We’re trying something new at Sell with WP, and we’d love your feedback via email or within the comments. We’ve started a list to send out the Weekly Roundup via email on Friday morning each week so you can have the week’s WordPress eCommerce news delivered right to your inbox.
This is separate from our newsletter (which you can sign up for here if you don’t get it!), and the email will include each article in the roundup, along with more details than we publish here on its content & our summary.
Want to sign up for the Roundup email? Good thing there’s a form here 🙂 .
Now onto the news! (and lots of it)
- New WooCommerce release upcoming: the version 2.3 release candidate was released this week with the version 2.3 drop slated for Tuesday. Make sure you check out Maintainn’s overview and guide to safely updating so you’re ready 🙂 . We’ll have a review as well.
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Several new WooCommerce extensions were released this week as well:
- WooCommerce Order Status Manager: Add custom order statuses and integrate them into your workflow; trigger new order emails based on status changes
- PostNL: lets you calculate PostNL shipping rates
- Advanced Product Labels: Add labels to catch customers’ attention by displaying info such as what’s featured, has free shipping, etc
- Hipchat: Get Hipchat notifications for new events in your store, such as new orders
- Slack: Get Slack notifications for new events in your store, such as new orders
- A widget for WooCommerce Bookings was also released this week to add a much-needed “search by availability” widget to your shop pages. When customers select a date range, the plugin will search through all your products and find all the ones that are not booked during that range of time — you can pick up the Search Availability Widget here.
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Prospress published a very interesting case study with Bryce Adams on using WooCommerce to build his SaaS business in 3 days.
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A free Easy Digital Downloads extension was released to connect Product Updates to Frontend Submissions so vendors can email updates to their customers.
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EDD has also relaunched the PayPal Payments Advanced extension this week and released an update to integrate the Amazon S3 extension with Frontend Submissions.
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While we’re talking about both EDD and WooCommerce, a new marketplace was launched this week to sell WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads extensions: Shop Plugins.
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AffiliateWP posted a neat tutorial on how to append affiliate IDs to Jetpack sharing links when an affiliate is logged into your site.
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They’ve also released an Affiliate Area Shortcodes add-on to let you only include what you’d like in your affiliate area.
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Here’s an interesting interview from two authors I like: Andrew Youderian on Matt Report discussing sourcing eCommerce products and different platforms. While Andrew’s not correct on all points related to what WordPress solutions like WooCommerce can do, it’s still an interesting look at some challenges of hosted vs self-hosted solutions.
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Andrew also has a podcast on his biggest eCommerce regrets worth a listen.
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ConversionsXL posted an article I really enjoyed this week: Where Should You Start Testing? (what to test, where to start, and how to do it).
Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy your weekend!
