Daily ArchivesSeptember 8, 2021

Gutenberg is the new post editor that will be published with WordPress version 5. Its name derives from Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the printing press. Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, and his team aim to simplify creating content with WordPress. To be fair, Gutenberg is not officially ready for using it on production systems yet. Meaning, don’t install it on your live website, it will not work 100% properly.

However, WordPress users should be aware that Gutenberg is coming. Developers are already making their themes and plugins compatible with the new concept of “Blocks” – and WordPress users should familiarize themselves with those blocks too.

In this brief introduction, I’m going to give you a real-world example of how you can start using Gutenberg and explain why it’s a good idea to do that. In fact, you might already be using similar tools, but I’m jumping ahead.

Will Gutenberg Change How We Use WordPress?

In short, yes. The plan with Gutenberg is to replace the current post editor and to introduce a new system that’s more a page-builder than a simple text editor. According to Joel Rasmussen, the reasoning is quite straightforward:

The editor will endeavor to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.

If you ever used shortcodes in the regular WordPress editor, you’ll know how tedious to work with they can be. And don’t get me started on moving from one-page builder plugin to another one. They all rely on their own shortcodes, thus copying a layout isn’t easily possible. Regardless what type of visual editor you’re using, almost certainly you’ll have to rebuild your entire layouts if you were to change to a new editor.

So, is Gutenberg going to be a new visual editor? I don’t think it will. In fact, Gutenberg is set out to be a content editor, not a page builder you can use to create entire layouts. Of course, I can’t tell what the future will bring. But for now and probably the next years, I don’t think Gutenberg will be able to build entire layouts. Developing a new editor has shown to be hard enough, Automattic would be well advised to not touch the theme ecosystem in the same breath. Hence, I guess we’ll still see visual page builders, but with Gutenberg being able to interact with them. Later in this post, I’ll give you examples of how popular page builder plugins and themes with integrated visual editors currently interact with Gutenberg.

The bottom line is, that with WordPress 5, we’ll all see a new post editor. While the classic editor is already ported into a plugin and thus you could continue using it, eventually WordPress will abandon it at some point and will make Gutenberg the only editor. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

Writing A Post With Gutenberg

You might worry that creating content now becomes much more time consuming that it has been. I can assure you that it won’t, for two reasons. First and foremost, Automattic cannot afford to make using WordPress more complicated. They’re well aware that the vast majority of their users cannot understand or write code, so their aim is to make Gutenberg as easy to use as possible. Second, you’ll get used to using Gutenberg faster than you think. Even in its current prototype state, writing posts is incredibly straightforward and simple. You’ll see what I mean.

Have a look at this example page, created by WP developer Joel Asmussen: http://moc.co/sandbox/example-post/

Isn’t it beautiful how you can use Gutenberg to arrange the content elements? It’s going to be super easy to, for example, add columns for presenting content side-by-side, to add drop caps to your paragraphs, to add images in various sizes and widths (even wider than the text content).

So, you can get started with Gutenberg pretty easily. As I said, set up a new site or create a staging copy of your site, before starting. Hostdedi’ Managed Hosting plan makes creating staging sites super easy. If you’re not sure whether your host offers this functionality, I recommend talking to their support staff. You definitely do NOT want to use Gutenberg on your main site until it’s officially released for production websites.

After logging in to your staging site (I’ll call it “playground” from now on), you can activate Gutenberg by confirming this message in the WordPress dashboard:

or by installing it from the plugin repository:

After you activated Gutenberg, you’ll see the new editor when editing a post, page, or custom post type. In the screenshot below, you’ll see an article called “Welcome to the Gutenberg Editor” which will give you a nice overview on all elements you can use. I suggest you use that article to familiarize yourself with using the new editor. When you edit a text block for example, you’ll see the settings in the column to the right:

It’s quite simple to add a drop cap, change the font size, work with colors, etc. Especially things like setting a background color for a certain section of your content can be tricky and might require custom HTML and CSS with the current editor – Gutenberg makes those quite easy.

You’ll see that the block you’re currently editing gets highlighted with a subtle gray border. Depending on the type of the block you’re working on (text, image, columns, list, …), the settings in the small bar on top of the block and in the right column will update automatically. A gallery, for example, has entirely different function than a text block:

Note that, even though the gallery settings are set to two columns, Gutenberg shows the bottom image in one column. It is smart enough to notice that the number of images in the gallery is uneven. Showing the last image in the same column as the first one and reducing its size to fit that column would result in an empty space right beside the image (where the fourth image would be placed). As that doesn’t look great, Gutenberg shows the last image in full width and that in turn looks fantastic. It’s small details like this that make me confident that we’ll have fun using Gutenberg in the future.

Keep in mind though, that Gutenberg is still in prototype mode. You’ll find that some elements will not work as expected. Take the “Columns” block for example. This is how three columns look on a big screen from a desktop computer:

It’s not bad, but I’d like to be able to control the spacing between the columns, so that the text of each column isn’t as close to the next one. Also, I expected the columns to rearrange themselves below each other on mobile devices, so that each column is shown in full width and the content is easily readable. But instead, the columns just get narrower:

With the demo content this doesn’t seem to be that big of a difference. But the next screenshot will highlight the problem with having non-responsive columns:

You can see that the text is getting really close to each other, the drop caps make it very hard to read and the image in the second column is floating in some weird blank space. From working with other page builders, I expected the columns to rearrange like this:

This layout would be a lot easier to read – but again an option to control the spacing between the blocks would be nice.

I’m sure the WordPress community is already working on issues like this and I’m sure Matt Mullenweg won’t release Gutenberg without those basics being fixed. For now, it’s just something to expect when testing Gutenberg (after all, it’s officially a prototype).

Does It Work With My Theme?

The screenshots I’ve shown you thus far are just from the default Twenty Seventeen theme. But will it work with your theme? I can’t really tell, as they are way too many themes out there. However, I’ll point you in the right direction on finding out whether Gutenberg does work with your theme or not.

Method 1: Research online about news from your theme creators

Many of the big theme development companies like Theme Fusion or StudioPress are following the Gutenberg development right from the start and are making their themes compatible with Gutenberg.

Even the developers of popular visual editors like Beaver Builder or Visual Composer are making their plugins compatible with Gutenberg. It’s interesting to see their different approaches though and worth comparing them. Beaver Builder gives you the choice of either using Gutenberg or Beaver Builder when creating or editing a page. On the other hand, Visual Composer has created a “Gutenberg Compatibility Element”, in which you can use Gutenberg’s functionality while building the overall page/post with Visual Composer. I’m not sure whether there is a “right” or “wrong” approach to making page builder plugins compatible with Gutenberg. But it’s good to see the efforts!

If you’re in doubt, you can google your theme name and add “gutenberg” to the query to see if your theme creators published a statement related to Gutenberg already. If they did not, go to “Themes” in your WP backend and select the current theme. Then click on the highlighted link to visit the website of your theme developers. Very likely, you’ll be able to submit a support ticket or a different type of message on that website.

Method 2: Create a staging site and test

I outlined the second method in the content above already but I want to briefly bring it back to your attention here. By creating a staging copy of your site (Hostdedi’ WordPress plan includes free staging), you’ll be able to safely play around with Gutenberg and see how well it’s working with your theme.

This method is my preferred choice and recommendation, because it’s the much more practical approach. While you should pay attention to whether your theme developers are even just working on Gutenberg compatibility, you also should familiarize yourself with using Gutenberg. Being able to use Gutenberg will make the transition into WordPress 5 a lot smoother.

Stay up to date with the latest Gutenberg content, subscribe to the Hostdedi Blog or follow us on Twitter.

WooCommerce is the fastest growing eCommerce platform for small and medium businesses (SMBs) right now. The WordPress plugin provides businesses with an inexpensive and seamless way to sell online. Considering that more than 50 percent of content websites are running on WordPress, it’s not surprising that WooCommerce is the most popular choice for SMB eCommerce.

If you are one of those businesses with a WooCommerce site, you have undoubtedly been preparing your holiday strategy for months. The holiday season brings in some of the highest sales numbers for the entire year. Projections suggest that there is $626 billion up for grabs on mobile devices this year, so it’s imperative to evaluate your WooCommerce site to make sure it is optimized to capture vital revenue. Regardless of what you’ve already done, we have some advice on simple things that can be done last minute to really maximize sales before the end of the year.

Reduce Abandoned Cart Rates

Almost every eCommerce company suffers from high cart abandonment rates. With an average abandonment rate of 69.39 percent, this is definitely a major pain point for online store owners. While this issue will never be completely eradicated, there are several strategies you can use to combat the issue.

An unusually high cart abandonment rate typically points to a larger problem with your eCommerce site. Some of the top reasons shoppers leave before completing the checkout process include unexpected shipping costs or a difficult and long checkout process. Using Hostdedi’ cart abandonment tool can help you pinpoint the reasons your consumers aren’t completing their purchase.

Be completely transparent about all costs, like shipping, taxes, and fees. That way, consumers are not taken by surprise when they get to the payment page. If you can, offer free shipping during the holidays as a special promotion. It is also worth noting that transparent business practices play a powerful role in earning the consumers’ trust.

When was the last time you went through your own checkout process? Online shoppers want the checkout process to be quick and painless. Keeping this in mind, eliminate any step that asks for unnecessary details. Consumers should only enter the minimum amount of information you need to bill and ship their purchase. Offering an even quicker way to check out, such as one-click payment, is another way to allow customers to purchase items with a single click of a button. You may also want to implement some simple design updates to create a better user experience.

Ensure Your Site is at Peak Performance

Evaluating your eCommerce site’s performance is an essential step in ensuring great holiday shopping results. Using a trusted partner, like Hostdedi, can help you by analyzing your site’s performance and reveal any areas that may need improvement.

Next, you’ll want to make sure that your site speed is sufficient because traffic to your online store will likely be higher than usual during the holiday shopping season, especially on important days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The last problem you want to experience during the busiest time of the year is a site crash.

Give Your Site a Festive Feel

Using Hostdedi as a Managed WooCommerce hosting provider, you can integrate fun and attractive holiday-related themes as well as useful features through the many Page Builder plugins. Having an attractive site that is easy to use will provide consumers with a great user experience, which builds brand loyalty and helps to encourage repeat customers.

Use Social Media and Email to Drive Traffic

In today’s world, social media rules the internet. Six out of 10 Gen Z consumers use social media to shop for products and it’s a great way to grab consumers’ attention and guide them to your site. Hype up your Black Friday sales and special holiday promotions on high-performing social channels to entice customers back to your site to make a purchase.

Email marketing is another essential part of your holiday marketing strategy. Your email subscriber list is one of your best lead generation tools, especially if you send them relevant, engaging and personalized content. Leverage the user data to make informed marketing decisions on sales and promotions. Target specific types of consumers by offering exclusive discounts and promoting items similar to purchases they’ve made in the past.

To help make the preparations as easy as possible, be sure to check out Springbot’s Holiday Marketing Resources. The holiday planning checklist will help you hold yourself accountable and guide you towards making this holiday season your most profitable one yet!

Make Sure Your Website is Ready for the Holiday Rush

Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting is the perfect platform to ensure your website stays online during peak traffic while converting more leads using cart abandonment technology. It also handles image compression and has optimized database load queries so that your site is lightning fast and you make more sales than ever before.

The following article is with Akshat Choudhary, founder of BlogVault and MalCare, two leading security products in the WordPress Community. We sat down with him to find out more about his recent success with MalCare, how he did it, and what we can all learn from him about keeping our WordPress sites secure.

Akshat, thanks for taking the time for this interview. You’re running BlogVault and MalCare, two companies settled in the WordPress security space. Can you please give us a run-down about your services?

Hi, thanks for having me.

I started BlogVault – a WordPress backup service 8 years ago. At the time, I had a full-time job, and it was meant to be a small side-project. But after putting in some consistent effort into building a good backup service, I saw how the product had great potential to grow. Fast-forward to 2018, BlogVault is one of the most popular backup services in the WordPress ecosystem right now. Presently we are trusted by over 300,000 websites, and we provide a comprehensive set of backup services that includes Daily Automatic Backups, On-Demand Backups, Real-Time Backup, Incremental Backup, Off-site Storage, Access up to 365 Days Backup, One-Click Auto Backup Restore, as well as built-in Staging and Merging feature.

We recently launched MalCare – a complete WordPress security solution to an overwhelming success. We developed MalCare from grounds up after analyzing over 240,000 websites over the course of 2 years. MalCare comes with a comprehensive set of features that scans, cleans, and protects your site.

MalCare offers a powerful Scanner that doesn’t slow down a site and goes beyond just signature matching to find new and complex malware. This is the type of malware that usually goes undetected in other popular scanners. It also comes with an industry first One-Click Automatic Malware Cleaner and an intelligent plugin-based Firewall that protects your website from bad traffic by using the collective intelligence of its network of sites. There’s a Site Management module that lets you manage your themes, plugins, users and WordPress core for better security of your website. MalCare facilitates implementation of WordPress security best practices, i.e., Website Hardening to strengthen your site. And it offers a premium White-Label solution along with an ability to generate beautiful and detailed Client Reports. It allows you to sell our service to your clients on your terms.

Apart from BlogVault and MalCare, we’ve built another WordPress plugin called Migrate Guru. It is a completely free one-click Migration plugin, and it’s our biggest contribution to the WordPress community.

You recently completed a hugely successful launch on AppSumo, can you tell us a bit more about that?

After building MalCare, we were looking for ways to find the right users. AppSumo seemed like a suitable channel that could bring MalCare to people who need a good security service. But since this was the first time a security product was appearing on AppSumo, we kept our expectations really low. We thought maybe some 500 people would buy our product but ended up selling over 4000 deals. MalCare was declared sold out on AppSumo.

Congrats on those results. Why do you think was your launch so successful?

A couple of things made the launch very successful. First, the reduced cost, second, a lifetime deal and third, a really good product.

Security plugins are an expensive affair. When we offered our $259 yearly Business Plan at a price of $49 for a lifetime, people couldn’t resist.

And not to blow our own trumpet but we know the product that we have built. We believe MalCare is a great product because if it weren’t, we would have still been working on it. One of MalCare biggest USP is the industry-first One-Click Malware Cleaner. Generally, security plugins allow ticket-based cleaning services. If your site gets hacked today, you’ll have to raise a ticket with a security service, and they’ll clean the site for you. There are a few catches to this method. One, you’ll have to give access to your site to an unknown security professional and two the process is time-consuming. For a hacked site, time is of the essence. There are many dangers of delay. Google can blacklist the site; web hosts can suspend your account. You’ll experience a drop in the visitors and revenue count among other things. MalCare Cleaner fast tracks the process. With MalCare, users can clean their site instantly with just one-click. It wipes off all traces of malware from a site while also offering post-hack protective features.

We shared our entire AppSumo journey as transparently as we could on our blog, for those interested.

According to CodeInWP, WordPress powers around 30% of the entire Internet. This makes it a very attractive platform for hackers, doesn’t it?

It certainly does. Popularity draws more and more new users, but it also puts a target on the back. Moreover, with the advancement in technology, hackers are developing abilities to execute really complicated hacks. It’s hard to even recognize a hack. Having been involved in the WordPress community for so long, we knew there was a need for an intelligent security service, one that comes at an affordable price and can combat sophisticated hacks. We are very happy to be able to offer the WordPress community a valuable service.

In what state do you see the current WordPress security space? Are bloggers and business owners becoming more aware of the threats they face when running WordPress?

There are many challenges to the WordPress ecosystem. Moving such a large ship with so much mass is a tremendous challenge. WordPress is constantly evolving but technology changes even more rapidly and thus keeping up is not easy at all. With hack attacks becoming more and more powerful and untraceable, there is a need for intelligent, intuitive security services that can ensure security in such an ecosystem.

Since you’re running two services heavily related to WordPress security and data-loss prevention, there’s one very obvious question I have. Are there protective measures that every WordPress user should take to protect their website?

Glad you asked this. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that can take care of all your security issues. Therefore, one must do many things, take several protective measures to keep a site safe.

• Remember, hackers can target your site even if it’s small, unpopular and draws barely any traffic. In fact, small websites are an easy catch because they take their security leniently. Hence, small sites owners must take their site’s security seriously.
• Keeping your site’s WordPress core, plugins and themes (even the ones that are inactive) updated is very important. Often developers release vulnerability patches in the form of updates. When you don’t update your site, vulnerabilities in the core themes and plugins remain and could be exploited to break into your site.
• Migrate your site to HTTPS. It encrypts information that your visitor inserts in your site. It’s a good security practice, one that even Google recommends. Get started with an SSL certificate.
• The login page of a WordPress site is one of the targeted pages by hackers. To protect the login page, website owners can have a number of measures in place like using Firewall, limiting failed login protection, HTTP Authentication, etc.
• Apart from these, taking regular backups, deep-scanning the site on a daily basis, following WordPress recommended site hardening practices are necessary.

For the last part of this interview, I’d like to talk business for a little bit. When it comes to starting your two companies, what were two of the most important lessons you learned?

Having competitors is good. When VaultPress, a backup service developed by Automattic was launched, regular bloggers would write articles on its alternatives. They’d just google for “VaultPress competitors,” find BlogVault somewhere and call us the competitor of VaultPress. That way we got a lot of exposure. We weren’t the first ones to enter with backups in the realm of WordPress, but serendipity helped make our service into a big league player. Which is why I encourage people to pursue their ideas even if it’s not unique.

Another important lesson I’ve learned is to look for whether there are growth opportunities in the world where you want to plunge yourself into. Back in 201-0 when we released BlogVault WordPress Backup plugin, the WordPress market share was about 10%. Today it’s 31.5%. In the span of a few years, many people saw the opportunity that WordPress is providing and they built valuable businesses (like iThemes, WPEngine, Sucuri, etc.) surrounding the ecosystem.

If you could give one piece of advice to a beginning entrepreneur in the WordPress field, what would that be?

Recurring payments – 2 words which I think are key to building sustainable businesses in the WordPress space. While being a SaaS we were always a recurring business, the rest of the ecosystem was based on one-time payments. In the early days, this did make competing lot more difficult, but today we have a lot more robust business. We see a lot of traditional products/plugins in the WordPress space charging on a recurring basis. This will make our whole ecosystem much more valuable in the long run.

What do you think about the direction where WordPress, as a platform, is heading?

Gutenberg and improvements to the editor are one of the biggest things happening in WordPress currently, and it is overshadowing any other development. With this, in many ways, WordPress is getting back to improving its roots of “Democratizing Publishing.” It is a big step forward from a user experience perspective and will also serve as a platform for a great deal of innovation.

Once the dust settles on this, I feel the next few years will be about the battle with platforms such as Wix, Squarespace and more. The competitors have many advantages, but at the same time, WordPress too has great strengths – the biggest being the ecosystem. The onus will be on all of us to ensure that WordPress is the preferred choice for customers around the world.

Need a WordPress Host?

Hostdedi’ Managed WordPress Hosting takes the hassle out of hosting. With automatic updates to your WordPress core and plugins, your site is less vulnerable to attack. And with image compression included, your site will be faster than ever.

One-day shipping by Amazon Prime has raised expectations. Customers want their products yesterday.

Today, customers don’t just consider price and quality before pressing the buy button. They factor in how long it’s going to take to get their laptop, athleisure shorts, or specialty coffee mug. To stay profitable, store owners who rely on dropshipping for some or all of their products need to know the shipping basics of popular online marketplaces like AliExpress.

AliExpress is an enormous marketplace that offers multiple shipping options for getting products to customers or to storage. It’s what most buyers call a “dropshipping site” because you can use it to ship individual products to customers. The advantages of dropshipping are that you don’t need storage space for inventory or packing materials for shipping.

You can ship products on AliExpress with familiar international carriers or use AliExpress’s own shipping service. Some methods let customers track packages, and some don’t. In the end, your business goals will determine what shipping method you choose.

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to save money on shipping with AliExpress while getting customers their goods on time.

Major Carriers on AliExpress

Most suppliers on AliExpress offer the option to ship with major private carriers like FedEx or government-owned ones like China’s postal service. Generally, both shipping options have shorter delivery times but are more expensive.

If speed is a high priority, consider going the route of a major carrier like these:

Free Shipping Options

AliExpress has several free shipping options. In general, any method of free shipping will take longer than a paid one and cost you in higher prices or longer wait times. For example, the China Post offers free shipping on some items on AliExpress but has a delivery time of 20 to 39 days.

Some products are free, but the delivery method is decided by the seller (i.e. “Seller’s Shipping Method”). Shipping times will vary accordingly, and you’ll need to communicate closely with the sellers and customers on estimated shipping times. In that case, free shipping will come at a cost to your time.

Free shipping options can work for dropshippers if they keep your prices competitive and your customers are willing to wait.

AliExpress Standard Shipping

AliExpress Standard Shipping is inexpensive and includes tracking, so it’s a popular choice among dropshippers. Security is top-notch, too. Since both the transaction and tracking information are stored on AliExpress, suppliers and customers can quickly check the status of an order.

However, AliExpress delivery times are long (15 to 20 days).

AliExpress Premium Shipping

If you’ve got a rush order on those wedding decorations, you probably need another option, like AliExpress Premium Shipping. It’s comparable in price to major carriers like DHL and FedEx but is much faster than AliExpress Standard, cutting times down to 8 to 15 days. Premium is available in 183 countries and includes package tracking.

ePacket

ePacket combines affordable shipping costs with fast delivery. This delivery service, a joint effort between the US Post Office and the Hong Kong Post, operates at a loss. That’s why it can offer similar shipping times from Asia (10 to 20 days) as major shippers at a fraction of the cost (around $3 to $5).

ePacket isn’t always an option. Only a limited number of countries support ePacket shipping from China, and the product’s price can’t exceed $400. All packages must also meet the following physical requirements:

• Maximum length is 24” (60 cm)
• Total length, height, and thickness cannot exceed 36” (90 cm)
• Maximum weight is 4.4lbs (2 kg)

Overall, ePacket offers eCommerce owners a good balance between shipping costs and wait times. Order tracking makes it easy for you to check the shipping status when a customer complains and resolve disputes around shipping. Dropshippers get the most benefits from ePacket because low shipping costs increase long-term profitability.

Do Shipping Times Really Matter?

While your customers want their products ASAP, that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to wait if the price is right. The better deal they think they’re getting, the more patient they’ll be.

Really, what customers hate is inconsistency. Late shipments are unexpected shipments. When your customers know upfront it will take “4 to 6 weeks” to get their waterproof fly fishing jacket, you’re less likely to get an email with a subject line reading, “Where’s my stuff!!!”. So, customers will wait—they just don’t want to feel they’ve been swindled. Be honest and upfront about your shipping times on your product pages and watch the frustration levels decrease.

And be conservative with your estimates. If an item is delivered through ePacket (10 to 20 days), give yourself some cushion and list “12 to 22 days” in your disclaimer. A few customers may be put off by the extra days, but more will be satisfied when their shipments arrive on time or early.

In the end, shipping times don’t really matter if you set up appropriate customer expectations and manage your shipments correctly.

Tracking Orders on AliExpress

The best way to track a shipped package on AliExpress depends on the shipping method you or the customer chooses at checkout. As the supplier/buyer for your customers, you’ll have access to the tracking order in your AliExpress account. However, you will need to send the tracking number to your customers through email or text for them to check the shipping status.

Here are some available tracking methods on AliExpress.

Free Delivery Tracking

Free delivery is usually sent by the China Post Small Packet or Aliexpress Standard. The delivery will be assigned a unique tracking code, which you can find on your My Orders section of the AliExpress website. You can then enter that tracking code into the Global Order Tracking site, or if a major courier like UPS is delivering, you can enter the tracking code on the company’s tracking page.

ePacket Tracking

Every ePacket order comes with a unique tracking code, which you can use to check the status of the shipment or forward on to a customer. However, ePacket tracking codes are country-specific. If a package originates from China, the China Post will assign it a tracking number. Once the package arrives in the U.S., the USPS will change the number for delivery.

Dropshipping on AliExpress

Unsurprisingly, AliExpress is a popular dropshipping site because it’s easy to get started. There are no membership fees for buyers and shipping is easy. After you receive your customer’s order, just purchase the product on AliExpress and supply the customer’s address for the shipping destination.

To maximize your profit, use ePacket shipping and focus on the U.S. sales for cheaper and faster shipping rates.”

However, dropshipping popularity means more competition and smaller profit margins. Smart dropshippers use savvy marketing like email campaigns and social media ads to put the right products in front of the right people at the right time. That’s how to make dropshipping profitable.

Won’t Customers Just Buy From AliExpress?

With all of this talk of shipping costs, one question naturally arises—why wouldn’t a customer just skip your store and go straight to AliExpress? Why not pay for the shipping themselves? The answer is marketing and the personalized buying experience that attracts customers.

The sheer size of a marketplace like AliExpress leaves customers a little cold. The website is built for the practical purpose of connecting buyers with sellers and moving large quantities of products.

Compare this to the warmer appeal of a more cozy store with personalized branding and hand-picked products for a niche audience. Marketing and customer service are how store owners bring value to their customers.

Need an eCommerce Host?

Managed WooCommerce Hosting reduces query loads by 95% and includes leading cart abandonment technology and analytics tools right out of the box. See the plans today.

By streamlining your WooCommerce checkout process you can increase your revenue because more people will make a purchase. But, increasing the volume of sales you get through your store is only one way to increase your revenue. A second way to increase your overall revenue is to increase your average order price.

Today we’re going to look at some of the features WooCommerce offers out of the box to help store owners increase the average order price by showing users other products they may be interested in. We’ll explore why they may not be the best options for some stores. Then we’ll dig into how Smart Offers resolves many of the issues you can encounter with the stock WooCommerce related products options. Finally, I’ll walk you through how to set up Smart Offers on your WooCommerce site.

Increasing Average Selling Price with WooCommerce

Out of the box, WooCommerce gives you two options to control the products your customers may be interested in while they’re shopping. They’re labeled “Upsells” and “Cross-sells” and can be found on an individual product editing screen.

Products you add to Upsells are displayed on the main product page. These are a hand-curated list of products that you think your customers may be interested in alongside the item they’re currently viewing. You could also modify your WooCommerce theme so that these products are shown as items that “Others have also bought” to bring a more personal feel to the page.

You’ll also notice that we have related products showing in our default WooCommerce setup. Out of the box WooCommerce looks through your products and tries to figure out which products are related to each other. Then WooCommerce shows other related products to customers as they’re browsing your site.

Cross-sells show on the cart page of your WooCommerce store by default.

Cross-sell items are hand-curated products that you are hoping users purchase alongside what is currently in their cart. Looking at our screenshot above, if a user already had “My Awesome eBook” in their cart it would not show in the Cross-sell area.

While all of these options are a decent starting place for many stores, they can distract users from a purchase. Particularly, Cross-sells can get in the way of an optimized checkout process. I recommend that you only put the things you absolutely have to have in your checkout process. Cross-sells adds something that’s visually distracting to a customer’s checkout experience.

Instead of purchasing the items they already have, customers now have to decide if the other items being shown to them should be added. Maybe they’ll decide that the other items could be a better purchase, and they’ll head back into your site to evaluate the other products they’ve been shown.

If a customer is heading back into your store to evaluate their purchase decision again, you’ve increased the likelihood of losing the sale. This scenario is where Smart Offers can step in by allowing you much more control over how your customers are shown other purchase options.

Let’s take a deeper look at what Smart Offers is and how you can set it up on your site.

How Smart Offers Can Increase Your Sales

Whereas WooCommerce cross-sells show users extra products on the cart page which could possibly distract them, Smart Offers can be configured to only show users products after they’ve made a purchase.

Smart Offers has two ways you can set it up. First, you can use Smart Offers to show upgrade purchases, or add-on purchases, just after a user has clicked to add a product to their cart. Second, you can use Smart Offers to offer users other products after they have made their initial purchase. You can even use it with both of these features turned on, though it’s always wise to be careful about how often you try to prompt users with additional purchases so you don’t annoy them.

Once you’ve purchased and installed Smart Offers, you’ll find the settings for it at WooCommerce -> Smart Offers. Then choose “Add New Offer” to add a new offer to your site.

From there title your offer and choose which product you want to offer. You can also choose how you want to price the offer. Offers can be fixed price, discounted price, or discounted based on a percentage depending on what suits your store.

Next, you get to decide where to offer your extra product. Remember not to overwhelm your customers. Hitting them with the same offer multiple times during their time on your store is likely to decrease the chances that they make a purchase because they’ll get annoyed.

My preference is always to show the offer after our customer has made a purchase. That way you don’t interrupt their initial purchase and lose the sale. You can then choose to show the offer as a popup or directly in the page content. I’d suggest testing which option works best for your customers.

You can also decide the display rules for the offer.

Smart Offers has lots of ways you can customize when to display an offer to a user. It covers everything from what products are in your customer’s cart, to what the dollar value of their transaction is. You can even set the quantity level of a product to trigger an offer.

If there are multiple rules you want to apply to an offer, Smart Offers supports numerous rule configurations. You could set an offer so that it only shows if you have over $100 in your cart and have 5 T-Shirts in the cart. Then offer this customer a special custom shirt that only qualifying customers see.

The final two options to set for an offer revolve around what to do if a user accepts or rejects the offer they’ve been shown. If you’ve used Smart Offers to offer an upgrade purchase to your customers, you can remove the original purchase so they don’t double purchase. I’ve used this with a client who was selling a course bundle and wanted to make sure that users didn’t purchase a single copy of a course at the same time as they purchased the bundle.

When someone accepts an offer you can also add a coupon to the cart, or show them another offer after their initial purchase. You can also send them to a custom URL if that suits your store.

When someone rejects an offer, you have fewer options. You can choose to show them another offer, send them to the cart page, or send them to a custom URL.

The final step in setting up an offer is choosing the content that you want to show to your customers. Smart Offers provides you with the ability to write your own content in the WordPress editor alongside the ability to add custom CSS to get the exact look you want.

As I’ve used this for clients, we’ve always found that we can get the look we want without a huge hassle. Some of my clients are comfortable with CSS and don’t ask me to make adjustments, they manage their Smart Offers and the styling on their own with ease.

The final feature that Smart Offers provides is some reporting for your site. On the WordPress Dashboard there is an overview of how Smart Offers is doing, and when you look at your offers you can see some stats on how each individual offer is contributing to your overall stats.

For all the greatness that is Smart Offers, there is still one shortcoming. When I was working with one of my clients, The Sweet Setup, we wanted to offer customers our other courses, but only if they hadn’t purchased them already. We didn’t want to make multiple offers either because we figured that a bunch of offers after a purchase was annoying.

Unfortunately, Smart Offers doesn’t allow you to us an “OR” statement as you offer products. You can get around this by nesting offers in layers and adjusting the display rules so that only on offer could possibly match, but it’s less than optimal. As you add more products to your offers, this nested setup becomes even harder to manage.

In Summary

Today we’ve looked at a few ways that you can increase the average purchase price of your customers. While WooCommerce offers some options, Smart Offers provides you with a robust toolset to present users with your products without overwhelming them.

I hope it goes without saying that even with extra offerings being shown to your customers, you need to make sure that you’ve streamlined your checkout process. Remember to only ask for the things you need from your customers and not every detail they could possibly have.

Increase Your Store’s Orders With a Lightning Fast Platform

Create a lightning-fast store that converts traffic with Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting. It also comes standard with Jilt and helps you recover abandoned carts.

It’s no secret that we’re a nation (and, really, a world) that’s obsessed with T-shirts. We have been since before the tie-dye shirts of the ‘60s. People love to express themselves with designs, colors, and slogans that speak to them. It’s no surprise then that designers have been creating their own T-shirts to sell for decades.

But really, the only difference between designers like you today and those early designers is that starting a T-shirt business from home has never been easier.

This blog post is going to discuss all the ins and outs of starting a T-shirt business from home, from finding your niche to marketing your product.

Choosing Your Niche

There’s an old adage in business, “If you’re selling to everyone, you’re not selling to anyone.” That’s especially true as you start out with your T-shirt business. It’s better to completely own a niche than to try to appeal to everyone.

Starting with a smaller niche can give you room to grow, as well. Take the shirt company Homage, for example. Homage is a brand that has vintage-inspired shirts, hoodies, sweatpants, and more that appeal to sports fans across the United States. These days, they even have contracts with everyone from MLB teams to wrestling superstars.

Related reading: How to Find a Profitable Niche >>

When they started, though, Homage started small. Most of their apparel was geared toward fans of the founders’ alma mater: The Ohio State University. Their OSU-themed gear was so popular that they expanded into Ohio pride in general. They made clothing that was a nod to —but didn’t violate the trademark of—professional and collegiate sports teams across the state.

An example is their simple “Cincinnati Invented Hustle” shirt. Baseball fans will get the nod to infamous Cincinnati Reds hitter Pete Rose, but the message doesn’t even come close to violating any trademarks held by Rose or Major League Baseball.

Homage eventually expanded, teaming up with colleges across the country to do branded apparel that appealed to those who lived outside of Ohio. Now, you can shop their collections for a dozen cities in North America.

What’s an area that you love enough to think of dozens of ideas for shirts? It might be pop culture, the environment, gardening, travel, or it could even be an attitude or a feeling.

Validate Your Niche

Now you have some ideas. But are they popular enough to find customers? There is such a thing as a niche that’s too small. How do we validate a niche?

Let’s use bike polo as an example. If you’re not familiar, bike polo is a lot like regular polo, but players ride bikes instead of horses. Sounds pretty niche. Sounds maybe a little too niche, but let’s find out.

First, we’ll do a search on Facebook to see what kinds of groups and pages exist for the term “bike polo.”

These results are encouraging. A bike polo group in San Francisco has over 700 members and looks pretty active, averaging two posts per day. There also appear to be Facebook pages for bike polo teams across the country. San Francisco might not be the best litmus test for what’s popular in the rest of the country. But seeing that Milwaukee has a bike polo team with close to 2,000 followers tells us that there might be something to this niche.

Next, we want to see if this is something that people are actually searching for. Google Trends is perfect for this. It’s a tool Google offers to show you the popularity of search keywords over time.

This chart is concerning for one big reason: Popularity of the search term “bike polo” has been on the decline for some time now. Popularity peaked in 2009 and has declined steadily since. That should make us worry that the numbers we saw in those Facebook groups and pages might not be the best indicator of the sport’s current popularity.

With that in mind, we want to go back and check on the social activity for those bike polo groups we found earlier. Even if people aren’t searching for bike polo as much on Google, if the communities are very active, this might still be a niche we want to get into.

Finally, we want to take a look at the competition. A Google search of “bike polo T-shirts” tells us that only a few T-shirt designs exist. We know that this is a recognized niche, but we don’t know how well these tees are selling.

From our research, we’ve learned a few things:

• There seem to be active social groups for bike polo on Facebook.
• There is some search traffic for bike polo, though it has been declining for a few years.
• There aren’t a lot of other designers in the bike polo niche, which either presents an opportunity to stand out or is an indication that bike polo designs aren’t popular.

From these things, it’s up to you to decide if it’s a niche worth pursuing. It’s not the home run it would have been had Google Trends indicated it was growing in popularity, but there does seem to be a solid amount of traffic for bike polo-related searches.

One last quick note. Whatever you choose, make sure that you can come up with ideas that don’t violate trademarks. Trademarks can include titles, graphics, and certain slogans. You can do a trademark search at the USPTO website.

How to Make and Sell Your Product

This is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make when you’re starting a T-shirt business from home.

Making and Shipping T-Shirts From Home

This might be considered the “old school” way of starting a T-shirt business from home. In this method, you physically make and ship the T-shirts you sell. You buy the plain, unbranded products from a supplier, you apply the designs on them however you’d like (paint, screen printing, bleach designs, heat transfers), take photos of them, put them online, and ship them out as people buy them.

The two main upsides to physically making your T-shirts are total control of the end product and higher profit margins. You don’t have to sit back and hope that someone else is shipping quality products to your customers. You know full well that your buyers are getting a great shirt packaged exactly how you want it. And you don’t have to share your profits with anyone like you will with marketplaces and dropshipping.

All you need to make and sell T-shirts from home with this method is a website that supports eCommerce (like WordPress and WooCommerce) or a marketplace like Etsy that allows vendors to sell products they hand-make.

T-Shirt Marketplaces

T-shirt marketplaces like Teespring, RedBubble, and Threadless are popular with T-shirt designers because of how easy they make starting a T-shirt business from home. With these marketplace sites, all you need to do is choose your base products (e.g., cotton T-shirts) and upload your design.

You don’t have to maintain your own site, and you don’t necessarily have to worry about marketing like you would if you ran your own site. Marketing on your own is still important and is always recommended, but your designs are added to each site’s extremely popular marketplace.

Let’s go back to that bike polo example. If you search Teespring.com for “bike polo,” you’ll find several shirt designs.

Once you click on a design, you can choose the style (i.e., product type, color, and size).

Teespring is unique because shirts only print when a minimum number of them is ordered. That encourages buyers to share products with their like-minded friends and on their social channels. This mandatory minimum could mean selling 10 shirts instead of one when people who are passionate about a design share with their friends, but it could also mean selling zero shirts instead of five if you only get five orders instead of that minimum of 10.

Other popular marketplaces like RedBubble and Threadless don’t require a minimum order, but all of them take a pretty large chunk of your sales, comparatively.

Each of these marketplaces takes a percentage of sales. That’s how they make money. The portion that these marketplaces take varies. Teespring publicly estimates that creators see about 55% net profit on their shirts. Teespring takes 18% to cover printing and fulfillment, 5% to cover their marketing, 10% for customer service and refunds (even if your product is never refunded), and 7% for product costs. An additional 5% margin is what Teespring takes for their profit.

That means you’d take home $11 on a $20 product. Compare that to the net profit on a T-shirt that can cost as little as $2 wholesale that you also sell for $20. You can see why not everyone chooses to sell their products on a marketplace website despite the ease of entry.

Dropshipping T-Shirts

The third method is the one we recommend the most: dropshipping T-shirts. Dropshipping is a middle ground between doing everything yourself and using a marketplace.

The T-shirt creation process is similar to the T-shirt specific marketplaces like Teespring. You upload a design, choose the products you want the design to appear on, and set the price. The dropshipper creates the products and ships them when customers place orders.

The difference is, T-shirt dropshippers like Printify integrate into your own website. If you don’t already have a website, we recommend WordPress with WooCommerce, which is a robust and easy-to-customize combination.

The benefit of dropshipping T-shirts is that you get to build your own brand like you would if you did everything yourself, but you don’t have to do the most time-consuming part of running a T-shirt business—making and shipping the shirts.

Dropshipping T-shirts works well for those looking to start a T-shirt business from scratch and those who already have some sort of online brand established. Going to the bike polo example again, if you’re already running a website about bike polo, you can start selling bike polo-themed shirts before you know it.

But what about the cost? It varies based on the product you’re applying your design to, but most offer their cheapest shirt between $7-9. Everything after that is profit for you.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Website

If you decide that the best thing for your T-shirt business is to go with one of the options that require you have your own website, you want to make sure that website works for you.

There are a lot of out-of-the-box options out there that are extremely inexpensive up front, but might not offer the customization you’re looking for without having you pay extra—likely more than you would have paid if you’d started with something like WordPress with WooCommerce to begin with.

Speed is also a huge factor for any eCommerce store. If you’re on a bare-bones, $3-per-month hosting plan that isn’t designed specifically for eCommerce stores, your site speed is likely suffering. During busy times for your business, like around the North American Hardcourt Bike Polo Championship (it takes place in late September, FYI), the influx of visitors can slow your site, or worse, crash it. That could mean lost revenue and people possibly buying their bike polo T-shirts elsewhere from now on.

Managed hosting solutions like those offered by WooCommerce can make your site work seamlessly, all the time. Even if your designs go viral, managed hosting solutions can handle the volume and make sure you don’t lose any sales due to slow site speed.

Even if you don’t have a lot of design or website experience, you can absolutely create a successful online T-shirt business from home. All you really need is some creativity, a niche you can thrive in, and the willingness to try different marketing tactics and designs until you find something that strikes a chord with people.

Get A Hosting Solution Designed For Online Shops

With Managed WooCommerce Hosting from Hostdedi, you get a high-performance platform dedicated to eCommerce stores of every size. Hostdedi has plans for all types of stores to help you get started, including those just getting started.

Today we’re going to look at what A/B testing is. I’ll help you identify your metric to watch for your store. And I’ll introduce you to a number of tools that you can use for A/B testing on your WooCommerce site. The truth is that if you’re not testing the changes to your store, then you don’t know which of them is affecting your bottom line.

What is A/B Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process you use when you test out two or more different versions of your content. That may be changing the button color on your products, testing out where you introduce other products a customer may be interested in, or how you ask for an email to grow your newsletter list. There are a few things to remember as you start with A/B testing on your WooCommerce store.

First off, you need to make sure that you’re only testing a single thing at a time for most sites. Sure you could change the font size of the product headings, and change the language on the buttons, and change their size and color. You could get lots of variations of your pages out of all that work.

The problem is, how do you know which variation positively affected your bottom line? Was it the color change? Maybe the language change? Did the font size make a difference at all?

If you have too many variations, you don’t know. That means when you’re starting, only test a single thing, like changing the language you use on your buttons. Leave the color and size changes for the next test once you see if a language change makes any difference.

Second, you need to make sure that your variations are loaded at random. It’s no good to show all users with a specific IP range the same content. You might discover that users within a particular area purchase with Option A, but the reality is that with Option B more users overall purchase.

All of the tools I’m going to bring up later will take care of this for you, including presenting random results to your users.

Third, you need to keep the current page as an option in your test suite. If you only show users changes, then you won’t know if the original page worked better or not. The A in A/B testing is the current look of your site, without changes.

If you’re not keeping the original page in, then you’re not performing A/B tests because you have no A variation.

Finally, you need to make sure you have enough traffic to test properly. If you have ten purchases a day on your site, it’s going to take you weeks to amass enough data to get useful results. Unless you’re selling 5 or 6 figure items and you’re getting ten sales a day, you’re probably much better off figuring out how to get more traffic to your site because WooCommerce is pretty good at conversion out of the box.

If you have a big site that gets lots of traffic and conversions already, then you should start to get some idea of what’s working reasonably quickly. In that case, don’t let a variation stick around too long. If something isn’t working, make sure you turn it off instead of continuing to harm your sales.

Let’s say that you have three variations for your checkout process. Your normal conversion rate on checkout is 48%. Your three variations are converting like this:

1. Converts at 48% (what you currently have)
2. Converts at 46%
3. Converts at 35%

In this case, option three is a prime candidate to end before the test is supposed to be done. It’s so far below the other few that it’s clearly not the winner and keeping it around for an extended period is only going to harm your sales. Don’t be afraid to cut a variation if it’s underperforming by a large margin.

You wouldn’t cut option two though. It’s close enough that it could turn around. Maybe you’ve only hit the purchasers during work hours, and they convert better one way while after work people will convert much better with your second option. You won’t know for sure until you capture enough data.

Identifying Your Metrics

While most WooCommerce sites are going to look at an increase in overall conversions as the metric they’re trying to improve with A/B testing, that is not the right metric for every site.

Other metrics that may be better suited to your audience are:

• Average Selling Price
• Repeat Customers
• Email list subscribers
• Social sharing of your products

The metric that matters the most to your store will change over time as well. Maybe you start improving overall conversions, but once you aren’t making much headway on that, you move to try to increase your average order price. Then when you have that locked down, you look at the top of your funnel and work on traffic and email subscribers.

It’s also highly likely that over the life of your site, you’ll cycle back to things you had already optimized. After increasing the leads coming into the top of your sales funnel, you head back to look at the conversion rate, then move to the average selling price.

With A/B testing your WooCommerce site, you’re never really done. Something can always be improved.

4 Ways to Setup A/B Testing Fast

Now that you understand what A/B testing is and why you should be using A/B testing on your WooCommerce store, let’s look at some of the tools that are out there to make this process easy for you.

Nelio A/B Testing

Nelio A/B Testing provides you with a full management system to build and track your A/B testing. Nelio provides reports including heat maps and is fully compatible with WooCommerce.

Nelio doesn’t do the processing of the split tests on your site, which can cause speed issues. It has its service that takes care of this for you. The WordPress plugin comes with a free trial so that you can test Nelio out.

Marketing Optimizer for WordPress

One of the ways that Marketing Optimizer for WordPress shines is its wealth of templates. This plugin provides you with many landing page templates to use on your site so you can test your different calls to action on your email list, for example.

Another feature that makes Marketing Optimizer for WordPress standout is its Gravity Forms integration to make your form testing easy. You can use this integration to post all your form data to the plugin.

Convert Experiments by Yoast

When you go to check this plugin out, you might wonder why it was listed here. Convert Experiments currently has a big banner at the top telling you that the plugin hasn’t been updated in a while. The developer is on the record to say that the plugin works and is still supported.

To use Convert Experiments, you’ll need to get an account with Convert. Once you have an account, you can run as many tests as you want and have as many collaborators as you need on your projects. There is no extra per-user fee.

Once you’ve got the plugin installed and connected to your site, all of the administration of your A/B tests happens on the Convert site. They provide a simple editor so that you can customize the whole test process without needing to know any code.

Simple Page Tester

Simple Page Tester is another WordPress-based end-to-end solution. Directly inside WordPress, you can navigate to the page you want to test, set up your test and even declare the winner of the test when you’re ready.

If you go for the Pro version, it will even tell you when to declare the winner. Being told when to end a test can be awesome because most of us don’t have a statistics background to know when we’ve collected enough data to stop a test. With Simple Page Tester, you can ride along and let it take care of your site.

Continue Learning New Ways to Testing Your Site

We did not do an exhaustive look at the tools you can use for A/B testing on your site. There are entire services dedicated to A/B testing like Optimizely which is similar to the Convert service we covered. The tools I’ve recommended today are great ways to get started with A/B testing.

As your A/B testing experience increases, your needs may become more complex. Some of the tools here may not fit those needs. At that point, you should have enough experience to look at the more complex tools and decide which one suits your needs best.

The most important takeaway is that you need to be testing your site. If you’re not testing your site, then you’re leaving money on the table. Something as simple as testing the size of buttons on your checkout can increase the revenue that your store brings in.

Want to JumpStart Your New WooCommerce Store?

Create a lightning-fast store that converts traffic with Hostdedi’ Managed WooCommerce Hosting. It also comes standard with Jilt and helps you recover abandoned carts.