Have you ever come across two WooCommerce stores that look and function the same? Probably not! While all WooCommerce sites basically use WordPress and sometimes even the same plugins, you’d be hard pressed to find stores that have the same checkout steps, store features, and user experience.
We see it a lot here at Robot Ninja — sites that have been customized to suit the store owner’s (and customers’) needs. That why we recently updated our standard plan with the offer to write 3 custom WooCommerce tests to help get your store successfully set up and running smoothly with Robot Ninja.
We understand each store is different and want to help get things working just right for your unique setup and requirements. With custom WooCommerce tests the sky’s the limit (well, within reason!). In our documentation, we only touch on some of the possible customizations that we can develop for you.
So in this post, I want to share with you some real-life examples of custom WooCommerce tests we’ve written for Robot Ninja customers so you can see what’s possible — and learn how we can help you with writing custom tests for your store.
The example custom WooCommerce tests we’ll cover in this post include:
- Multi-Step Checkouts
- Page Validation Checks
- Custom Landing Pages
- Custom Store Features
Note: Having trouble adding a store to your Robot Ninja account? Check out I Added a Store to Robot Ninja But My Tests Are Failing. HALP! or get in touch via live chat in the bottom-right!
1. Multi-Step Checkouts
Out of the box, WooCommerce doesn’t offer a multi-step checkout. However, many themes and plugins allow store managers to split the default checkout process into multiple steps.
Robot Ninja provides some support for this out-of-the-box for themes, such as Avada and its multi-step checkout feature. But for other themes, we need to create tailored customizations, because if there’s one thing we’ve learned since starting Robot Ninja, it’s that every multi-step checkout is a little different. For example.
- Some include a first step that asks the customer to log in or continue as a guest.
- Some have 2 steps separating the billing/shipping information and the payment information.
- Some separate the checkout flow into 3 or 4 smaller steps before the customer can place the order.
We’ve seen each of these checkout scenarios in the wild and have helped our customers write customizations to support these unique checkout flows.
Below are some examples of WooCommerce sites using multi-step checkouts that we’ve worked with to develop customizations.
Londonsockcompany.uk
What was unique: This store has a two-step checkout process — customers are asked to fill out their billing and shipping information, before proceeding to the next step to fill out their payment information and finalize their order. We created a custom WooCommerce test to suit this two-step process and also added support for a custom test, “Select a Title” field on the checkout and the `ClicktoAddress Auto Complete` plugin.
Bittersweet.com
What was unique: This store has a three-step checkout where the first step asks customers to log in if they have an existing account or checkout as a guest customer. The final 2 steps split the checkout into billing and shipping information, and a payment and order confirmation section. We worked with BitterSweet Boutique to develop a custom WooCommerce test that takes all of this into account so their Robot Ninja tests run smoothly.
2. Page Validation Checks
When you run a custom test with Robot Ninja, you’re not limited to just loading up a store page and confirming that elements can be found and clicked. Robot Ninja also integrates with other third party services and APIs that can perform some additional checks and flag any errors that are identified.
One interesting use case we recently worked on was the development of a custom test to automatically check if certain WooCommerce pages on a site had valid AMP markup after a deploy.
Instead of manually validating the output using a site like AMP Validator, we were able to create a custom test that made the request to the AMP validator API provided by Cloudflare and then returned the results needed to confirm if the pages were valid. If the results returned is not valid, the test flags a failure.
If your store uses AMP and you’re be interested in a similar setup, get in touch so we can help you out!
3. Custom Landing Pages
A well-designed landing page can help increase conversions for your WooCommerce site. Instead of sending visitors to your main site where they can get distracted looking at products, sending them to a specially designed landing page can help direct customers to your special off, and encourage them to click your call-to-action.
At Robot Ninja, we’ve seen landing pages with varying levels of integration with WooCommerce:
- Some that automatically add products to a customer’s cart with a whole bunch of custom content;
- Others that simply display a pricing table and provide links to different product pages; and
- Many that are simply a regular product page with some added design flare.
The good news is we can write custom WooCommerce tests for you to accommodate any of these scenarios and more to ensure your landing pages are working after your updates and deployments.
Recently, we wrote a custom WooCommerce test for our friends at WP Sessions to help ensure the “Join” page loads correctly, and that each price tier can be properly added to the cart from the landing page.
4. Custom Built Store Features
If your store has custom-built features, no matter what kind of functionality your store has, we can write a custom Robot Ninja test to suit.
Many store owners have worked with developers to build out custom features, including:
- Custom membership area functionality;
- Custom review functionality; or
- Custom product download functionality.
To give you an example, we wrote custom WooCommerce tests for customer who runs an online video membership site. The site has some functionality that integrates with a membership site that gives customers access to a video playlist feature. Basically, when a customer purchases a membership, they can then create and remove playlists from their “My Account” page, and also add new videos to their playlist.
The custom WooCommerce test we wrote for this customer make a purchase (of varying membership level products), checks to ensure the customer can log into the “My Account” membership area, and then additionally confirms that a playlist can be created and/or removed once logged in. Pretty neat, eh?
Have You Got A Custom WooCommerce Test You’d Like Us to Build?
We understand that every WooCommerce store is different. That’s the beauty of WooCommerce — it’s incredibly flexible and customizable, letting you create anything kind of store you want!
But it also means that Robot Ninja’s default tests can’t account for every little store variation, especially if you’ve built out completely custom features for your store. This is why we updated our standard plan to offer to write 3 custom WooCommerce tests to help get your store up and running with Robot Ninja.
We want you to have the best experience possible with Robot Ninja 🤖 So with this post, we wanted to show you what’s possible with our custom tests, but also encourage you to get in touch so we can help write custom test for your store.
Have you got a custom test you’d like us to build for you? Get in touch! Send us a message either using the messenger app in the bottom-right corner or shoot us an email: support@robotninja.com 📩