I have been considering for some time to change the website over to a new theme. When I first started selling online I presumed it was only going to be good for some extra beer money but it has moved beyond that now, which is great!. However there are some details which were never really ideal from the start and I have noticed that with the way customers are using the site a change was required.
The first issue is that, surprisingly to me, that half of the visits are via mobile. The Woodmart theme we are using, to me, is great on desktop but lacks quite a bit for mobile viewing. The issue here is that there are so many options I was not really looking forward to trying to change it to suit. The mobile theme is it’s own beast, even with this new theme it’s not good but it should be easier for me to work on now. Thats my next job after finishing this desktop version.
I have also been of the opinion that Woodmart is simply too slow, it does not help I do half the online work in Malaysia making it slower again. I have found that a few of the services I was using were making quite a speed impact (cloudflare, WP Rocket specifically) Changing to the new theme has not really sped it up any faster than the old one once those plugins were rmoved/replaced.
So we’re using Blocksy now which is a lilghter theme but it’s still with Elementor with the Happy Addons. Cache is now lightspeed and we’ve still got the same security plugins, as you really should…
As well, we have been having issues with stock control. Until now we have been selling as single pieces & as cartons which is not an ideal way to do it and I have as it creates 2 “stocks” for the same product. More than once I have got into trouble selling parts as singles, not realising I have the cartons already spoken for. I had played with the bulk discount to try and get around this but I had alot of trouble on the shipping side, specifically the TNT part. TNT does not add up the volume in a normal way (they stack them) so it was giving some really high rates. I then used an alternative plugin to get around this problem where the parts are being boxed prior to the rates getting calculated but the plugin was broken and would not return a result at all. I made a plea on the Woocommerce reddit forum and found another plugin (funnliy enough by an Australian developer) which allowed packs to be sold which deduct from the central stock but have a fixed packing size. So all good in the end. Prior to the fix it had lead itself into a bigger issue of back end stock control and I will be likely changing away from Zoho to something like Inflow later on which will link between the online sales and the commercial sales which are not done through the website. This way we have 1 central location for all stock.
There are likley a few broken links, spelling mistakes 😒 and some other small issues around that I will work on. The main find product → buy part is working normally and is still within the no more than 3 clicks I have always made a rule for.
In other news, we have done the trial on the new 25cm trolley and it largely went ok, always have a small gas issue on the cores but it worked itself out during the day. We’ll have these in the nextt container, likey all 4 types (mill, black and anodised) We need to hold onto some stock and wait for the next grey run before finishing the set out.
In the next update I think I’ll be able to introduce our new DTH product that we have been trialling.
