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Using Conversio with Physical Products and Deferred Payments

I’d like to share what I’ve learned recently about Conversio (previously Receiptful).

Conversio is the brain / love child of Adii Pienaar, co-founder of WooThemes and also at the helm when Jigoshop morphed into WooCommerce. Yep, that WooCommerce, that has gone from 0 to 30% market share in a few years. In short, WordPress legend.

Many years ago now, OM4 decided that WooThemes was a theme development shop that had legs. We switched our focus from on our own (very successful) OM4 theme, and shifted our new development projects onto WooThemes. Once WooCommerce hit the scene, we decided to stop focussing on WP e-Commerce and do all new developments using WooCommerce. So just to get things clear, we’ve liked Adii’s work on WooThemes and WooCommerce :). A lot.

When we heard that Adii was leaving WooThemes to try something new, we were intrigued. I was on the lookout for what was brewing, and when Conversio emerged, it was impressive. I’ve been part of the technology scene and observing new technology launches since 1989 (for those old enough to remember, I sat in the audience while Mark Benioff launched Oracle Forms 4 in Melbourne – I know exactly what it looks like when technology companies are talking complete crap: ) )

Conversio is a great piece of software. But if you are running an eCommerce store that ships physical products, there are some things you need to know.

Once you know the available workarounds, you can make better decisions about what Conversio offers you.

So, about Conversio. The signup and setup experience for Conversio is just brilliant. At core, I’m a cynical and hard bitten technology soul, but Conversio is impressive. The design is exceptional, the body of knowledge that sits behind this product is amazing. Sign up tell me if you disagree – there is a freemium version so you can experience this without parting with a dime.

Recognising that the click through rates from receipt emails were higher (a lot higher) than other email click through rates was a big insight. Big enough to launch a product. Conversio was built to leverage that insight.

But The current version does this better for virtual products than physical products (that require shipping) however.

Let me clarify that. Physical products. That require shipping. and deferred payment methods. Are not as well supported by Receiptful as virtual products with real time payments.

After enthusiastically recommending Conversio to a range of our WooCommerce clients, after implementing it I’ve learnt some important lessons about how Conversio actually works.

There are two key considerations to keep in mind.

Conversio will disable the standard WooCommerce Order Processing and Order Completion emails. You need to know this to figure out how Conversio might affect the way you process your own orders.

Consideration one, the WooCommerce Order Processing email gets replaced by the Conversio receipt. This works well in situations where the payment occurs with the order. But if you allow deferred payment methods (BACS, Cheque, e-PATH deferred credit card processing), then you need to know that the standard WooCommerce email notifications are suppressed. This means that the customer doesn’t automatically get the standard WooCommerce New Order notification advising your bank account details, or your cheque payment details. This is the notification that goes out when your WooCommerce Order moves from Pending to On-Hold.

So if you decide to implement Conversio, your New Order emails won’t go out automatically. As a workaround, you can go to your WooCommerce dashboard and manually send out the New Order email to your customers. Once the customer pays, and you change the WooCommerce status to Processing, the Conversio receipt will get sent.

Consideration two, the WooCommerce Order Completed email gets suppressed. So if you are shipping physical goods, you might be used to changing the WooCommerce order status to Completed, and the customer gets a notification their order has been shipped. If you are using third party plugins such as shipping tracking plugins, there might be shipping tracking details that go out with this email as well. Be aware that by default Conversio will stop the Order Completed email – normally sent by WooCommerce – from being sent. Conversio do this to try and better manage the information flow to your customers (sometimes too much information is not good). But if you are relying on shipping status notifications going out to customers, this might be important. If this is an issue for you, contact Conversio’s support desk and ask for a code snippet that stops the suppression of the standard WooCommerce Order Completed email.

So to summarise, if you ship physical products and use deferred payments methods, keep in mind when choosing to use Conversio that the Order Processing and Order Completed emails are suppressed.

I can understand where Conversio are coming from – anyone who is a fan of ReWork from Basecamp will understand this.

Sign up to Conversio and tune in to the research. Lots of people click on receipt emails, and if you run an online store you’ll want to work with this knowledge.

Maybe one day Conversio will deploy a way to better support those stores that ship physical products and use deferred payments. In the meantime, if you are in this category, figure out if the workarounds work for you.

And let Conversio know what you want – feature requests do count.