Simon Tomkins Author Page - Cofounder of CommerceGurus

WooCommerce Email Customizer – The Five Minute Guide

I was looking for a WooCommerce Email Customizer solution for our own CommerceGurus site for a while for buyers of our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme. Email customizations are one of the forgotten aspects of eCommerce but definitely shouldn’t be overlooked. They’re invaluable for defining your brand right up to and including the point-of-sale and can provide useful information to buyers post-purchase.

This could include a link to documentation, a phone number for support or even a coupon code for subsequent purchases as a way of saying thank you. Let’s look at what I discovered, and I promise, it should only take five minutes to implement on your store.

It’s an easy win!

WooCommerce Shortcodes – Tutorial and lots of examples

By Simon Tomkins27 Comments

WooCommerce shortcodes may not be familiar to everyone. Even if you have a WooCommerce store, it may be a feature you haven’t come across and don’t yet realise how useful they can be in sprinkling product references and buying call to action buttons throughout your site.

WooCommerce shortcodes are small code snippets which you can place anywhere in your site to display WooCommerce products or calls to action such as ‘Buy Now’ buttons. There are a multitude of uses for these and we wanted to incorporate some great examples directly within our Shoptimizer WooCommerce theme. They should also work within any theme with WooCommerce installed.

WooCommerce Subscriptions – become a recurring revenue powerhouse

By Simon TomkinsLeave a comment

Before talking about the excellent WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin I want to first mention a start-up, whose beginnings were described on the Starter Story website.

Blue Coffee Box is a coffee subscription business, founded in the UK by a dad, with the intention of raising enough monthly revenue to pay for his son’s college education and living fees. His son now runs the business with him and through directly mailing a fresh, original batch of coffee to their paying subscribers, they have already surpassed $26,000 in monthly income.

This is after being in business only a little bit over one year.

WooCommerce Memberships review – reward frequent buyers

By Simon Tomkins1 Comment

Running and marketing a successful online store isn’t easy. It takes a huge amount of effort to get people to visit your store and even more to convert a relatively small percentage to actually buy. It’s one of the biggest problems to solve in your quest for growth. How do you get customers to buy, then return and buy again? Without these recurring users, you’ll end up spending huge sums of money on trying to continually acquire new customers. The WooCommerce Memberships plugin aims to make this easier.

Customers who have purchased from you already and are comfortable with the experience are much easier to market to. You have their details and what they’ve already ordered so it’s much easier to predict what category or product might entice them back.

Building the best WooCommerce theme – focus on speed and conversions

By Simon TomkinsLeave a comment

What essential features would make up the best WooCommerce theme? We’ve been building WooCommerce themes for some time, starting with Captiva in 2014 and our best seller, Adrenalin in 2015 and our oft-imitated Suave in 2016. Over the past few years, we’ve noticed a proliferation of multi-purpose themes on marketplaces such as ThemeForest. These, on the whole, tend to feel ‘heavy’. By including dozens of javascript files, image sliders, icon libraries and the like, speed dramatically suffers.

5 proven conversion rate tips to boost your eCommerce store sales

By Simon Tomkins1 Comment

When it comes to conversion research we’re big fans of the Baymard Institute Research website. It is a web usability research center which conducts detailed studies on nearly every feature of major eCommerce websites. These conversion rate tips, based on extensive research, could make a huge difference to the turnover of your store. It is academic in nature but practical in how it presents solutions to common UX problems.

When planning our Shoptimizer theme we quickly realized that nearly no WooCommerce theme on the market has actually studied these usability reports in order to make the default experience easier and more likely to convert their visitors into customers.

Do you want a whopping $50 off Shoptimizer for WooCommerce?