Category: E-COMMERCE

Growanizer is the new generation of smart sales for WooCommerce

Hello everyone,

We kept a little silent although the quarantine period for our company wasn’t relaxed.
We have worked hard on our new product and happy to share it with you.

During the years Custom4Web worked on developing many e-commerce projects and found out a lot of ways for smart sales, accumulated experience has allowed us to create a truly unique and useful digital marketing tool that we can use on multiple projects for increasing the conversion rate on websites, without buying additional traffic, we call it – Growanizer!

It combines many marketing features into a user-friendly WooCommerce plugin that we are going to develop constantly.

Create your own related product dynamic rules, use product finders, help users find products by attributes and all of these without coding knowledge.

For more details follow this link.

We provide a special offer of 30% discount for the first 100 subscribers. Just use the promo code: Custom4Web

CLARIS (FILEMAKER) TO SHOPIFY INTEGRATION

Hi guys,

Today, we would like to share with you one more wonderful showcase of how we’ve digitalized one of our client’s business processes. Initially, the problem was that our customer has a pretty unique warehouse plus the sales workflows which obviously, at that time, needed to be launched in an online store.

Apparently, there are two ways of doing it:

The first one is that you can develop everything from scratch. It’s definitely going to be a unique one and what you exactly need, of course, hire the right developers. The problem is that it takes a lot of time and resources.

Another way of doing that is taking something that’s been already made and customize it to your own needs.

After a particular discussion, we decided to stick to the second approach just because it saves a lot of time and money. For the online store platform, we have chosen Shopify for its stability, fast-growing process and an ability to perform a high amount of traffic. We created a private app for it, that 960 allowed us to customize the logic and filters.

Choosing the right platform for a custom warehouse and the sales processes was more complicated. After a short investigation, we’d discovered that not so many services do exist for those operations on a market. Firstly, we reviewed the Airtable, which is a pretty good service, but we understood that due to its restrictions we can’t really implement some of our custom processes to it. Eventually, we came to an assumption that Filemaker that is rebranded as Claris, fits all of our requirements.

Working with Claris, was very convenient for us and we’d developed a custom interface, implemented all custom processes to it and even created an API that had passed all needed data from Claris to Shopify and back from Shopify to Claris.

Summing everything up, I’d like to say that those work awesomely together. Our customer has successfully achieved the needed targets and has saved a lot of resources using two well-known platforms.

Hope it was useful to you all!

Please feel free sharing your own experience with us using Filemaker and Shopify.

Best regards.

Data exchange

WHY WORDPRESS(WOOCOMMERCE) CAN BE THE BEST SOLUTION FOR A COMPLICATED EСOMMERCE WEBSITE IN 2020?

I hear how bad WordPress is from a lot of people. They say how slow it is, how unprotected it is, how bad is the database for scaling, I want to say all of it is true. But after delivering hundreds of projects, after meeting dozens of experts, after working with different technologies, participating in different businesses, I want to say next: no one will create the first working version of you your website faster and cheaper using other technologies then we do use WordPress!

Explain this is pretty easy, WordPress powers 34% of the internet in 2019, If you count only the CMS-built sites, then about 60% of them are WordPress, it was launched in 2003. As a result, it has more than the rest already prepared solutions, various plugins with custom logic, integrations with other systems.

How about page speed? Well, if you follow the best World’s practices during the development process, let your developers to do everything in the right way, following pretty common speed optimizing rules, then your website will be fast enough. We did it many times and archived 90+ Google page speed scores, even on a website where it was less than 20 at the beginning.

Someone will say here: “but it is still unsafe to use WordPress all my data can be stolen!”. Damn buddy, keep up to date your WordPress version and plugins, set some good security plugin like WordFence, set CDN like CloudFlare, use complicated passwords and keep them in a safe place, don’t hire suspicious developers and your website will be protected enough. If you still think that any WordPress website can be easily hacked, tell this to White House, BBC, Bloomberg or Walt Disney guys, they use WordPress for a long time.

And finally, the WordPress bottleneck is DB scaling. I totally agree that if you are planning to have over 50 000 visitors daily on your website, you should be prepared very well. And despite powerful cloud solutions, moving complicated logic to separate parts of your website, there will be a moment where to keep the high performance of your website will be very very hard.

But tell me please, how fast you can attract such a big amount of users to your website? I saw cases when people decided to build a custom web app, spent tons of money, time and even didn’t launch! If you just launching a startup, want to try your business model or building MVP the first what you need is to launch it! Money and time are vital on this stage. Of course, when you grow big and have enough resources, you can start rebuilding your website with some more modern and faster technologies but for most cases, it is not what you need at the beginning.

Take care guys, don’t waste time and money.

C4W Spirit.

PRODUCT BUNDLES

Product Bundles

Today we are going to tell you about one of our creative solution “The Bundles” because we did a very interesting, but difficult project. We aren’t greedy team and can share with you some hidden details 😉.

The client from Germany wanted to hold original promotions for the customers. He asked us about it, because we did some projects for him and have respect from client. We’ve analysed the market of promotions and decided to offer Product bundles.

A bundle is a package of things wrapped together. The meaning “to

 

bundle” is to collect things together in a compact way.

Often bundles used on the specific thematic websites that sells different licences, products, books or games that can be used electronically, so from the time of purchase to the first use it can take only a couple of minutes.

It looks like online store with usual goods, but bundles are used in addition with the single item.

For combining all of these products together for our project we used plugin “WooCommerce Product Bundles”. Bundles are the best way to offer deals and unmissable mix of products to yourcustomers. Set how many items you bundle should have and choose the single products: they will be showed clearly in the bundle detail page and your customers will be free to appreciate the combinations you have created.

Our client from Germany and for him invoices were very important part. And we decided to use a WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips plugin. This WooCommerce extension automatically adds a PDF invoice to the order confirmation emails sent out to the customers of site. Includes a basic template as well as the possibility to modify/create your own templates. In addition, you can choose to download or print invoices and packing slips from the WooCommerce order admin.

Also, not a trivial decision was that you can pay a different price. Our client liked this very much and we made it the main advantage of the project because it is very difficult and interesting solution and, of course. The YITH WooCommerce Name Your Price Premium Plugin was used for this option. Almost every time the customers have a choice in sets of products, so it should be different price on each bundle. But, also, you can get a donation from purchasers. The main condition is the minimal product cost. For example, the set of games cost 7 $ but client can pay 9 $ and this 2 $ is a donation. But, of course, you can’t pay less than this product price. It is all about market laws and a psychology: satisfied customers need to “pay back” somehow the service or the product that made them happy. They can do it with a donation, or maybe, paying something more for the next product they are going to purchase.

Equally important is the duration of a bundle. The duration can be different from few hours to many days. To check the remaining time was implemented the Countdown Wpdevart. It allows users to check time of discount and encourage the buyer to make a decision faster.

The last part in this article, but not least important. Every product on the client’s website has a license to use every product legally and with full support. We used plugin FS License Manager that allows runs on your company’s internal server, allows writers to use the software without an explicit activation process and allows administrators to manage users and licenses through a web interface.

Will be happy to share our experience with you in case you have questions.

Thanks for attention.

Best regards,

C4W team.

HOW TO CREATE ONLINE STORE

With the technological development business has changed its location in a standard office for the Internet. Now it is popular to earn money online and online stores can be a good alternative to a customary shop. Everything you need to start your own online business is to create online store. It can be performed with the help of a popular and free plugin WooCommerce from the creators of WordPress. Easy to use it can be configured to any taste and has a variety of optional add-ons to improve the store functionality. There are several steps to follow creating online store:

  • Installation of WooCommerce requires a WordPress account, where you find a necessary plugin and click the ‘Install’ button. Having activated the plugin, you will start the setup pressing ‘Let’s go’. There are 4 stages to go through;
  • Page Setup: The installer will ask if you wish to create key pages of your store automatically. If you agree to have such pages as the main shop, a shopping cart, checkout and my account (a page of the registered customer), it is enough to continue the setup;
  • Store Locale: here you should indicate the location of the store, currency to use, units to use for product weight and dimensions;
  • Shipping and Tax: If your store is going to sell products that require shipping, opt for basic shipping option that includes either domestic or international shipping. If you sell products in the states where sales tax is required, it can also be mentioned on your site. If you order the Woocommerce store here, you can get rid from the routine troubles.
  • Payments: the installer tells that both online and offline payments are accepted. You can use PayPal, cheque payments, cash or bank transfer. After you click a ‘Continue’ button, the setup will be finished.
  • Additional settings include establishing of the crucial for you settings of the store. For example, you can switch off the geolocation function as it may slow down your store, change shipping options, the recipient e-mail for notifications or create coupons if you wish.
  • Add products. It will be easier to find a necessary product if to search by categories, which you can create in the ‘Categories’ option in the dashboard. You can also add tags, description and pictures to each of the goods by pressing ‘Add new’. It is important to consider Product Data here as choosing a Simple Product you will see the basic options, selecting External or Affiliate product there will be an affiliate link created and it means that you sell products from other sites with a referral commission, while preferring a Variable Product will mean that there is an availability of the same product in different styles with attributes to describe each of them. Though the procedure how to create online store seems rather simple, it is impossible to omit obstacles if you are not a professional. The only right decision in such situation is to order a WooCommerce online store at the professional company to take the advantage of this profitable online business.