A bit late this month, but better late than never 🙂 Let’s take a look at our October month in review and which major development projects have been completed or are in progress.
We’d wrapped our in-progress development from September, and we’ve got a lot of exciting work in the pipeline now!
General Updates
October was a lot of heads-down development on our plugins and Jilt app while we tried to finish up with plugin updates before the holiday season hit.
We were proud to get set up as a WordCamp Peoria sponsor in October to support their first ever WordCamp, so thanks to Patrick Garman for organizing the event!
We also published a tutorial on adding custom order actions for WooCommerce orders, which can be used to help you speed up fulfillment workflows in your store.
Now onto the updates for October!
New Jilt Updates and Integrations
Development on our Jilt app was firing on all cylinders in October, as we had several WooCommerce merchants getting on board and recovering abandoned carts. This helped us fine-tune some integration points between the app and WooCommerce, such as ensuring tax display is consistent, cart regeneration works with shipping methods and selected payment methods, and also ensuring that coupons are re-applied. Dani, Justin, and Max have been working closely with merchants to ensure this is the best WooCommerce abandoned cart solution available.
To complement our WooCommerce connector, we also partnered with the fantastic team at Easy Digital Downloads to bring Jilt to the EDD ecosystem! Easy Digital Downloads merchants can now connect Jilt to EDD to save abandoned carts as well.
Sell with WP has a detailed review of the app and these connector plugins that providers further details.
WooCommerce Elavon Converge v2.0.0
Our WooCommerce Elavon version 2.0 rewrite was led by Chase and released in October, which brings massive improvements to the Elavon Converge plugin and adds several highly-requested features, such as:
- refund / void support from within WooCommerce
- support for Subscriptions and Pre-Orders
- allows customers to add and manage saved payment methods from the checkout or account
- merchants can now enable eChecks as a payment method
- an enhanced payment form is used with inline formatting and retina card icons
- authorized transactions can be captured from within WooCommerce
- detailed decline messages can be shown at checkout
- Elavon Multi-Currency can be used to charge in currencies other than USD or CAD
Tokenization Support
You can view the announcement post for full details and screenshots.
WooCommerce URL Coupons v2.4.0
Tam led a release of URL Coupons this month which vastly improves the experience in importing URL Coupons to WooCommerce. URL Coupons now supports the Customer / Coupon / Order Import Suite to allow you to set URL coupon data when importing coupons to your store (such as redirect pages, products to add to the cart, or other settings).
Map URL Coupons Fields
We’ve written up a guide to importing URL coupons to help you get started.
WooCommerce Admin Custom Order Fields v1.7.0
Admin Custom Order Fields benefitted from a small feature release this month to add support for our Customer / Order XML Export Suite plugin.
This update will now automatically show admin order fields within your XML Exports so that you have relevant order details available. The XML will show each custom field in an XML tag, along with the data for that custom field:
<CustomFields>
<CustomField>
<ID>field ID</ID>
<Name>field admin name</Name>
<Value>field's input for this order</Value>
</CustomField>
<CustomField>
<ID>second field ID</ID>
<Name>second field admin name</Name>
<Value>second field's input for this order</Value>
</CustomField>
</CustomFields>
WooCommerce Checkout Add-Ons v1.9.0
Similarly, Checkout Add-ons was also updated to support Customer / Order XML Export Suite. Add-ons are now automatically shown in exports.
While you could see add-ons in the “FeeItems” tag before, this didn’t give you insight into which option was chosen for an add-on that allows customers to make a choice (such as a radio button). The order XML will now automatically show full details for each add-on, including the label, customer selection, and cost:
<CheckoutAddOns>
<CheckoutAddOn>
<ID>field ID</ID>
<Name>field admin name</Name>
<Value>field's customer input for this order</Value>
<Cost>field's total cost added to this order</Cost>
</CheckoutAddOn>
<CheckoutAddOn>
<ID>second field ID</ID>
<Name>second field admin name</Name>
<Value>second field's customer input for this order</Value>
<Cost>second field's total cost added to this order</Cost>
</CheckoutAddOn>
</CheckoutAddOns>
In Progress
We recently wrapped up some other projects that we’ll be discussing in the November month in review. In the meantime, we also have lots of development currently going on:
- Fulvio is working on a Local Pickup Plus rewrite ? This will vastly improve pickup location management, allow merchants to enable an availability calendar for each location, and allow pickup appointments for locations.
- Illimar is working through a rewrite as well on PDF Product Vouchers. The voucher administrative process is being revamped to make it simpler to track, find / search for, and redeem vouchers, while creating voucher templates is also being improved.
- Apple Pay support is coming soon to Authorize.Net AIM and CIM, courtesy of Chase. Apple (and payment processors) require merchants to complete a lengthy server certification process before being able to accept Apple Pay, so this is not a “turn-it-on-and-profit” kind of feature. The plugin will support allowing you to enable Apple Pay and we’ll provide an overview on how to get certified; we’re also working with Codeable to offer assistance for merchants who would like some help in completing the certification process.
- Jilt app development continues! Dani is working on dashboard reporting improvements for Jilt, then will be continuing with improvements for email creation and editing.
We’ve also got new Memberships development queued up and we’re preparing for WooCommerce 2.7 compatibility releases, so remember that you can stay in the loop via our newsletter for updates on development and plugin features.
Happy Thanksgiving to US friends, and best of luck for Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales!
