When we published our May in Review I talked about how it felt like the month just ended. This time they went by so fast I didn’t even realize June had ended; I’m sure many of you know that feeling!
Here are some updates from the past couple months from our blog and development team. Lots of new stuff in progress, so check out that section 🙂
General Updates
Despite having several larger projects in development recently, we’ve had some smaller feature releases, along with lots of blog posts to keep you busy!
Agencies or developers may want to read up on WooCommerce Sales Tax 101, covering a checklist of some important tax questions and some recommendations on handling tax collection and remittence for WooCommerce stores.
For developers getting into WooCommerce, we also published a couple starter guides:
- How to create a simple payment gateway: a good example of extending core WooCommerce classes within your plugin.
- We put together a quick starter snippet on checking if the cart contains a particular product category.
We published a few quick tutorials for store owners over the past couple months as well:
- Printing Invoices for Orders in a Date Range: more generally, this also shows you how to get a list of orders by date range, not just per month.
- How to add Member Area Links to Your Sidebar: helpful for sites who want member details to be in the sidebar vs in the account “My Memberships” table
- How to Change the Default External Product Button: helpful to change the default text for all external products.
WooCommerce Customer / Order CSV Export v4.0
There are tons of amazing new goodies in our Customer / Order CSV Export v4.0 release! We refactored some major parts of the plugin to improve the export file processing. This let us export thousands of orders or customers at a time without timeouts, and improve all manual and automatic export processes.
Custom formats can now be built with the help of a column picker for both order and customer exports:
Create a custom export
Exports are stored for 14 days in a new Exports List, and the export / transfer statuses are now tracked so you can ensure exports process correctly, and retry any failed exports as needed.
The plugin will also automatically monitor transfer failures and let you know of issues so you can fix them pre-emptively.
Automated customer exports, product and category order filters, and other features abound. See the release post for the full list!
WooCommerce Order Status Manager v1.6.0
Version 1.6.0 of Order Status Manager adds the ability to mark a status as “needs payment”. This will act like the core “Pending Payment” status.
If a status is marked “needs payment”, then customers will be shown “Pay” and “Cancel” links for the order.
For order statuses that do not require payment, but are not paid (such as “refunded” or “on hold” order statuses), you can still mark them as “not paid” as you could in previous versions.
Authorize.Net AIM Enhancements
We’ve had two feature releases for WooCommerce Authorize.Net AIM in June and July.
The first feature release added an update for the plugin’s Authorize.Net emulation mode for improved stability. This emulator mode now uses code from our highly-tested payment gateway library.
This release also added enhanced checkout form support to the emulation gateway credit card form, regular credit card form, and eCheck payment form. This form auto-formats credit cards, provides larger input fields, displays the card type automatically as the card is entered, auto-formats expiration dates, and includes retina card icons.
Enhanced Credit Card form
Our version 3.9 release added Accept.js support to the credit card payment form. This improves payment security and ensures that merchants meet the lower SAQ A-EP PCI compliance standards when in use, as card data is tokenized in the browser before being sent through your server. (Read more about WooCommerce and PCI compliance.)
Any merchant can generate a Client Token and begin using Accept.js today for improved security!
Jilt for WooCommerce 1.0
Shhh, this is a secret 🙂 We’ve released version 1.0 of our Jilt for WooCommerce plugin after our beta-testing phase was completed. Our Jilt app lets merchants recover lost revenue from abandoned carts by sending recovery emails to customers, encouraging them to complete their purchases.
We’ve “soft-launched” our WooCommerce integration to help WooCommerce merchants recover abandoned carts as we finish up some of the analytics and reporting dashboards in the app. You can start using the app already to recover abandoned carts (sign up here!) as recovery workflows are fully functional, and we’ll be shouting this one from the rooftops once we have our analytics tools tested and deployed.
In Progress
We’ve had several large projects in progress recently, and many are coming to a close:
- Larger merchants looking to optimize their fulfillment workflows will be happy to hear we have an Infoplus Commerce connector plugin wrapping up development soon.
- Memberships version 1.7 is in testing right now for expiration emails, CLI support for developers, and improved membership access controls.
- Tab Manager has a feature release upcoming to restrict global tabs by product category.
- We’re working on adding Accept.js support to Authorize.net CIM as well.
- Customer / Order XML Export also has some updates in progress, our CSV Export rewrite announcement will probably give you an idea 😉
