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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.
I was thinking a lot this week about checkout UX. It was provoked by the launch of Fast.co which has gotten quite a bit of buzz. In their words it's "The world's fastest checkout" - with no passwords or long forms.
The checkout screen is absolutely crucial in the buying journey. We've done a lot of checkout optimizations in Shoptimizer based upon research in the field. Using something like Jilt is also a huge benefit. Many people will start the process, by entering their email but not complete the form.
Jilt will send automatic cart abandonment emails, you don't have to do anything. We use it on our own site and it's satisfying to see how much revenue it recovers each month, easily justifying the low monthly cost.
Baymard's post on checkout UX is an excellent overview of the kind of issues every store should be considering.
Read about the current state of Checkout UX
Brian Dean has another fascinating article this week where he looks at how people use Google. Specifically, he investigated:
- How many people click on ads vs organic results
- Percentage of clicks go to local, video and Google Shopping
- Average search session length
- Number of users that make it to the bottom of the first page
It's as usual well worth reading Dean's posts, they provide lots of insight in an easy to digest, scannable format.
See Brian Dean's insights into how people use Google
I got a lot of support tickets this week with customers having trouble displaying the 'Filter by attribute' widget in the sidebar of our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme.
It turned out to be a WooCommerce 4.4 issue - there's a GitHub thread on the topic with some possible solutions if you're experiencing a similar problem.
See the WooCommerce Filters widget issue
There are loads of tabs plugins for WooCommerce. But each of them had the same issue. If you used Elementor, your custom tab content was overwritten by the page builder.
It worked if you had a 'global tab content' - i.e. the same extra content displayed in all products.
But what if you wanted to show different contents in different products? Say technical specifications which were unique to a particular item.
There is finally a solution for this, thanks to the commenter on this GitHub thread, started by Colm over 18 months ago.
I've tested this and verified that it does indeed work and updated our support doc to reflect this.
See the solution within Shoptimizer's documentation
Colm found this excellent article from Gridpane this week about providing WooCommerce support during a massive increase of traffic for one of their clients.
They had over 6,000 concurrent users on his site, with hundreds of people trying to check out in WooCommerce, simultaneously.
What follows is a breakdown of how they handled that crisis scenario. It’s a really good example of the kinds of problems that an excellent, responsive host can diagnose and assist with.
Read about the crisis and what happened
If you sell online or have bought anything you've surely come across Stripe. A payment processing juggernaut, founded by two brothers from Ireland, but now based in San Francisco.
This is a very interesting short article about how it got so successful; basically they made payments extremely simple. Setting up payments for business before Stripe was much more complex; the paperwork alone made it very difficult for many companies to sell online.
Read about 7 lines of code which made billions
Finally this week I came across some lovely MIT-licensed illustrations and Lottie animations from pixeltrue.com.
I think the illustrations are particularly good and might be an excellent way to freshen up a landing page. They can be used on both personal and commercial projects and no attribution is required.
Take a look at the free illustrations and animations
That's it for this edition. Simply reply to this email if you have any questions or suggestions, we read every message. Have a great week and best of luck with your projects!
Colm and Simon from CommerceGurus
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