What’s new in the latest Woocommerce 2.6 “Zipping Zebra” ??

As we know with the growing demand for eCommerce in today’s world Woocommerce is the most popular free eCommerce solution which provides ready to go solutions for creating virtual shops beautifully and damn easily.Users having less coding knowledge can also develop beautiful web based shops in minutes.

Finally after development for 5 months and around 1700 commits from 25 authors Woocommerce has released its latest WooCommerce 2.6 “Zipping Zebra”. Sounds cool !! Don’t it..
Here I have listed some useful points you should know before upgrading to the latest version..

Introduction to shipping Zones

With the release of version 2.6 Woocommerce added the much needed shipping zone feature.

Shipping Zones are groups of locations to which you ship products. You can group multiple continents,countries, states, and zip codes into a ‘zone’ for example you could have:

Local Zone = California ZIP 90210
Domestic = All US states
International = Rest of the world

Previously when shipping goods with WooCommerce you can use one of the core shipping methods (flat, rate,international, local pickup) . Each method can be used once, and availability is configured per shipping method. Whilst this system is simple, it is in no way flexible for more advanced shipping setups.

Thanks for the new update now each one of these zones can contain multiple shipping methods, such as free shipping, local pickup, and flat rates. Customers within the zone only see the shipping methods applicable to them.

Beside above features you can also add Table Rate Shipping and Flat Rate Box to shipping method which are very useful.

 

The updated REST API

With the new update Woocommerce has replaced its own REST API with a new WordPress based REST API for better flexibility and standardization.This means Woocommerce now uses WP REST API scaffolding layer. So your WordPress version should be above 4.4 to utilize this feature.

More navigable account page

Now Woocommerce has a new “My Account” page where all the content can be split into menus and pages such as dashboard, orders, downloads, addresses, account details and logout etc ; allowing customers to navigate between content without viewing all data at once.

Ajax based Cart page

Now the following operations can be done more easily and faster with Ajax

• Updating cart quantities
• Applying and removing coupons
• Updating shipping options

Some other cool features

• There is a new wc_get_orders() function to get order objects and ids instead of direct get_posts() calls.This is the wrapper for get_posts specific to orders.
• Now payment tokenization API is being used by which payment method details of users can be saved for future
  purchases during checkout.
• There are now some on-hold status order emails.So if the order has issues like awaiting payment ,stock is reduced etc this can be useful
• Now products can be filtered by rating thanks for the updated layered nav system