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How-To: Send WooCommerce Follow-Up Emails Only to Specific Customers

The Follow-Ups WooCommerce extension is a powerful tool for increasing customer engagement and encouraging repeat purchases. It lets you set up automated emails or Tweets to customers to follow up on purchases, recover abandoned carts, or ask for product reviews. It has such an extensive feature list that I was surprised when I discovered something it couldn’t do, at least not out-of-the-box, which is sending follow-ups to only certain customer types or user roles. Fortunately a quick look at the plugin’s code revealed a solution.

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Marketing Automation for WooCommerce is way less complicated than this.

Marketing Automation for WooCommerce: The Definitive Guide

Marketing Automation isn’t just for big companies with big marketing teams and big budgets. By combining WooCommerce and its rich ecosystem of extensions with MailChimp’s robust API and automation features, businesses of any size can benefit from automated workflows that increase engagement, conversion rates, and return customers. Here’s everything I know about Marketing Automation for WooCommerce, so you can put it to work for your online store.
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Vertical columns of green characters on a black background, as seen in The Matrix.

You Need an SSL Certificate. Here’s Why, and How to Get One.

HTTPS, SSL, tokenized transactions—if you sell anything online I’m sure you’ve heard the words before and have some sense of why they’re important for ecommerce. Without HTTPS and SSL Certificates all of your online transactions would be basically open for anyone to steal. But I still see stores out there without SSL Certificates, sending data over plain old, unprotected HTTP instead of HTTPS. HTTPS and SSL are important now—and they’re going to be getting a lot more important to Google.

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Infographic: Four eCommerce Conversion Rate Killers (and How to Fix Them)

eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization is a job you could do for the rest of your life, just on your own website. There’s always one more change you could test, one more tweak to make. To help cut through the noise, I’ve created the following infographic that takes four of the most common ecommerce conversion rate killers, diagnoses them, and provides prescriptions for fixing them.

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Should you sell on Etsy or other Marketplaces or on Your Own Website?

Marketplaces vs. Your Own Website: Where Should You Sell?

“Should you sell on Etsy or another marketplace? Or should you sell on your own website? Or should you sell on Etsy and your own website?”  I visit a lot of forums for artists and makers, and there always seems to be at least one thread on the front page devoted to some variation of this question. It’s a source of anxiety for a lot of handmade businesses, a kind of amped-up FOMO: a fear that wherever you are selling you’re not selling in the right place. So what do I say when someone asks me one of those questions? I start with my favorite answer: “it depends…”

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How dbdc Helped Double Chocolate and Steel Jewelry’s Order Volume

Chocolate and Steel is a handmade jewelry business started by the owner, Christine Street. They sell a variety of products, from earrings to bracelets to quote necklaces. Their existing site dated back five years and was no longer meeting their needs in terms of brand identity and current technology. In addition their web host had become unreliable and slow, hurting their WooCommerce performance.
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Why You Shouldn't Use Stripe (not the painted kind)

Why You Shouldn’t Use Stripe

Stripe is, hands-down, the best payment gateway out there for most online stores and eCommerce sites. Stripe is the default payment gateway for both WooCommerce and Shopify for several reasons: they’re the easiest to use, have great customer service, and don’t cost an arm and a leg. It makes you wonder why there are over a hundred other payment gateways out there—why shouldn’t you use Stripe?

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WordPress Security Decoded

WordPress Security Decoded

WordPress security is a topic that gets a lot of attention, both good and bad. If you listen to some people they’ll tell you that WordPress isn’t secure and using it will leave you wide open to hacks. True, WordPress sites are constantly being targeted by hackers but not because WordPress itself is inherently insecure.

WordPress is a target for two reasons: one, it’s used more than any other website platform, and two, there are some common but easy-to-fix mistakes that people make when it comes to WordPress Security. Here’s how to fix them to make sure that hackers have no luck on your WordPress site.

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Griffins aren't real, and neither are these myths about building your own website.

Five Myths Etsy Sellers Hear about Building Your Own Website

There are dozens of reasons that you should be building your own website if you’re an Etsy Seller. A website of your own lets you decide who to market to, how to price your work, and how to present your brand. It also protects your business in case anything ever happens to Etsy or to your shop. But there are some myths that Etsy sellers hear about websites that keep them from taking this important step in growing their businesses. Read on for five of the most common ones—and why they’re nothing to be afraid of. Continue reading “Five Myths Etsy Sellers Hear about Building Your Own Website”…

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