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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.
74% of desktop sites in Baymard's eCommerce benchmark have hover-based drop-down menus.
Many of their test participants deduced the correct parent scope and category taxonomy solely with the help of hover-based drop-down menus.
Yet testing also found that hover-based drop-down menus can cause serious usability issues.
In particular, drop-down menus appearing and disappearing unexpectedly caused considerable annoyance and interrupted product finding needlessly.
This research formed the basis of a new feature in our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme called hover intent.
Included in version 2.6.5, it adds a new option within the customizer which, when enabled, adds a 400ms hover delay as recommended by the research contained within this article.
Learn why Hover Intent is Important in Drop-Down Menus
Elementor Pro 3.12.0 was released this week and included a bad bug which makes the WooCommerce mini cart appear to be empty even when products have been added.
This bug is present in all themes, not just Shoptimizer. I've reproduced the problem in Elementor's own Hello theme, as well as Astra and Kadence.
The Github link for the issue is here.
As of the time of writing, no fix has yet been released so it is best not to update to this version, or if you have, rollback to 3.11.7.
Devin Price has built a lightweight, WooCommerce plugin to enhance your checkout page by including an address autocomplete via the Google Places API.
This has a number of benefits including:
- Help customers save time in the checkout process.
- Consistent address formatting.
- Autofills address results for both shipping and billing.
- Restricts autocomplete suggestions to the country selected.
- Optimized API calls to keep costs low.
Note that the Places API has a free level but over this amount there is a charge per-request.
You would need to judge if this cost is worth it for the potential up-tick in conversions the feature could provide your store.
Check out the Address Autocomplete Google Places Plugin for WooCommerce
WooCommerce has a new feature called High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS). It is designed to optimize the performance of WooCommerce by focusing on Orders and how it can more efficiently manage order data.
HPOS unlocks major performance improvements, including up to 5x improvement in performance during order creation.
In testing, the checkout flow was up to 1.5x faster after enabling HPOS.
With new tables having their own indexes, there have been major improvements in searching customer orders (up to 40x).
By August 2023 High Performance Order Storage will be enabled by default on all new WooCommerce stores.
Read more about HPOS within WooCommerce
WooCommerce's Order Emails are an often overlooked component of improving conversions and generating new sales.
The emails themselves are basic and functional but with some customizations they could be so much more useful.
Rodolfo from Business Bloomer has come up with an excellent snippet which includes a grid of related items based upon the products mentioned in the order email.
It outputs the result just below the email's totals data and before the billing address.
Learn how to include Related Products in your Order Emails
The new design of Wise.com has turned a lot of heads recently and I enjoyed their design team's write-up on the process of creating it. As they put it:
There’s a misconception that making a product accessible means sacrificing the visual design. Bold brands embrace accessibility.
Their approach to testing color schemes is excellent and should be a benchmark for anyone striving to create accessible websites.
Learn about Color Accessibility via the Wise Design System
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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