Today I relaunched the WooCommerce Office Hours show. The show is an hour long hangout, where I answer questions about running an ecommerce store with WooCommerce. The show airs every Tuesday at 2pm EST.
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WooCommerce Dropshiping
In this show, I started off by answering a question about setting up a dropshipping store with WooCommerce. The person asking the question is setting up a store with products that will be shipped from multiple vendors in different countries. He wants the shipping to be calculated from the vendor to the purchaser even if there are multiple products in the cart with different origins.
I split the problem into two parts: Shipping Quotes and Dropshipper notification.
Shipping Quotes
I suggested to use Shipping Classes for each product based on the country of origin. Then he can use the WooThemes T/woo/table-rate-shippingable Rate shipping plugin to set up shipping costs for each shipping class to different shipping destinations. For example, a product in the “China” shipping class can have a cost associated with shipping from China to other Asian countries, China to Europe, China to North America, and so on. He will have to do some work to calculate the costs associated with each product, but he’ll get accurate shipping rates. As an alternative, he can set up a 3rd party warehouse like Ordoro.
Dropshipper notification
The notification can be done in two ways. The first is to use a plugin like WC Order/Customer CSV Exporter to export orders with one item per line. Then the CSV can be split up per vendor and sent to each vendor. This can get tedious quickly as the number of orders rises.
Another option would be to use a drop ship plugin. I purchased the WooCommerce Dropshippers plugin from ArticNet and did an install and configure live on the air. The plugin allows the store admin to set up users as a Dropshipper user role and assign products to the dropshipper. When an order is placed, the dropshipper receives an email with the billing contact (the store) and shipping information (purchaser). The plugin seemed to work fine, although I did notice a deprecated function error in the WP_DEBUG log indicating the plugin author needed to update some of the code which the author fixed super fast!
Displaying Currency Code
The next question was how to add a three letter currency code to the price display to indicate the prices were in Canadian Dollars. An answer was provided and suggested to use this code. I demonstrated how to add the code to hook into the ‘woocommerce_currency_symbol’ action and add a string of “CAD” to the front of the currency symbol.
Add Per-Country Fee to WooCommerce Shipping
The next question was how to add a handling fee to the USPS shipping methods on a per-country basis. The store wanted to have one fee for USA addresses and a different fee for the rest of the world.
I showed how to use the WooCommerce Advanced Fees plugin to add these fees and how they would be shown to the customer in the cart.
WooCommerce Subscriptions and WooCommerce Memberships
Finally, I discussed a question that popped up in the Post Status Club Slack channel. Anu asked how WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, and WooCommerce Memberships work together in building a membership site.
I described how WooCommerce defines products that can be purchased and can be associated with WooCommerce Membership plans. The membership plans grant the product purchaser access to content on the site. WooCommerce Subscriptions make the products able to include recurring charges.
That’s all for this week! Thanks to Doug and Sebastian for joining on the Hangout.