Sports Card Strategy Show

In this conversation with a friend, I had the opportunity to give an overview of my entire career, starting as an unpaid intern with the Detroit Pistons of the NBA, to building WordPress websites and creating content as a side hustle, to becoming Director of Marketing and Public Relations at Columbia State Community College, to working "in the agency world," in Nashville for several years, before starting Data Driven Design.  This is a raw conversation in which I unveil more behind my mission to provide the best WordPress websites for small businesses and why I'm so passionate about it.  I also talk a bit about adjustments made during the pandemic in 2020 and my vision for Data Driven Design moving forward as a successful, innovative, remote digital agency.

Many businesses want to collect simple payments on their website, whether for non-profit donations or for-profit digital services/content or physical goods.  WP Simple Pay is a great solution for one-time payments accepted via Stripe as the payment gateway. The free version, however, doesn't include the ability to create recurring subscription forms.

When I built a WooCommerce Store in 2015, it was a bit complicated to connect my client's account Quickbooks account to the WooCommerce Store and ensure seamless integration.  Now, it appears there's a better, easier solution, and it's FREE!  Quickbooks Sync for WooCommerce by MyWorks.Software

As an eCommerce merchant, life can get a bit hectic, and tax zones can complicate things. Not only are there complicated Country and State Tax laws (for US merchants), but depending on your product and location, you may have to take a bunch of different things into account.  Your eCommerce platform better be reliable and able to handle your needs. WooCommerce for WordPress has some very simple ways of handling taxes and tax returns.  This video shows you to how to:  1. Automate your store tax set up by using a plug-in by Jetpack - https://woocommerce.com/products/tax/ 2. Automate your tax return with a state-by-state breakdown using a plug-in by TaxJar - https://woocommerce.com/products/taxjar/ for WooCommerce.

I think the number one most missed thing by WordPress developers is properly thinking through and setting up Shipping Zones and Classes. It can be a bit of a headache, unless your store is simply including the price of shipping in each item, and touting "free shipping!"  Maybe this is why it's often "forgotten."  However, a solid alternative, especially for smaller, start up eCommerce stores, is to set up simple, Flat Rate shipping in WooCommerce.  This video shows you how.

On this episode of The WordPress Show, I show you how to customize your member registration form and profile fields for your members.  This is a continuation of "How to Build a Simple Membership Website" - where we went over how you can easily turn your WordPress site into a membership site for free.  The add-on covered in this video allows you to go further and add whatever profile fields you want, as well as create a member directory.

SHOW LESSIt's definitely not as daunting of a task as you might think to turn your simple WordPress site into a basic membership site. Let's say you have different layers of content, and you want to make your site accessible to everyone, but add a "premium content" layer. You can easily do so with a FREE WordPress plug-in called WP Simple Membership.  This you through the steps to get up and running, as well as gives you an overview of different functionality that the plug-in has.  It automatically creates log-in, registration and password reset pages for you, allows you to create different membership levels, allow for free levels or integrate with payment gateways like Stripe and Paypal for premium levels.  This is great for content rich sites or virtual event sites like the example in the video.  You can protect content at the category, post and page levels, both dynamically or individually.  This also shows the different add-ons available to extend the functionality of the plug-in.  For those not wanting or needing a more robust solution like MemberPress, Simple Membership is my recommended alternative.

Small Business Owners are curious about Alexa Skills, but the main question I always get asked is - "how can an Alexa Skill or Flash Briefing actually help me generate leads for my business?"  This conversion with Dr. Teri Fisher, host of the "Alexa in Canada" Flash Briefing, walks viewers and listeners through how he grew his audience by building an interactive gamified Alexa Flash Briefing to generate leads for his business.  The Proof Is In The Data, his analytics were "off the charts" after he implemented this.  Recorded at Project Voice 2020, there is no video, just audio, so enjoy in its podcast form!

WooCommerce has become the main way to add eCommerce functionality to any WordPress website, but as WooCommerce has evolved, the set-up and installation process has become a bit more cumbersome. Not in a bad way, but in an "I'd really like to skip this and come back later and fill in all this information way"...  This leads to the likelihood that WooCommerce won't totally install all the way, and your site might be left without critical pages that WooCommerce automatically creates when you don't skip any parts of the installation process.  These pages are "Cart," "Checkout" and "My Account."  This video shows you how to restore these pages if the set-up process doesn't finish, or if your pages get accidentally deleted.

I've been building eCommerce sites using WordPress WooCommerce since 2011, and during that entire time, I've had several business owners looking for a way to customize their store to make it B2B (business to business).  What does this mean? Well it essentially means that clients (other businesses couldn't just rock up to the site and see all the products and pricing). First, they'd have to apply to become a member of the site. Then, once their application is approved, they would be able to see various products and pricing depending upon user role (what type of customer they are).  WooCommerce B2B is a great plug-in for this. Features include:  - Extend the default registration form to accept B2B registrations. - Add a user roles dropdown and extra fields to the default registration form. - Manually review and approve new B2B user registrations. - Enable default registration fields - Hide products and categories based on user roles. - Hide prices and add to cart button - Hide for guest users, specific user roles, or specific products & categories - Option replace “add to cart” button with a “quote” button - Add a mini-quote dropdown and customize quote form fields. - Configure different prices for different user roles - Add customer-specific pricing - Tax-exempt specific customers and user roles - Restrict shipping methods by user roles - Restrict payment methods by user roles