WooCommerce offers a full-featured e-commerce platform, right within WordPress. It turns a basic WordPress website into an e-commerce application capable of selling physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, and basically anything you can think of. It even has a REST API if you want to get super technical and fancy.

Long story short, WooCommerce is incredibly powerful. Potentially lost in its sea of features is the ability to redirect customers when they take an action. A small feature, sure. But also an underutilized tool that can help boost revenue by promoting cross-sales and upsells.

Take, for example, when a customer completes a purchase on your WooCommerce website. They’ve browsed your website, selected a product of interest, and paid you money for it. You’ve won that hard-earned sale. The customer trusted you enough to send you money. So what better time than after purchase to upsell the customer on another, related product?

Using WooCommerce Subscriptions?

Bulk Update WooCommerce Subscriptions lets you modify the pricing and terms of your existing WooCommerce Subscriptions in bulk. Change thousands of subscriptions in just minutes!

The best example of this that comes to mind is Vistaprint. If you’ve never shopped at Vistaprint, they sell all kinds of awesome products, from business cards and stationary, custom mugs, pens, shirts, and tons more. Each time you buy something on Vistaprint, you land on a thank-you page that gives a limited-time offer to do things like increase the quantity of what you purchase, or purchase other related items at a discount.

This tactic is incredibly effective. Personally, I fall for it almost every time. But I’m a sucker for a good deal – who could resits doubling your order for just 50%?!

WooCommerce Product Redirects

Redirecting in WooCommerce

So how can you do something like this in WooCommerce? Well, with redirects of course! The Custom Redirects for WooCommerce plugin allows you to set up custom redirects for any product, product tag, and/or product category. The redirect types include add-to-cart and after-purchase. The former occurs when a customer adds a product to their cart, while the latter occurs after a customer completes payment.

Drip & Protect Content with WooCommerce

Using WooCommerce Memberships to power your memberships website? See how easily you can protected and drip your memberships content…VISUALLY.

Since you have granular control over the redirect destinations, you can set up custom landing pages with special offers and promotions, then redirect your customers to those pages after they buy certain products.

Using the Vistaprint example, you could create a custom thank-you page that includes awesome deals on things like branded mugs, pens, and tee shirts. Then, when a customer buys business cards from your website, you can send them to this landing page!

WooCommerce Product Redirects List

Migrations can be a pain, but there are plenty of tools out there that make the task much easier. One thing we’ve always found aggravating is moving our forms across different websites. We use Gravity Forms to create forms for our own websites, clients, etc. Since Gravity Forms is a visual builder for forms, your form configurations are stored in a database. Instead of hard coding forms, the data is used to dynamically render forms.

While this makes for easily creating dynamic forms, it also adds complexity when you need to move the forms to another site. For example, we almost always start out by building forms in a local environment, which is basically just a website that runs on your own computer rather than a remote web server. This makes the development process quicker.

After developing locally, we move things to a staging site for further review and testing. This usually involves moving files from local to staging, such as changes to custom themes and plugins. Since we use continuous deployment for this, our code changes are deployed automatically when we push them to a git repository. Yay, automation!

Send File Uploads Straight to Amazon S3

SyncS3 for Gravity Forms lets you send your file uploads to any Amazon S3 bucket. Store your images, videos, and other files on Amazon’s high quality infrastructure.

So what happens if we update a form? We often work on building complex forms with conditional logic and feed data (e.g. PayPal, Mailchimp, etc.). Since this is all stored in the database, deploying form changes isn’t as easy as pushing code changes. Well, not by default anyway. By default, your only options for deploying form changes are: 1.) Migrating your database, or 2.) Exporting and importing your forms. Migrating a database is not ideal; it takes a while, and can overwrite other data you don’t want to modify, such as settings. Exporting and importing requires a lot of clicks, and is rather clunky to do each time you updates forms.

A New Solution for Syncing Gravity Forms

We recently learned of a tool that gives you a third option. This new option makes deploying form changes as simple as deploying code changes. If you use a continuous deployment pipeline, you can automatically push and sync changes to your forms without any extra clicks.

FormSync synchronizes Gravity Forms without any additional steps

FormSync is a premium plugin that turns your Gravity Forms configurations into JSON files, and stores them wherever you want them (in your theme by default). Then, when those JSON files are pushed to another website such as staging or production, you can sync the changes manually or automatically. How awesome is that?!

Recently, we needed to sync six different forms between local, staging, and production. Without FormSync, this would have been a rather tedious task to upload each import file on the different sites. FormSync allowed us to push the forms as JSON and trigger automatic syncs. We literally just pushed the changes to the custom theme to its Github repository, and our continuous deployment pipeline triggered the sync. Updating these forms required no additional effort to sync them up.

How does FormSync Work?

Getting started with FormSync is dead simple. You just run an initial scan on all your forms using the bulk scan option.

FormSync Bulk Scan Forms

From that point on, each time you save changes of your forms, FormSync does its thing to update the JSON configuration files with the new changes. Commit and push the changes, and trigger your deployments!

For developers and power users who like to manage things in git, FormSync has emerged as one of our favorite workflow tools for WordPress. What used to be an annoying task is now no task at all, thanks to FormSync and our continuous deployment. After using it for the first time, it feels like one of those things that you don’t know how you worked without. We recommend giving it a spin.

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