When working with WooCommerce we often need some demo data. Katie Keith of Barn2 mentions two sources for Woo demo data sets.

Woo will use the new block theme Pattern Assembler UI to provide customization options during onboarding.

Sometimes you might want to disable the WooCommerce Checkout and Cart. This was mentioned recently in the group when someone wanted to possibly use Woo just to display a product catalog. Also you might want to disable the cart if you only have one product. Here is a tutorial for those types of use cases.

Acquisition – Barn2, developer of a number of WooCommerce plugins, sold of them 7 to Kestrel so that they could focus on the best performing ones.

Here is an interview with Rodolfo Melogli, who offered WooCommerce development services. Last year he saw a significant drop in income and has pivoted his business. He now also offers small, single purpose Woo plugins for a low cost LTD, as well a subscription to an online Slack forum and master classes. In the interview Rodolfo shares his insights about Woo and the shifting ecommerce market, as well as his business pivot.

Related to large WooCommerce Stores – This article talks about the benefits and potential gotcha of using custom tables for Woo orders, now called High Performance Order Storage. A big gotcha is to ensure that all of your plugins are compatible with the use of the new custom table option.

WooCommerce 8.3 now sets blocks as the default for cart, checkout, and order confirmation pages on new installs. They warn that plugins that extend the checkout process should ensure that they will work correctly with the new defaults.

WooCommerce team is going all in on the “blockification” of WooCommerce. To help in communicating these changes they have started to share monthly updates, or “extensibility snaps.” I noticed from the comments in the October update that it appears that 3rd party developers may need to re-integrate their plugins to work with the new blocks.

This article talks about the new direction for WooCommerce, emphasizing WooExpress as a competitor to Shopify.