WooCommerce users will now have access to Social Rebate‘s unique social commerce plug-in, which allows brands to reward customers with instant cash rebates for promoting them on social networks.

“WooCommerce is always on the lookout for the best ways to boost sales for our users,” said Joel Bronkowski, WooCommerce Business Development Manager. “Social Rebate won us over with their unique ability to drive new customers to businesses through social commerce, we’re happy to offer this revolutionary tool to everyone using WooCommerce.”

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Photo credit; Sylvia Schade on Flickr

WooThemes has just released a new, innovative booking plugin for WooCommerce.

The extension, aptly named WooCommerce Bookings, will allow online businesspeople to:

• trade their time for cash money,
• set up appointments,
• connect with clients,
• link dependent resources, and
• integrate their services with their website.

What makes WooCommerce Bookings unique is that it takes a website from being just an online brochure, to being a place where people can go to actually book an appointment online.

The plugin is highly flexible and the WooThemes team has been perfecting it since 2011, according to WooThemes co-founder Mark Forester.

To read more on this story and check out a video about WooCommerce Bookings, click here.

In the editorial, the tech editor talks about how WooCommerce is specifically designed to work with WordPress, which is great for helping to monetize a regular blog or website.

To read Holden’s full review of WooCommerce, click here

Photo credit; SEOPlanter on Flickr

CMS Critic has published its 10 reasons why people thinking of creating an online store should think about using WooCommerce.

Kaya Ismail, who wrote the piece, says you’d be hard-pressed to find a similar plugin which holds the same level of potential as WooCommerce.

WooCommerce now supports a sizeable slice of the ever-growing ecommerce pie, with over 1.6M downloads from around the world.

The open-source platform provides users with a feature extensive, yet hugely user-friendly experience, making it perfect for ecommerce startups to get a feel for online business in a way which is easy to digest, and doesn’t cost too much money.

CMS Critic’s reasons to check out WooCommerce for online startups:

1. It’s Free

Despite being free and open-source, WooCommerce offers extensive features out of the box, whilst also being extremely flexible both by nature, and via the additional of extensions.

2. Huge Flexibility

Merchants using the platform can exercise a whole lot of flexibility with their products, without having to know too much about the technical side of things.

3. More Than Ecommerce

WooCommerce doesn’t force users to go beyond their comfort zone when building their online store, yet at the same time, it readily opens the door for more than just ecommerce.

For example, WooCommerce users can build a fully functioning store within a professional website, alongside an integrated blog.

4. Familiar Friendliness

With WooCommerce being a WordPress plugin, past users of the platform will benefit from being able to recognize the user-friendly WordPress interface. That kind of familiarity when building an online store could easily save time and confusion, whilst bolstering creativity.

5. Vast Customization Options

Currently, users can choose between 39 different WooCommerce enabled themes. Once a theme has been selected, you can then get to work on changing pre-set CSS styles and colour themes, tweaking the code and experimenting with the special features which each theme offers.

6. Professional Yet Simple

Built into the platform can be found detailed order tracking and customer engagement tools, which allow merchants to view past and open orders, update delivery statuses, apply discounts and so forth. Pretty much everything else you need for a professional ecommerce setup, is part of WooCommerce, right out of the box.

7. Analytics Made Easy

The built in analytics system makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. Figures like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all neatly presented via graphs, without the user ever having to leave their admin panel.

8. Apps Galore

There are hundreds of WooCommerce Extensions available, some of which are free, and some of which require a fee. From these extensions, one can find applications relating to accounting, payment gateways, marketing, reporting and more.

9. Room For Growth

As simple as WooCommerce is as an ecommerce platform, it also allows you to exercise some growth and expansion in terms of how you manage your store, products and customers.

10. Because WooThemes

They  have a wonderful track record of being reliable and exceedingly professional with both their products, and their support system. On top of a myriad of real, contactable people to talk to, WooThemes users can benefit from community forums, video tutorials, and more.

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Freshbooks users can easily keep up to date with their invoicing with the quick snapshot reports generated by this plugin. It allows users to send a report to an email address they specify that shows them the amount invoiced via Freshbooks for the current week, and for the previous week.

The figures are broken down into daily totals.

All you need to use the Freshbooks Daily Billing Stats Lite plugin is a Freshbooks account and an authentication token.

To download the Freshbooks Daily Billing Stats Lite plugin, click here.

Photo credit; Newtown grafitti on Flickr

Last month, WooCommerce announced that it had officially integrated the platform with Zapier, a service that makes automated updates for you.

The WooCommerce Zapier extension includes triggers that can be set up to send new (paid) orders to Zapier or when an order changes status. From there, you have many possibilities for automation.

The combination of a trigger and an action, on Zapier, is referred to as a “Zap”. Each time a zap is triggered, this is referred to as a “Task”.

Here is an example of some of the things you can do with Zapier in WooCommerce:

• Create a new Xero invoice for new WooCommerce orders.
• Create a new Contact in Xero when WooCommerce orders are paid for.
• Create a new Freshbooks Client from a new WooCommerce Order.
• Add a new row to a Google Docs spreadsheet when a WooCommerce New Order is received and paid for.
• Send a notification email via your Gmail service when a WooCommerce New Order is received.
• Send an email notification when a WooCommerce order changes status. Combine this with a custom filter if you want to limit the email to a specific status, for example, when an order status changes to refunded
• Add a Highrise Comment when a WooCommerce Order changes status
• Adds your paying WooCommerce customers to your MailChimp mailing list
• WooCommerce New Order to Campaign Monitor List
• Append a new line to a CSV file in a Drobpox folder when WooCommerce New Orders are received.
• Send your customer an SMS notification whenever their order’s status changes.
• Send your customer an SMS notification when their order has been received and paid for.
• Create a ZenDesk ticket when a WooCommerce order changes status. Use this Zap with a custom filter to customise it for a specific status – for example, when an order changes status to refunded.

To read more about this story, click here.

Yotpo sends automatic emails to your customers a certain number of days after their purchase and prompts them to review the product. On average, Yotpo claims to convert 8% of customers into reviewers, which may not sound like much, but is a ot higher than the industry average of just 1.2%.

Yotpo also makes it easy for reviewers to share their reviews on their social networking accounts, which in turn drives traffic to the sites using Yotpo.

Unlike other plugins that promise to drive traffic to your site but don’t actually prove it, Yotpo has its Campaigns feature, which lets you keep track of exactly how what Yotpo has done for your site.

To read more on this story, click here.

They are:

• Hipay.com Payment Gateway – This is a plugin to extend Woocommerce, allowing you to take payments via the Hipay payment service.
• US Export Compliance – Makes your shop compliant with the US Export regulations.
• Group Coupons – Allows you to link coupon validity to WordPress users.
• ConstantContact Integration – Allows you to build Your Constant Contact email list with WooCommerce.
• Recommendation Engine – Allows you to offer Netflix/Amazon style product suggestions to your customers.
• InterFax Integration – Integrates your WooCommerce site with InterFax, which enables you to fax the order details to your customers and yourself on every completed purchase.
• Composite Products – With “Composite Products”, WooCommerce allows you to create sophisticated, dynamic product kits by compositing existing products.

To read more about this story, click here.

• Product Archives Customiser – Allows you to customise WooCommerce product archives. Change the number of product columns and the number of products displayed per page and more.
• Sold Out Product Widget – It enhances the built-in WooCommerce functionality by adding a Widget and Shortcode for displaying sold out products.
• Smart Sale Badge – It enhances the built-in sale badge by displaying the total saving amount a customer will receive.
• Bundle Coupons – Enables store owners to make a coupon only apply when all products required for it are in the cart.
• Product Details Customiser – Allows you to customise WooCommerce product details pages.
• Email Validation – It adds a “confirm email address” field to the checkout page as a required field.
• Menu Cart – This plugin installs a customizable shopping cart button in the navigation bar.
• Bitcoin Payments – This is a WordPress plugin that allows acceptance of bitcoins at WooCommerce-powered online stores.
• Improvely – Allows store owners to see the specific website link customers clicked, search they typed into Google, or ad they clicked to get to your site.
• New Product Badge – Displays a “new” badge on products that were published in the last x days (as determined by you in the settings).

To read more about this story, click here.

The WooThemes team is just hitting their stride at the moment, having recently celebrated the milestone of 1 million downloads.

As WooTheme’s Mark Forrester said himself; “To be an online business and to make it to 5 years is an achievement in itself. To be 5 years old and to be experiencing our best growth month-on-month yet is testament to the team that powers our product offering.”

They are celebrating their fifth birthday with the release of the new ‘Memorable’ theme.

Again, Happy Birthday to WooThemes!

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