WooCommerce Memberships is not just another plugin for restricting your site’s content: it’s an easy-to-use, site-wide membership solution that brings your content, shop, and memberships together.

Memberships allows you to create an entire membership system that’s seamlessly tied to your store.

You can restrict your content to members, but you can also “drip” that content over time to schedule when members have access. Sell access to memberships, include memberships with product purchases, manually assign memberships, and completely integrate member perks within your store.

Sell or Assign Memberships

Memberships are not a specific type of WooCommerce product; instead, membership plans are created independently from products. This lets you determine how access is granted for maximum flexibility. You can assign 0 or more products (of almost any type) to a membership plan to support several types of memberships:

• sell a membership as stand-alone product — create a product for the membership, then tie the plan to that product to sell it
• grant access to a membership as part of a product purchase — i.e., buy a subscription for a meal box, get access to the recipes section for free
• grant access to the same membership from several products (i.e., a yearly purchase or a monthly subscription)
• assign memberships manually for an invite-only members area

  

Strategically Grant Content Access

You put a lot of work into your members-only content, so Memberships lets you schedule when your members should have access to it. You can drip content, which means that you can schedule when members should have access to your content. For example, you can require that customers be a member for a week before they can access certain posts or pages.

This gives you more control over how members begin using your site and lets you introduce members to your content at your pace.

When you use this with Subscriptions, you can even determine which content is included in a free trial period with content dripping rules.

Turn Your Store into a Purchasing Club

Memberships lets you create members-only products so that your site can become a purchasing club, or let you offer certain products exclusively to members.

You can restrict product viewing to members, which means these products will be hidden from non-members in your shop. You can also restrict purchasing, which means that products are public, but only members can buy them.

You can also drip product access so that members don’t get access to products immediately.

Offer Better Shipping Options to Members

Members should be your most loyal customers, so giving them perks that encourage them to purchase repeatedly from you keeps them coming back for more. Memberships extends your free shipping settings so you can offer free shipping directly to your members, while requiring non-members to meet other criteria (like having a coupon or minimum order amount).

Reward Members with Special Discounts

Since you may want to give your members certain perks, you can provide member discounts for all products, some products, or certain product categories.

Automatically Show Members Their Perks

While membership management should be easy on you, it should be easy on your members, too. Members can find all of the information they need about their memberships in the Member Area. Members can access the area for any membership from the “My Account” page by clicking “View”.

You can enable any or all sections of the member area to show members a list of accessible content (post and pages), products, discounts, and / or public membership notes. If a member will have access to content in the future, the member can see the access date as well.

Import or Export Members

You have a lot of tools to manage members within WooCommerce, but you may want to connect to other services too, such as importing a member list into an email tool. Memberships lets you export members to a CSV file so that you can get member data out of WooCommerce and into other tools.

You can also import members via CSV to add new memberships, create new users, or bulk-update existing members by merging your file with existing data.

Simplify Communication with Members

When you run a membership site, you spend a lot of time on customer service and managing members. We’ve tried to make that as easy as possible with Memberships. We’ve added “Membership Notes” so that you can track information about memberships for a customer, add your own notes for your reference, and even easily communicate with a particular member by sharing a note with them via email.

You can also use expiration and renewal reminder emails to let members know of ending memberships and prompt them to renew or upgrade.

Memberships + Subscriptions

Memberships is fully functional as a stand-alone membership solution, but it works very well with the most advanced eCommerce recurring payments solution available: WooCommerce Subscriptions.

When both plugins are active, Memberships can leverage some features of Subscriptions to give you more flexibility over membership billing (more details in our documentation):

• Memberships can use recurring billing (i.e., monthly payments) for the membership rather than a set term (such as a year)
• Memberships can use Subscriptions as a payment plan, but control access length itself to support installment payments
• Free trials can be used for the membership via a subscription
• Content restriction and dripping can include or exclude free trial periods so you control what content is available in trials
• Members can pause their own memberships by suspending a subscription
• Members can upgrade or downgrade memberships by switching a subscription
• Upgrades and downgrades can leverage Subscription’s proration to ensure that membership costs are accurate

Even if you don’t want to use recurring billing, you can leverage the other features of Subscriptions by setting the subscription length to one billing cycle so you can take advantage of upgrades and downgrades or trial periods.

Selling Memberships to Companies or Groups

Need to sell memberships to teams, companies, or groups instead? Check out the Teams for WooCommerce Memberships extension (purchased separately). This plugin adds on to WooCommerce Memberships, letting to sell access to a group of users instead of an individual.

How to Get Started

Ready to create memberships for your customers? You can get going with these steps:

1. Buy this extension 
2. Download and install Memberships in your WooCommerce store
3. Create your Membership Plans and Members
4. Check out our extensive documentation for any advanced setup help
5. That’s it! Sit back and enjoy your fully integrated membership site!

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The table rate shipping module extends WooCommerce’s default shipping options giving you highly customizable shipping options.

Define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, weight, or item count. Wildcards may be used to match multiple regions too.

• Add multiple tables of rates per shipping zone
• Several types of table rate calculation: Per order, Calculated per item, Calculated per line, Calculated per class
• Add rules based on Weight, Number of items, Number of items by class and Price
• Add costs per row, per item cost, a percentage and per weight unit

Intuitive Interface

Adding data as complex as table rate shipping can be an arduous process. That’s why the user interface has been designed to make the process of adding, duplicating and removing rates as intuitive as possible.

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For a shopping experience as unique as your customers

From adding a personal engraving, to upgrading to premium fabric, customizing products can keep your customers coming back. With Product Add-Ons, you can offer special options to your customers in a snap.

Product Add-Ons allow your customers to personalize products while they’re shopping on your online store. No more follow-up email requests—customers get what they want, before they’re done checking out.

Add options via text boxes, dropdowns, text areas, checkboxes, custom price inputs, even sample images. Add-ons can be added globally or per-product from the edit product page.

Give your customers the options they want

Product Add-Ons is one of the most popular extensions available for WooCommerce. It gives you and your customers even more options, including (but definitely not limited to):

Image-based selections

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so why describe a customer’s personalization options when you can show them? With image-based selections, customers can see what they’re getting before they buy.

Flat fees

Charge customers a flat fee regardless of how many products they ordered. Perfect for a one-time set-up charge or a rush fee.

Percentage fees

Charge a fee for the add-on based on a percent of the total price—this is especially useful for service-based add-ons that can be tougher to boil down to a flat fee.

Text input

Let your customers enter custom text to create a custom t-shirt, add a monogram or personalize a card.

Dropdown

Customer can chose between a few pre-defined options with a drop-down field for your add-on.

Checkboxes

Make customization as easy and satisfying as checking a checkbox. Great for add-on services, like gift wrapping or express shipping.

Custom price

Let your customers name their price, perfect for tips, donations and gratuity!

Add-ons can be named, described, reordered and (optionally) given prices.

The extension also works with:

• WooCommerce Subscriptions – add additional options to subscription products.
• WooCommerce Bookings – offer upgrades like an oil treatment for a massage, priority seats for their tour or a rush fee for their rental.

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For info on testing for conflicts and other troubleshooting tips, see: Self-Service Guide.

Installation

Download the Health Check plugin from the WordPress.org repository, and upload and install the .zip file to your WordPress/WooCommerce site.

Or use the WordPress Dashboard:

1. Log in to your WordPress/WooCommerce site.
2. Go to: Plugins > Add New.
3. Search for Health Check & Troubleshooting.
4. Select Install Now, and then Activate.

Usage

Backup

Before troubleshooting, it’s best practice to make a backup of your site as a failsafe. More info at: Backing Up WordPress Content.

Overview

Health Check includes a good, general overview of your WordPress installation. In comparison, the WooCommerce System Status Log is more in-depth.

To access the Health Check overview, go to: Tools > Site Health:

Troubleshooting

Health Check’s true power is its troubleshooting mode, allowing you to switch the theme and test plugins without impacting visitors to your site.

To troubleshoot, go to Tools > Site Health > Troubleshooting and then select Enable Troubleshooting Mode.

Once in Troubleshooting Mode, you can control which theme and plugins are enabled in the troubleshooting session. Initially, all plugins are disabled.

To test WooCommerce, go to Plugins, and click Enable while Troubleshooting

When viewing your site, you’ll see your own specific session where the theme and plugins are set by Health Check. When visitors view your site, it appears normal.

At this point, perform any necessary tests. If necessary, you can enable further plugins while troubleshooting, from the Plugins page.

Note that Troubleshooting Mode does not put a payment gateway into sandbox mode, so if you place an order while in troubleshooting mode, live payment will be taken.

To disable Troubleshooting Mode at any time, selecting Disable Troubleshooting Mode on your site’s Dashboard or via the Admin bar.

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A conflict is an error or malfunction caused by two parts of code giving conflicting signals. For example, plugin A gives the signal to put the order in “Completed” status and plugin B prevents this from happening.

Themes and plugins provide additional functionality and features — it also means more code is running on your website and the risk of incompatibility is higher. We strive to ensure compatibility with our own extensions, but third-party products made for WooCommerce are not guaranteed to work with our software. In this documentation page, we will explain how to test for plugin and theme conflicts.

How to do a conflict test

Testing is the only way to determine what is causing a conflict.

Backups and staging

We highly recommend making a backup of your site. Deactivating and reactivating plugins typically doesn’t cause issues, but having a good backup will save you a lot of time and energy on the rare occasion it does.

Most hosting providers offer a backup plan. If not, there are two options:

• Consider Jetpack Backup
• Use a Staging site – This is a clone of your production site — one that is processing orders and has visitors — where you can safely test conflicts without your live site being affected and potentially losing revenue. Most hosting providers can help with this. Or, on most hosting platforms, you can also use the WP Staging plugin to create a clone in your Dashboard.

Deactivation and testing

To troubleshoot theme and plugin conflicts:

1. Switch to a default WordPress theme, such as Twenty Nineteen to see if the issue persists.
   • If no, your theme is causing the issue. You can: a) change your theme; b) contact the author of the theme and ask them to fix it.
   • If yes, go to the next step.
2. Temporarily deactivate all plugins except WooCommerce and the WooCommerce extensions you’re experiencing issues with.
3. Test if the conflict still exists. How to test it, depends on what type of conflict you were experiencing.
   • If the conflict occurred while browsing your site or the Dashboard, go to the same location. Examples of this would be:
     • A feature not working on the product edit screen
     • A button not showing on the cart page
   • If the conflict only happens after a certain process, recreate and follow those identical steps. Examples of this would be:
     • An order is marked “On Hold” instead of “Completed” after product A is added and paid for.
     • An error displays while adding two products to the cart.
   • If the conflict no longer exists, it means that the theme or plugins/extensions you deactivated were causing the conflict. If the conflict still exists, see ‘Drop-Ins and Must-Use’ and ‘Unsuccessful Conflict Tests’ below.
4. Determine which plugin is causing the conflict by:
   • reactivating them one by one
   • testing again after each reactivation. For process-related conflicts, this means recreating the same process over and over again.

Helpful tools

• Health Check is useful for debugging and requires an official default WordPress theme such as Twenty Nineteen or our own Storefront. With a few clicks, it deactivates all plugins and changes the theme while you’re logged in to that session and normal visitors to your site are unaffected. More details at: Troubleshooting with Health Check.
• Meks Quick Plugin Disabler remembers what plugins you had active when you’re done testing.

Drop-ins and must-use

On some sites is a “Must-Use” and/or “Drop-ins” section in the plugins list. These cannot be deactivated by you directly, but they can be the cause of the conflict.

• Some of these plugins are installed by another plugin. The function as a “helper plugin”. While doing a conflict test, deactivating those other “parent” plugins will also deactivate these ones.
• Also, many hosting companies use drop-in and/or must-use plugins that they pre-install on your site because it helps with their server setup.

If the conflict persists in the latter case while doing the above tests, it might be caused by a drop-in installed by your host. For example, we’ve seen conflicts caused by drop-in caching plugins. In this case, you need to contact your hosting company for help with deactivation.

Unsuccessful conflict tests

Should nothing change/resolve with issues and/or errors you’re experiencing after testing for conflicts, it likely means there is another cause. Contact a WooCommerce.com Happiness Engineer via our Support Ticket. Please include a detailed description of:

• Steps which can be taken to replicate the issue
• Conflict tests you performed to exclude conflicts

The post How to Test for Plugin and Theme Conflicts first appeared on CODIBU.

The Understanding the WooCommerce System Status Report documentation page goes through the full report and related pages of the System Status.

Why check the system status?

It is important to know how to check your WooCommerce system status for a number of reasons, the following of which are outlined in the video tutorial below.

• How to check if you have the latest versions of the core WooCommerce plugin, the WooCommerce database, and your extensions.
• How to increase your PHP memory, if you have problems saving data (such as many variations).
• Payment Gateway transactions not logging aka logging is not writable.
• How to fix broken WooCommerce pages.
• How to rule out theme conflicts due to outdated theme template files.

The post Troubleshooting 101: Review WooCommerce System Status Report first appeared on CODIBU.

So with your precious data and content stored in different places, how should you safeguard it and keep it backed up?

Automatic backups

The most efficient and reliable approach is to use an automated site backup service for which we recommend Jetpack. Besides not having to rely on memory and manual procedures, you instantly benefit from:

• Unlimited storage space.
• Automated, regular backups of your entire site including database, content, media, plugins, themes, and settings.
• Instant restore service so that if something goes wrong you revert to an older version with one click.
• Direct access to 24/7 expert support.

Manual backups

If you wanted to do things the hard way, there are two parts to backing up your site content manually.

1. Go to Tools > Export – to export all of your site content. This contains all of your posts, pages, comments, etc. in a XML file.
2. To back up your theme files and plugin files, log into your site via FTP to find your files in the wp-content  folder. We strongly recommend making a backup of your theme files if you made any customizations.

Learn more

• WordPress backups at the WordPress Codex.
• Jetpack’s backup and security services.

We provide expert priority support for Jetpack customers but not third-party plugins.

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Prefer a written version of how to troubleshoot your site? No problem! Check out our Self Service Guide to Troubleshooting an Issue here.

The post Troubleshooting 101: Checking for Code Conflicts first appeared on CODIBU.

Pinpoint the Error

Here is an example of an fatal error similar to what you may see on your site:
 Fatal error: Call to a member function get_cart() on a non-object in .../html/wp-content/plugins/example-plugin-for-woocommerce/woo-integration/example-cart.php on line 2117  You will notice the message references /wp-content/plugins/example-plugin-for-woocommerce/ as the cause of the error. This means we need to either try updating that plugin or disable it to get around the error.

Log in to your site via FTP

Since you cannot log into your site via the WordPress Admin, accessing the folders containing these files via FTP is our only option.

If you are not familiar with how to connect to your website using FTP, it is best if you contact your hosting provider for further instructions.

Rename the conflicting plugin folder

Once you’ve logged into your site, navigate to the conflicting plugin folder.

By renaming the plugin folder you’ve effectively ‘disabled’ it, allowing you to once again access your WordPress Admin, which would then display the following error:

The plugin ‘does not exist’ because we renamed the folder.

Resolve the root of the issue

Many times we find customers contact us in support due to a conflict with an outdated third party extension or theme. If the plugin or theme was not developed and purchased directly from WooCommerce.com, we are not able to help troubleshoot this issue further. At this point, we would have to ask that you please contact the third party theme or plugin developer directly for assistance.

Updating is the most important step towards getting a quick resolution

Woo product causing error

If the theme or plugin causing the error is determined to be a Woo product, ensure that you have the latest version of the theme/plugin before contacting us.

To confirm you are running the latest version:

1. Log into WooCommerce.com and go to the My Downloads page.
2. Locate the product to confirm the version number matches the version number of the plugin on your site.

If updating the product does not help, you can open a new ticket and our Happiness Engineers would be happy to assist you.

Third-party product conflicts

When purchasing themes or extensions from third party developers, it can be helpful to ensure that the developer is reliable and responsive before you purchase or install the extension on your site.

If they do not stay up to date with WooCommerce API updates that are announced on woocommerce.wordpress.com, you run the risk of their files being outdated and possible conflict with new versions of the API.

The post Troubleshooting 101: Plugin Causing Fatal Error first appeared on CODIBU.