Weekly Roundup: December 6, 2013

Thankfully, if you’re reading this roundup you’ve survived Black Friday / Cyber Monday! This year’s traffic and sales were insane across the board for eCommerce sites, so if you have some insights or lessons learned from this year, please share them with us!

Before we get into eCommerce news, I do have something else I’d like to share. Tom McFarlin wrote a great post to remind us that much of the WordPress software (including many eCommerce plugins) we use is free or very inexpensive. As such, there are some pointers to keep in mind when reporting bugs, asking for support, and requesting features that I’d hope we all acknowledge and try to use when working with free software. Now, on to the news 🙂

• Easy Digital Downloads had some big extension releases this week, including a ticketing integration with Modern Tribe’s popular Events Calendar, and a Discount Code Generator that allows you to generate discount codes in bulk and them export them directly to CSV. They also released a Cyber Source integration and a plugin to set downloads as email attachments.
• Looking to use something besides The Events Calendar? WP Kube has a list of 5 other calendar plugins to choose from.
• Jigoshop also dropped some new extensions this week, including integrations for Stripe, WorldPay, Doc It documentation, and Shipworks shipping tools.
• iThemes is currently running a 40% off holiday sale – this is a great opportunity for Exchange users to pick up some add-ons! They new Featured Video add-on for products would be something I’d check out. They’ve also hired a new security expert and plan to develop new security plugins in the near future.
• Looking into using WordPress learning management systems? Slocum Studios posted an overview of some popular LMS plugins.
• Daily Blog Tips posted an interested overview of a pricing study. TL;DR: prices ending in “9” always perform best – even over lower prices.
• The Crazy Egg recently posted an article I liked with advice on selling benefits and features – great help for designing and writing for your product pages.
• Looking to do appointments / bookings in WooCommerce? Chris Lema has a plugin review you may want to check out.
• WP Beginner has a very interesting project going on: they’re currently making a WordPress glossary for beginners. If you’ve found terms you’re unfamiliar with, or end up explaining a concept often, please let them know to help contribute!
• Looking to import your RSS feed as blog posts to inform customers? WP Mayor posted a how-to article to help you out with this. They also posted a Magic Members review this week.

That’s it! As always, enjoy your weekend!