Woocomerce is the leading E-commerce platform in the world. Developed by Automattic, the global remote company behind WordPress. The previous major release was their version 3, which came out in 2017. In between there has been a lot of sub versions, up to the latest 3.93, until today. So let’s take a look at what’s new in Woocommerce 4.

What’s New in Woocommerce 4 – Features

We will be looking at different aspects of the new release

WooCommerce Admin

Woocommerce Admin was released to the public in February 2019 as a 0.8.0 version, which we could see as a public Beta version. That way, end users could start giving their opinion and points of view on the application until the release. We tried the Woocommerce admin on a few of our clients websites, and at the beginning, it got us more headaches than actual results.

However, this is normal, it’s a first version, it is supposed to not function right away. With the versions improving throughout the past year, we started to find stability and results on the application. Therefore, over the past few months, we have been installing Woocommerce Admin on all our Woocommerce Installs. It provides you with advanced analytics and helps you look at the progression of your store sales and revenue generation.

What it also does is to provide you with a workflow when it comes to order management, so you know where you stand with your order statuses, and notifications.

Woocommerce Action Scheduler

If you are not a developer, I’m pretty sure you never have heard of it before. What it is, it’s the system that triggers actions when someone purchases something on your store. For example, with the new Subscriptions Plugins, it will assist you with membership sales. And send accurate messages when you are in a Monthly Recurring Revenue business plan.

Other Features

The other features and fixes are

• Enhancement to the Order edit screen
• Latest fixes of WooCommerce Blocks package
• Updates related to Brexit and VAT
• Improvements to email handling
• Optimizations for saving variations and Cash on delivery payment gateway

That way, it provides a more accurate shopping experience to your clients.

What’s new about Woocommerce 4 – What about Upgrading?

You are ready to upgrade to Woocommerce 4.0, now I am sure you use additional plugins on your site. Those plugins perform actions and display options that make your solution tailored to your business model. So the answer is YES, it’s a great to upgrade, but as Woocommerce 4.0 is not fully backwards compatible with previous Woocommerce versions. You need to make sure that you test it out on a sandbox site, and see that all your other plugins are cooperating, or even better, wait for the next release of your other plugins. That way you will be ensuring a 100% compatibility with Woocommerce 4.0.

What if my plugins haven’t been updated for a while?

You do not want to overlook that issue. If a developer does not update a plugin for a while, there is a chance they stopped working on it. Then you will have two options. The first one will be to stay with a deprecated version of Woocommerce, and make sure no one updates it when you’re not looking. The second one is to find a similar plugin performing the same tasks as your original one that is in a state of content improvement.

Can we help with Woocommerce 4.0?

Of course, we have been working with Woocommerce installations for a long time now, and can handle your upgrade and migration to the new version. If you are using other E-Commerce platforms and are looking to switch to Woocommerce, we can assist with that as well. We have used Woocommerce in all types of Industries, from Retail Stores, Services, Subscriptions, Take out Orders for restaurants. Let’s take a look at your website and see how we can improve it.

Illustration Credit Woocommerce.com