WooCommerce has shipped version 5.5.2 as a follow-up to the forced security update that patched a SQL Injection vulnerability last week. The vulnerability impacted versions 3.3 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce plugin, as well as versions 2.5 to 5.5 of the WooCommerce Blocks feature plugin. The team created a patch for more than 90 releases, which was sent as…
WooCommerce has named Paystack its preferred payments partner for WooCommerce in Africa. More than 20,000 merchants are using the free Paystack WooCommerce Payment Gateway plugin but searching for and downloading the plugin separately is no longer required. Store owners can now easily select Paystack as a payment method when inside the WooCommerce dashboard. Paystack has a…
Kevin Ohashi has published his 2021 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks report. The annual report is broken down into six different hosting tiers, from the most economical <$25/month, to the $500+ enterprise level. This is the second year the stats include WooCommerce-specific hosts as a separate category. After eight years of measuring peak performance and consistency…
WooCommerce Live Africa is hosting its first online meetup on Thursday, March 18, 2021, from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM GMT+1. The new regional group is part of the WooCommerce network of more than 100 meetups with nearly 30,000 members across 40 countries. Events will be focused on topics pertinent to store owners and entrepreneurs with a…
Fast, a startup backed by Stripe, has just added WooCommerce support to its new Fast Checkout experience. The company was co-founded in March 2019, by Domm Holland and Allison Barr Allen, with investment from Stripe, Index Ventures, Susa Ventures, and Global Founders Capital. It has received $22.5M in funding to reduce the friction that remains…
Automattic has acquired MailPoet, a popular email marketing solution for WordPress, to give WooCommerce store owners more integrated email management capabilities in the admin. The plugin is used by more than 300,000 websites for everything from building a mailing list to managing transaction and abandoned cart emails. The nine-year old company is now a team…
WooCommerce 4.6.2 was released yesterday with a fix for a vulnerability that allowed account creation at checkout, even when the “Allow customers to create an account during checkout” setting is disabled. The WooCommerce team discovered it after several dozen users reported their sites were receiving spam orders, or “failed orders” where the payment details were fake.…
Instagram’s checkout feature, which allows users to purchase products without leaving the app, has become an even more important part of Facebook’s long-term investment in e-commerce now that the pandemic has so heavily skewed consumer behavior towards online shopping. When Instagram introduced checkout in 2019, it reported that 130 million users were tapping to reveal…
On September 14, GoDaddy announced it had acquired SkyVerge, a major WooCommerce-focused development company, for an undisclosed amount. At the moment, GoDaddy is playing it close to the vest in terms of its future plans. It has not publicly announced anything beyond a continued commitment to current customers. The initial announcement makes note that SkyVerge’s…
Jetpack is firing up a new suite of email marketing tools in partnership with Endurance International Group’s Constant Contact brand. Last week version 8.9 of the plugin introduced a new newsletter signup form inside its Form block, based on an integration with the Creative Mail plugin that Constant Contact recently launched as a solution tailored…
Yesterday, Automattic dropped version 4.4 of its popular WooCommerce plugin. The new release is a minor update with the biggest changes around the plugin’s blocks and coupon management in the admin. Two dozen people made 450 contributions to the release. The WooCommerce team brought several updates to the plugin’s blocks. The biggest user-facing change is…
WordProof, the company behind the WordProof Timestamp plugin for WordPress, has received a €1 million grant from the European Commission as the reward for winning a competition called “Blockchains for Social Good.” The Dutch startup beat 175 other participants from around Europe. The competition was designed to reward developers’ efforts in exploring decentralized applications of blockchains…
As the pandemic and lockdown measures have caused major shifts in consumer behavior, accelerating the trend towards e-commerce, many WooCommerce-powered stores have seen a significant boost in sales. Major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target have strained to meet the increase in consumer demand, creating an unprecedented opportunity for independent stores. According to the latest…
The first beta for WooCommerce 4.3 was released yesterday. The team behind the popular eCommerce plugin added a new homepage screen, updated the product grid blocks, and is pushing users to update their version of PHP. Users who want to test the latest beta version can do so by grabbing the ZIP file from WordPress.org…
As part of an ongoing initiative to convert the plugin’s existing shortcodes to blocks, WooCommerce core developers are testing a new block-based cart and checkout experience. This major architectural change has also been redesigned to improve conversion rates for stores. An initial preview release of the blocks can be tested using the WooCommerce Blocks feature…