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Hi there, hope you're having a great Friday!
This is Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus, with a handpicked weekly roundup of eCommerce articles.
WooCommerce Product Tables is a new plugin from Studio Wombat designed to help store owners display products in clean, responsive, and high-performing tables.
It provides a fast and flexible way to create searchable, filterable product lists that look great on both desktop and mobile.
The plugin includes a simple table builder wizard, allowing users to select which products and details to display, customize the design, and optimize performance settings like pagination and lazy loading.
Built with speed and modern coding standards in mind, WooCommerce Product Tables loads quickly and avoids legacy bloat.
It’s especially useful for stores with large inventories, such as wholesale, B2B, or repeat-order shops, where customers need to compare products, check availability, and add multiple items to their cart from one place.
The plugin also integrates well with Studio Wombat’s other tools, like Advanced Product Fields, and works seamlessly with our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme for consistent styling.
Read our Full Review of WooCommerce Product Tables
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WooCommerce is integrating AI capabilities to enhance eCommerce experiences through the development of the WooCommerce MCP and the Abilities API.
These initiatives aim to facilitate seamless interactions between AI assistants and WooCommerce stores, enabling functionalities such as product and order management via AI interfaces like chatbots.
The WooCommerce MCP, set to debut in version 10.3, will support AI-driven store management and development workflows by providing a standardized approach for AI assistants to interact with WooCommerce stores.
In parallel, WooCommerce is focusing on agentic commerce, a paradigm where AI agents autonomously assist customers in discovering products and completing transactions without direct interaction with the store's website.
To support this, WooCommerce is enhancing product discoverability through AI-native experiences and collaborating with partners like Google and Stripe to enable secure, off-site transactions.
Read more about AI & Agentic Commerce in WooCommerce
OOPSpam reported stopping what it calls the largest WooCommerce card‑testing campaign they’ve seen: attackers launched massive, sudden bursts of checkout attempts, targeting PayPal and credit/debit gateways and creating thousands of failed orders.
Their systems blocked over 450,000 attack attempts in a single week. The attack showed clear bot patterns.
OOPSpam recommends defenses that worked in this incident: install anti‑spam/fraud protections, enable settings to block orders from unknown origins or require valid device types, use rate limiting where appropriate, and integrate bot protection (e.g., Cloudflare) and gateway/processor tools.
These measures reduce failed orders, cut cleanup costs, and stop bots from probing card numbers at scale.
We have covered this topic previously also in our WooCommerce Card Testing Fraud Prevention and Solutions article which is well worth looking over.
Learn How OOPSpam Blocked 450,000 Card Testing Attempts
This excellent article (and accompaning video) from Weston Ruter looks at the WordPress Core Performance team's work on site speed enhancements, with a critical focus on improving the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric.
LCP is one of the three Core Web Vitals (CWV), measuring how long it takes for a webpage's primary content (like a featured image or hero heading) to become visible.
Since LCP is weighted heavily in overall performance scores and WordPress is shown to lag behind other platforms in this metric, the team determined that LCP improvement remains the most important area of focus.
To achieve a "good" LCP time of 2.5 seconds or less, the team benchmarked various feature plugins to isolate the optimizations that yield the most substantial results.
Among the tested optimizations, the feature that had the biggest impact on LCP was the Image Prioritizer plugin.
This plugin works by identifying the LCP element (usually an image) and applying the fetchpriority=high attribute to it, instructing the browser to load it as a priority resource.
While features like "Enhanced Responsive Images" provided a massive ~25% LCP reduction by ensuring correctly sized images were downloaded, the Image Prioritizer delivered even stronger results, achieving a reduction of approximately 27.5% on mobile and a staggering over 50% on desktop.
This demonstrated that explicitly prioritizing the fetching and rendering of the LCP element is a more potent optimization than purely focusing on image file size reduction.
Discover The Site Speed Frontier with Performance Lab and Beyond
Our latest Shoptimizer 2.9.1 and CommerceKit 2.4.4 release this week has some interesting new features and options, some of which you can now see on our main demo.
Display Reduced Number of Swatches on Listings
You can now show swatches on a single line on listings pages. A maximum of 4 image swatches or 5 color swatches is shown, with a +2, to indicate that there are 2 more variations available.
Gallery Captions
Include additional context within your product galleries by displaying a caption over a product image. Check out our demo product galleries for various use case examples.
Partial Word Search Suggestions
Within the Ajax Search module there is a new option to find matches even when users type only part of a word.
See the Full Changelog of Updates
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Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Simon and Colm from CommerceGurus
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