Welcome to a special edition post brought to you by Beau Lebens, Head of Engineering for Woo.
Last week I shared an updated roadmap and vision for the future of WooCommerce on our developer blog, and I wanted to share it here as well. This post is a bit technical, so I thought I’d offer a quick summary of what this means for WooCommerce merchants.
We are excited to bring you this next phase of WooCommerce. In keeping with our open source roots, it brings more functionality and extensibility to the core WooCommerce product and focuses on building block-based pages and customizing the site to provide a better user experience.
If you have questions, write them in the comments and our team will get back to you. Here’s what I think is most important to store owners and employees.
It allows you to edit your store
Block-based site building is the future of WordPress and WooCommerce, and we continue to lean into it. Blocks makes it easy for non-coders to create and edit pages, meaning you control your own destiny when it comes to managing your site’s content, layout, and merchandising.
Unlike many cloud eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce even allows you to intuitively customize your shopping cart and checkout pages using the Cart and Checkout blocks.
We’re working on even more improvements to Blocks to make your site easier to manage, and we’re also asking developers to make sure everything they work on is compatible with Blocks.
Improving the user experience
We’ve recently introduced a number of initiatives and features to help you improve the way you use WooCommerce, from launching a new store to day-to-day management to measuring your success.
- Simplified boarding: We’ve significantly reduced the number of steps required to launch a WooCommerce store. If you want to create a new store, you will be able to do it quickly and efficiently.
- Improved store customization: We continue to better integrate WordPress’ native site customization tools to make it easier than ever to customize your store with your brand, customize page layouts, and more. While this is an ongoing process, you can check out our new built-in store designer at WooCommerce > Home and clicking on “Start Customizing” knob.
- Better product management: Our new product editor is faster and more intuitive, meaning adding and editing products takes fewer clicks and less time.
- Revamped analytics: We think about how to help you understand what’s going on in your store and how to make your business more successful. We’re starting with improvements to the core analytics features available in WooCommerce. In the long term, we are looking at how to create a more robust solution.
We’re also working hard to make WooCommerce better for shoppers. These tweaks are meant to help you increase conversion by giving your website visitors the best possible experience.
- More available blinds: We invest in improving the accessibility of your WooCommerce store to ensure that your store is usable by as many people as possible.
- Unrivaled checkout: We continue to evolve our block checkout to reduce cart abandonment, increase mobile conversion and simplify the overall experience. We particularly emphasized the performance improvement, and so far the new checkout has a conversion rate a few points higher than the classic one. We hope to take it even higher with upcoming features and improvements.
- Better payment options: We’ve combined and simplified local pickup options, improved account creation options for customers, and built integrations to allow custom checkout fields for more complex needs.
- Improved order confirmation: The order confirmation screen now has an improved design to display delivery details and order summary, as well as the option for shoppers to create an account after paying for their order.
We are excited to bring this next phase of WooCommerce to you and your shoppers. Please see the full dev blog post for details and stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.
