Category Archives: e-commerce

WooCommerce Vulnerability – Act NOW

e-commerce, Security, WordPress,

This week WooCommerce published a critical update for their WordPress eCommerce plugin with the advice that it is installed immediately.

What is it?

A serious vulnerability had been reported that could allow a ‘bad actor’ to exploit a cross-site scripting bug where a link is manipulated on a page. Anyone clicking on the link (the store / site admin as well as a customer) could be affected. The impact of this could be immense for your store and the wider website. At the time of publishing the update, WooCommerce believe that it had not been exploited (yet), but given the seriousness of the bug they have made this rare emergency announcement.

What to do?

Login to your WordPress Dashboard and got to the Plugins folder. Scroll down to find WooCommerce and check the version number. If you are currently on v8.9.3, then you can relax, you have the critical update installed. If you are NOT at v8.9.3, then you should hit the update link for WooCommerce.

I use an older version of WooCommerce – what should I do?

There are many reasons why a business might have to remain with an older version of WooCommerce. The update has been ‘back-ported’ to include version 8.8.x. If you can, you should update to v8.8.5. If you cannot update to either 8.9.3 or 8.8.5 than you need to manually turn off the Order Attribution option in your WooCommerce settings. If you are using an even older version (8.7.x or earlier) then you should not be impacted. However, why are you persisting with older plugin versions; there are many risks associated with this?

This is all gibberish – I need help!

We fully understand that notices like this can be scary. If you have any concerns over the security of your WooCommerce store or the wider WordPress website, QD Design can perform a security audit and make any changes that are required for you.

Let us take care of your website, so you can concentrate on taking care of your business.

Call us today!

Appointment Bookings

e-commerce

• Do you offer customer “appointments”?

• Spend too much time managing your calendar and not enough with clients?

• Let them make bookings directly with you via your website.

• Take payments via your website at the time of booking, stop worrying about “no shows”.

Consultants, Therapists, Fitness Instructors (in fact anyone who offers appointments to their clients), we feel your pain.  Responding to customer enquiries can be time consuming; time that you could be spending earning with a client.

Simplify the process by putting your calendar onto your website so that customers can see exactly when you are available AND let them make a booking without having to call, text or email you.  Better still, ask for payment when the booking is made so you never have to keep cash or handle change.  It is simple to integrate a card payment processor such as PayPal, Stripe or one of the many others available.

Have multiple therapists working from the same premises and need separate calendars for each? No problem.

Need to offer different appointment types or durations? We’ve got it.  In fact you can have ten different appointments within each calendar.

Need to reserve certain times for “walk ins”?  Of course, you can block out repeat time slots or ad hoc blocks of time.

Need to insert appointments by hand (where a client calls you or makes a follow up appointment)? You can easily drop a manually created appointment into your calendar via the simple admin screen.

Our easy to use appointments system will save you time, increase your earning opportunities and means you can spend more time with your clients and less doing administration!

Call us for a demonstration of the system, or drop us a message and we can call you back.

Find out more…

How long to set up a shop and sell online?

e-commerce, Marketing, On Line, WordPress

How long does it take to set up a shop and sell online?

I’ve been asked this question several times in the last week.  When you turn it around and ask the questioner how long they reckon it will take, the answer is usually several hours, if not days.

What if it took less than 30 minutes to set up your own shop and begin selling on line, wouldn’t you do it?  Of course you would!

You design handmade jewelry, knit incredible garments, print custom T shirts or make amazing items of artwork and sell them to friends / family and through local independent shops.

No doubt your customers are delighted with your products and tell all their friends about you. But you are still only tapping into the tiniest proportion of your available market. Unless someone happens to know you / one of your friends or be in that independent shop, they have no chance of knowing about your product and thus making a purchase.

The answer (of course), is to sell online.  However, several conversations in just the last week show that for many people the idea of setting up their own shop is a daunting one, and one they expect to be complex and problematical.

Let me let you into a secret. It isn’t! You could easily have a shop of your own up and running in around 30 minutes.    Here’s how.

1. Assuming you have a website running WordPress, install the WooCommerce plug in. WooCommerce is part of the organisation that builds WordPress itself and it is the biggest (by a long way) e-commerce platform on WordPress.   Not got a WordPress website – no problem. Just about every server can handle WordPress*, it is easy to set up a simple WordPress site, styled to look like your current website and put links to it from the relevant places in your main site.

2. Configure WooCommerce – set up your location, currency, whether it is a physical or downloadable product (e.g. an e book), customise any email confirmations you want the system to send.

3. Download the Payment Gateway plug in of your choice (PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, WorldPay etc) and configure your account.

4. Connect WooCommerce to your chosen payment gateway and link using the provided API key.

5. Create a product to sell in WooCommerce. Ideally with a product description, images, size / colour options etc.

6. Begin selling!

It is as simple as that.  In 30 minutes or so, your reach will have gone from local to potentially global.  What’s stopping you?   You have a great product, why not sell it as widely as possible!

At QD Design we can assist you through the process. From simple advice and guidance, to setting up the WooCommerce platform and Payment Gateway or even building the complete WordPress site to contain it all.

We eat, sleep and breath the web and want to help businesses make the most out of it. Call us for a chat or drop us an email and we will get back to you.

*If your server really can’t support WordPress, we need to talk, urgently!  You are being hosted on a device that may well be compromising your websites speed and thus your position in Google search results (Google hates slow sites and penalises them over faster ones).