Category: E-Commerce

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Automattic Acquires MailPoet

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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 of 11 that will be joining Automattic.

MailPoet launched in 2011 under the name WYSIJA (“What you send is just awesome”), a branding misstep that founder and CEO Kim Gjerstad readily acknowledged as “a terrible idea.” The name was difficult to spell and remember. It was changed early on but the company was stuck with the “WYSIJA” slug in the WordPress plugins directory, a common issue for many plugins that have rebranded.

When MailPoet version 3 was released in 2017, the company was finally able to get the “mailpoet” slug in the plugin’s URL on WordPress.org. Version 2, which still has more than 100,000 users, has support for multisite and uses the old email designer, among other differences. MailPoet 2 has received security updates for the past three years and plans to continue these following the acquisition.

Gjerstad reported that nearly a quarter of MailPoet users are running WooCommerce stores. The plugin’s developers have been expanding its WooCommerce functionality over the past three years with features that help store owners catch customers’ emails at checkout, measure revenue per email, send automated emails using purchase data based on products purchased or product categories, customize store emails, and recover abandoned carts.

Earlier this year MailPoet introduced its own SMTP solution to ensure emails sent from the plugin land in recipients’ inboxes, instead of flagged as spam. This silent background feature includes store emails as well, bringing higher deliverability without users having to depend on separate SMTP plugins.

In WooCommerce’s acquisition announcement, CEO Paul Maiorana said adding MailPoet “helps accelerate our roadmap toward a fully-integrated commerce experience.” Last year Maiorana and Gjerstad met at WordCamp U.S. and exchanged ideas about a partnership.

“As our conversation progressed in the following months, we came to realize that we shared a common vision for stores; with store owners being able to access email right in their dashboard,” Gjerstad said.

Maiorana said Automattic’s initial focus of the acquisition is to work together on improving the experience for WooCommerce users, but the company plans to “evolve our collaboration in a way that can benefit the entire WordPress community.” MailPoet’s FAQ’s on the announcement reiterate that all WordPress users will continue to be able to use the plugin, even if they do not have a WooCommerce store. There are no immediate changes planned for the plugin’s features.

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WooCommerce Patches Vulnerability that Allowed Spam Bots to Create Accounts at Checkout

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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.

Source: WooCommerce Developer Advisory

WooCommerce developer Rodrigo Primo described how the bot is attacking stores:

The gist of it is that the bot is able to create a user when placing an order exploiting the bug fixed by 4.6.2. After creating the user, the bot tries to find vulnerabilities in other plugins installed on the site that require an unprivileged authenticated account.

WooCommerce recommends users update to 4.6.2 to stop bots from creating users at checkout and then remove any accounts the bot previously created. This will not stop the bots from creating fake orders so store owners are advised to install additional spam protection from the WooCommerce Marketplace. Some users in the support forum are trying free plugins like Advanced noCaptcha & Invisible Captcha and Fraud Prevention Plugin for WooCommerce.

The first logged instance happened nine days before WooCommerce was able to issue a fix. In the meantime, some users reported having their site’s URL changed and other hacking attempts. Dave Green, WordPress engineer at Make Do, used log files to determine that the script relies on exploiting other vulnerabilities in order to gain access to the database.

“That script is creating the order, and is also likely to be exploiting whatever vulnerability is available to bypass customer account settings and create a new user; it may or may not be relying upon other exploits for this,” Green said.

“Assuming it has successfully gained access to the system, it then tries to update the DB. It either fails and leaves you with nuisance orders, or succeeds and points your site to the scam URL.”

The WooCommerce team has also fixed this same bug in WooCommerce Blocks 3.7.1, preventing checkout from creating accounts when the related setting is disabled.

WooCommerce did not publish the names of any of extensions that have vulnerabilities being exploited by this script. However, some one user reported an attack that coincided with the fake orders:

I had a failed order yesterday with similar info to the OP as well.

At the exact same time that failed order came in, my WAF blocked two attempted attacks from the same user/IP (bbbb bbbb) for “TI WooCommerce Wishlist < 1.21.12 – Authenticated WP Options Change”

The script may have been probing for a vulnerability in the TI WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, which was patched approximately two weeks ago. The plugin is active on more than 70,000 WordPress sites.

The WooCommerce team is still researching the origin and impact of this vulnerability and will publish more information as it becomes available.

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WooCommerce 4.6 Makes New Home Screen the Default for New and Existing Stores

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WooCommerce 4.6 was released today. The minor release dropped during WooSesh, a global, virtual conference dedicated to WooCommerce and e-commerce topics. It features the new home screen as the default for all stores. Previously, the screen was only the default on new stores. Existing store owners had to turn the feature on in the settings.

The updated home screen, originally introduced in version 4.3, helps store admins see activity across the site at a glance and includes an inbox, quick access to store management links, and an overview of stats on sales, orders, and visitors. This redesigned virtual command center arrives not a moment too soon, as anything that makes order management more efficient is a welcome improvement, due to the sheer volume of sales increases that store owners have seen over the past eight months.

In stark contrast to industries like hospitality and entertainment that have proven to be more vulnerable during the pandemic, e-commerce has seen explosive growth. During the State of the Woo address at WooSesh 2020, the WooCommerce team shared that e-commerce is currently estimated to be a $4 trillion market that will grow to $4.5 trillion by 2021. WooCommerce accounts for a sizable chunk of that market with an estimated total payment volume for 2020 projected to reach $20.6 billion, a 74% increase compared to 2019.

The WooCommerce community is on the forefront of that growth and is deeply invested in the products that are driving stores’ success. The WooCommerce team shared that 75% of people who build extensions also build and maintain stores for merchants, and 70% of those who build stores for merchants also build and maintain extensions or plugins. In 2021, they plan to invest heavily in unlocking more features in more countries and will make WooCommerce Payments the native payment method for the global platform.

A new report from eMarketer shows that US e-commerce growth has jumped 32.4%, accelerating the online shopping shift by nearly two years. Experts also predict the top 10 e-commerce players will swallow up more of US retail spending to account for 63.2% of all online sales this year, up from 57.9% in 2019.

The increase in e-commerce spending may not be entirely tied to the pandemic, as some experts believe this historic time will mark permanent changes in consumer spending habits. This is where independent stores, powered by WooCommerce and other technologies, have the opportunity to establish a strong reputation for themselves by providing quality products and reliable service, as well as by being more nimble in the face of pandemic-driven increases in volume.

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How to Design Mobile Product Pages for Greater Sales

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This post is originally published on Designmodo: How to Design Mobile Product Pages for Greater Sales

How to Design Mobile Product Pages for Greater Sales

Mobile e-commerce has experienced a meteoric rise these last few years. And according to recent data, experts predict that the vast majority of online sales will be made through smartphones by 2021. Specifically, it’s believed that 72.9% of e-commerce revenue …

For more information please contact Designmodo

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Google Shopping Is Now Open to Free Product Listings

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Google announced today that it is bringing free listings to the Shopping tab in the United States before the end of April and will expand globally by the end of the year. Previously, merchants were required to pay for ad placement and product listings, which led to major online retailers dominating the Shopping tab.

“Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google,” Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce, said. “With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.”

This change comes at a critical time when the retail industry has taken a significant hit due to shelter-in-place orders aimed at mitigating the spread of the coronavirus. Free listings make showing up in the Google Shopping tab more accessible for independent stores.

“For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs,” Ready said. “For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab.”  Existing Merchant Center users will retain their ads for specific products as promoted listings but will also now be able to list their full inventories for free.

Google also announced a new partnership with PayPal that will streamline the onboarding process for merchants who want to link their accounts. The announcement identified WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce as existing partners that offer platforms to help businesses sell online. In light of the current crisis, WooCommerce has ramped up its efforts to make e-commerce more approachable. The team recently hosted a free webinar on how to start selling online and produced a guide to adding a store to an existing WordPress website.

Although Google cites the coronavirus pandemic as a factor in advancing the company’s plans to make it free for merchants to sell on Google, the move is a strategic step towards wooing back the overwhelming amount of traffic it sends to Amazon. If Google’s Shopping tab can become a better source for price comparisons with a diversity of stores, consumers may return to searching Google first when intending to make a purchase.