosystem, I have a few thoughts as well.
The post Breaking Into the WooCommerce Ecosystem as a Product Developer appeared first on BobWP.
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What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder
Abha Thakor, co-host on my podcast Do the Woo, has been bringing on guests to tell stories since she joined our team. Before she did that, she was a guest herself and took the time to explain why storytelling is such an important part of being a builder.
The reason behind storytelling
I get really exasperated when people tell me in a professional environment, “Oh, we do storytelling” when this storytelling is basically nothing about the person or capturing what it is that it means to them. And it is just a corporately-engineered line. Some corporate blurb that has nothing about the real person or people involved. Storytelling has been around for thousands of years, the only difference is the tools that we use. A story, to be effective, has to have certain components to help people understand that story, to reach others, and for them to be moved or inspired by that story.
That doesn’t mean that they should create stuff that’s not there. This is one of the things that I would really say to WooCommerce businesses, please don’t create stories that aren’t true. If you change people’s stories or what they share in reviews to fit your corporate brief or what you’re trying to sell, they will come back about it and they will not work with you again. They will also be a lost customer.
And actually, you don’t need to approach it like that because the story they’ve told you is the one which will inspire somebody else. Storytelling needs to be something that is positive, it needs to have an integrity to it. It also needs to avoid being translated into words that actually people will not understand. People don’t relate to that, people relate to people.
What storytelling means to a product builder
The best stories are often going to be the people who write to you and give you a particularly strong review, saying why it made a difference. Now, don’t just use their review and run it as a promotion with all your branding around it. Talk to the person. Because talking to the person will give you more of the context of that story. That story itself is likely to be more powerful. You have empowered the person and the customer, you’ve made them feel valued, which is important because this customer has taken time to contact you. It is often so easy to give a negative review. In our culture, sadly, people will not jump to pay a compliment. Value that customer who does and help them share their story.
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution is a really good example. They are a charity in the UK and Ireland, and like many other organizations, they monitor what is happening. They monitor what is being said. But they don’t just take it, reproduce them and say, “Hey, this is all about us.” What they do is actually something that is the same for what you would do for a product.
It’s, “Let’s talk to this person, let’s see what the context is. Let’s see what else they might want to say.” It may be that they want to share more. If you don’t have the conversation, you could have just missed out on the best story, something that will not only interest your audience, but will also motivate your team or staff.
Stories can also come from other sources and interactions with your customers. Encourage your team to look out for how to help build your community.
The story brings trust for newcomers to WooCommerce
We often say to one of the WooCommerce agencies we work with, “Okay, if you are working with a charity or you are sponsoring something because you passionately believe in it, what are you want to say about that?” And not from the perspective of making money off that charity or making money off that cause. But what is it that is part of your story? Because actually telling your story is more than telling the public that you sponsored something.
And I’ve seen it with WooCommerce builders. I’ve dealt with a couple of sites recently that they’ve sent me. [These sites in their version of stories] literally talked about what they had in their toothpaste and when they brushed their teeth, what came out of their teeth. And “Why would people want to know this?”
It was because the teams looked at social media where people talked about breakfast and things like that. They didn’t know where to start, so, that’s what they did too. I have got permission to re-tell that story because the team there said, “Someone should have told us this.”
But it’s telling your story and telling what you are comfortable with sharing. I’m one of the editors of the People of WordPress series. And we’ve interviewed lots of people who are from e-commerce, but hear them say, “Okay, what are you happy to be reading about yourself? What are you going to be happy about someone talking to you about? Is really important and that’s for any person.
It’s about being listened to and heard
And that’s the joy for me, coming from a PR background where I’m a Chartered PR Practitioner and that’s a lot about actually thinking about the ethics of communication and how we deal with things in a positive way and how we involve people. We don’t do communications to them, we create or we do communications together because it’s about being listened to and being heard. And helping people be listened to and heard is the greatest way to do that.
We talk about ownership a lot. So if I was talking to you as a product developer, I would say, “Okay, share a little bit about what that means in terms of why it’s special to you, how and why it excites you,” because that is your story. And that may be what you invite other people to share as well.
For example, with the boats work that we do, we ask the captains to share what it is that they love about taking people on these wonderful excursions. And it becomes much more than this e-commerce thing that you’re supposed to do. It becomes a living and breathing part of your business and part of your organization. And that is when business really innovates, it’s when you get fantastic solutions, it’s where you meet and collaborate with other people. And more importantly, you get to meet exciting customers that makes day with you for the rest of your business career. And that’s the people that you want to be at your party when you retire. So, it’s bringing that locality back to you, really.
The post What Storytelling Means to a WooCommerce Product Builder appeared first on BobWP.
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Multilingual Sites Are a Good Bet for WooCommerce Shops
No person is an island, and the same can be said for your WooCommerce store. In fact, you’ll want to make sure any potential customer can find you, regardless of the language they speak. If you run a multilingual WooCommerce store, you have the best chance of finding greater profits, and more success than ever before.
There are lots of ways to do this, but if you use WordPress and WooCommerce, you have a stellar foundation. Both are market-leading platforms, and if you extend the ecosystem using plugins, you can create almost any type of store imaginable. What’s more, you have enormous flexibility and power under the hood.
For this post, we’re going to take a look at a number of ideas and thoughts around why you should launch a multilingual WooCommerce store. To set some context, let’s talk about the popularity of WordPress and WooCommerce.
WordPress’ Market Share (And How WooCommerce Leverages It)
First off, WordPress is a huge industry. It is used for nearly 45 percent of all websites and sees constant growth. More users come to the platform on a regular basis, despite the competition. There are lots of positives to this, which we’ll discuss later on.
As for WooCommerce, the statistics still make for good reading and account for several million sites.
How E-Commerce Statistics Correlate With WordPress’ Own Numbers
Worldwide e-commerce is also big business. Purchase numbers were around two billion across 2020, and with around 25 percent in growth of the market, it’s a channel that lots of stores should be a part of. The good news is that WordPress and WooCommerce can both scale to meet those demands and is continually growing.
In fact, WooCommerce has core design and code to help you scale a store. This is just one of the many positives of using the platform in this way.
The Benefits of Running a Multilingual WooCommerce Store
There are likely customers, ready and waiting, almost everywhere in the world. By extension, this means there may be demand for your products or services. This is the core benefit of running a multilingual WooCommerce store, but there are lots more to consider:
- User Experience (UX). The UX of your site will improve because you will cater to the most number of users. A site in a familiar language is going to be easier to navigate, use, and interact with.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Each extra page for your multilingual content will have a rank in search engines. At a base level, the greater number of pages you index, the more chance a user will click one.
- ‘Social currency’. This aspect covers a number of areas. For example, your attempt to localize your site (a key aspect of running a multilingual WooCommerce store) will bolster trust in your customers. Also, you stand to earn more credibility, goodwill, and loyalty.
- Ahead of the competition. If your sales are going well in your original market there’s a strong chance your products will gain the same success elsewhere. Perhaps you have several competitors in your home market that aren’t as ready and willing to create a multilingual store, this sets you apart and puts you ahead of the competition when it comes to international conversion rates.
Overall, a multilingual WooCommerce store can open up new markets, and give your products and services fresh attention from would-be customers.
How to Launch a Multilingual WooCommerce Store
Of course, you’ll need some tools, services, and platforms in place before you begin to create a multilingual WooCommerce store:
- Your site will need to run an up-to-date version of WordPress.
- By extension, you’ll also want to run the latest version of the WooCommerce platform too.
- You’ll need some way to translate your content, and display it for users.
Most WooCommerce sites will already have products in place and optimized text, which leaves the translation process.
Conclusion
Finding new customers is tough. While there’s merit in trying to reduce that churn, you will also need a strategy to find fresh customers for your products and services. A multilingual WooCommerce store is a top-tier yet simple way to do so.
The premise is that the more eyes there are on your store, the greater the chance of a purchase or conversion. However, to get here, you’ll want to run a multilingual WooCommerce store.
The post Multilingual Sites Are a Good Bet for WooCommerce Shops appeared first on BobWP.
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Personalization, the Future of eCommerce and WooCommerce
In a podcast with Kenn Kelly from Never Settle, a WooCommerce agency, he was asked with all of the changes happening in the e-commerce industry, the different platforms, headless becoming a thing now, where does he envision the future of e-commerce going? And how does Woo fit into that?
Kenn shared that subscription based businesses stood out to him. which we’ve been seeing happen for a long time. Amazon pressed that quite a few years ago. And a lot of people started realizing, it was like, “My toilet paper’s going to be on delivery.” And now everyone’s like, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense.” And people also see, “Oh, it’s a recurring revenue stream.” He thinks when it’s forced it doesn’t work. But he absolutely thinks that that segment of e-commerce is going to continue to really expand. And WooCommerce can do that out of the box, really powerful engine, there.
One of the things that his agency sees where they get called into bigger projects are people wanting some sort of advanced subscriptions. So a client that Never Settle is launching right now, Bixbi Pet, they have all these incredible dog foods, and all organic, and all this stuff, and they’re in most PetSmarts across the country, and pretty large business. But their customers are on subscriptions for their dog food, and their dog treats, and cat food, and cat treats.
But they wanted a really cool checkout engine for people to build their subscription. So his agency had a lot of customization in that, but where they found the most customization, where he thinks it’d be fun to see us as a community invest more into WooCommerce is my account experience. That’s the thing that he feels like has the most potential, not just in design and user interface.
As an example, for these guys, they want their customers to come in and be able to just swap out what flavors they’re in. So they’re going to order three bags a month and they want to be able to go in and change those without changing the subscription. And that’s highly custom. That’s not something that you can do out of the box, or to set up an auto-rotation where they’re just surprised. They can just say, “Hey, of these six flavors, just rotate them for me.”
And so they built that for them. And Kenn thinks not only are you going to see subscription businesses increase, but you’re going to see people really pressing into the customer experience of the subscription business. That’s the ones that they’ve seen really grow, is they really nurture those people. Clients see them as the goal behind their business and so they invest a lot into that experience.
So it’s more and more personalization. It’s going to be leveraging AI, it’s going to be leveraging market automation tools, but less blanket offerings. They have something that’s written that says, “Hey, this person’s ordered 10 bags of cherry dog food,” which isn’t a real flavor, “and we’re releasing cherry treats. so we’re automatically going to present this offer to them to try it free for one month or something.” So I think personalization is one of the big things.
The post Personalization, the Future of eCommerce and WooCommerce appeared first on BobWP.
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STAGGS Product Configurator: The Ultimate Visual Tool for WooCommerce
In the bustling world of e-commerce, standing out is no longer just a luxury—it’s a necessity. Enter the STAGGS WooCommerce Product Configurator, a game-changing tool designed to revolutionize the WooCommerce landscape. But what makes it so special? Let’s dive in.
The post “STAGGS Product Configurator: The Ultimate Visual Tool for WooCommerce” first appeared on WP Mayor.
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I Once Updated a Site with 100 Plugins Activated – A Bit of History
I had this post over on Do the Woo and felt it needed to come back home to BobWP.
So without further ado….
Back when WordPress 4.0 came out I did an experiment. I installed and activated 100 plugins on two test sites, including WooCommerce. I did this primarily so see if I could get away with a one-click update without getting the white screen of death.
It was an old post, and had since been deleted. Maybe because I didn’t want to encourage anyone to actually do this. But whatever the case, in fall of last year two of my good friends on Twitter asked me about this deleted post.
Matt from GiveWP pinged me…
Well, Jeff found this…
But of course Matt was disappointed….
At that time I searched on my backup drive and lo and behold, yes, I did save all those videos. I posted here, on my older BobWP.com and everyone, at least the two of them, were happy. Since then I had updated and deleted all those olds posts. And like a bad penny, it’s back.
One note I should make. I did not go through in the end and see if all 100 were completely functional. My test was simply to see if the look of the site would change much or if I would get the dreaded white screen of death.
It’s short.. so take a step back in time and see if the entire universe exploded or not.
The post I Once Updated a Site with 100 Plugins Activated – A Bit of History appeared first on BobWP.
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Advice for Starting Your WooCommerce Business Journey
Make sure you know it (the WooCommerce business ecosystem). You can’t just come in and start a WooCommerce product company. You need to be in there whether it’s just doing a hobby site for yourself, doing websites for friends and families, previous freelance work but you need to really immerse yourself in it and discover the problems and gaps for yourself. Find out what you’re interested in and you might be particularly interested in I don’t know WooCommerce. events, websites or something, so start setting them up.
And that’s when you will find the opportunities because there are still gaps, even though there’s loads of people building products for commerce, there’s plenty of gaps and opportunities to fill them with products, but you will only find them if you’re truly immersed in it. And also, when you find those gaps, think about what is a realistic product for you. If you’re going to get venture capital funding or something, then you can aim. high and go for something complex, whereas if you’re bootstrapped and doing it as a side project alongside other work or job, then maybe go small and think what can you realistically do that there’ll be some demand for.
This came from an episode of Do the Woo with Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins.
The post Advice for Starting Your WooCommerce Business Journey appeared first on BobWP.
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What About Some Added WordPress and WooCommerce Tips?
It has occurred to me that I have this site here and over on Do the Woo I have some massive content. When I say massive, I mean transcripts of podcasts where professionals have shared hundreds, if not thousands of tips.
Each single show it filled with them.
So, what to do? Oh, maybe I should start reposting them here. And by that, I mean with a bit of editing there could be some very useful, and short posts that will help most anyone who builds with WordPress or WooCommerce, no matter the level. Heck maybe even some nuggets for users.
It’s like I’m going back in time LOL.
Do you feel like I’m asking you for your thoughts. Well it so happens that I have opened comments here, and that should give you some indication that I am happy to hear from you.
Will your thoughts drive me to where I should do this or not. Nope. Decision made and soon you will start seeing those tips with kudos to the proper peeps in the community.
But don’t worry, I will still write about podcasting, blogging, community and other various topics that seem to always be on my mind.
And why stop there? Maybe I will drop in some other things I think of along the way. Stuff I pick up in the community. Not really news, but maybe something I would like to highlight.
Because, hey, over on Do the Woo I work hard to elevate the voices. Might as well do the same here.
The post What About Some Added WordPress and WooCommerce Tips? appeared first on BobWP.