January in Review

Well so far we’ve been more like every other month in review, but December is probably a good month to slide on 🙂 We published our November Review a couple of months ago, and we have lots of exciting news to share in terms of what we’ve been up to since then.

General Updates

December and January were filled with on-boarding and trial periods for 3 new teammates, helping merchants get through the holiday rush, and WooCommerce compatibility releases.

We also spent a lot of time planning our annual SkyTrip, which takes place at the end of this month, and preparing for WooConf, which we’ll be again sponsoring and attending. I’ll also be presenting this year, so don’t miss it 😉 If you’re planning to attend, be sure to get your tickets soon! They’re selling fast, and prices go up after the end of this month.

The final note in general updates: as always, our blog was busy. We published another developer-focused tutorial on Adding plugin settings to WooCommerce, along with some additional tutorials / how-to posts:

• Change the WooCommerce price display
• Add Registration Prompts for Guest Purchases
• Stop Customers from Editing Addresses

WooCommerce 2.5 Compatibility

WooCommerce 2.5 was released in January, so we started updating all of our plugins in December due to the break over the holiday season. We released updates for all plugins to ensure each are fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.3 to 2.5, which means that WooCommerce 2.2 is no longer supported with our plugins (we drop a compatibility for a previous release with each major update).

WooCommerce Memberships Improvements

WooCommerce Memberships version 1.4 was released in December, and this added several new features.

A members area provides an area where members can see all available content associated with the membership, along with any discounts or public member notes (you must enable this in the plan settings for plans created prior to this version). We also published a post on customizing the member area, and we’ll have another post published soon on adding your own custom sections.

This release also added support for applying member discounts to sub sign up fees, transferring memberships from one user to another, and redirecting members back to restricted content after they log in (if they click a link generated by the {login_url} merge tag).

WooCommerce Order Status Manager 1.3.0

Order Status Manager got a major release in December as well, as version 1.3.0 added a few new features and some enhancements that are now available with WooCommerce 2.5.

This version lets you drag and drop order statuses into your desired order, and lets you pick a status to which you can reassign orders if you delete a custom status.

This version also adds a setting to designate a status as “paid”, which ensures that purchase notes and downloadable files are accessible to the customer. With WooCommerce 2.5, status descriptions are also shown in the customer’s “Recent Orders” list if the customer hovers over a status.

WooCommerce FreshBooks 3.6.0

Rounding out our December releases, FreshBooks got a useful little update for version 3.6.0.

This version added the ability to map WooCommerce payment methods to the associated FreshBooks payment methods, helping stores sync up payments between their store and invoices.

WooCommerce Cost of Goods

Our most recent release was Cost of Goods 2.0 which refactored all admin reporting classes for better performance and a completely re-designed admin experience.

Profit by date

This also added a “Profit by Category” report along with improved Profit by Date, Profit by Product, and Inventory Valuation reports.

The plugin previously had native support for Product CSV Import Suite and Order / Customer CSV Export, and this release also adds native support for the Customer / Order XML Export Suite.

WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro

January brought on two plugin releases we’ve been excited about for some time! WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro ($29) lets stores use enhanced eCommerce tracking to measure valuable store metrics, and adds several advanced events for tracking like coupon usage, customer registration, and more.

WooCommerce AvaTax

WooCommerce AvaTax (free) was released to help store owners track tax calculations and compliance. This plugin was developed in partnership with Avalara for their AvaTax service, so we’re very happy to bring the plugin to WooCommerce merchants for free to connect with their AvaTax accounts (paid).

AvaTax will automatically fetch and apply appropriate tax rates from Avalara for merchants across the globe. The plugin supports tax calculation, address validation for US / Canadian customer addresses, and tax codes globally, per category, per product, and per variation.

The plugin also lets you manage customer tax exemptions in WooCommerce, submits refunds adjustments automatically, and more.

WooCommerce Print Invoices / Packing Lists

We’re wrapping up and testing a complete rewrite of WooCommerce Print Invoices and Packing Lists, which adds some oft-requested features like excluding virtual products from packing lists, adding “pick lists” for shop managers, making invoice and packing list templates far more extensible, and other stability and performance improvements.

In Progress

We’ve also got a lot of other development in progress that you’ll hear more about next month!

• Customer / Order / Coupon CSV Import Suite is half-way through a major rewrite to add order merging, batch importing for large files, and a more flexible import format.
• Memberships version 1.6 is being started to add member CSV import / export (will not include billing / subscriptions, just membership data).
• We’re making some updates to our internal plugin framework for some improved payment gateway features, as we’re starting a couple more payment gateway rewrites shortly.
• We’re working on a public code snippet repository that will contain a library of custom code examples related to our extensions.