AutomateWoo – Things To Know

AutomateWoo is a plugin for WooCommerce. It allows shop owners to email customers automatically. For example, it can be set up to email customers who buy specific products and ask for a review. Or it can suggest other products they might like, or send them a discount code.

I set up AutomateWoo a day or two ago and see that I can set triggers, rules, and actions. Rules are not an essential part of the workflow, and one can simply set up triggers and actions.

An example will explain this.

I can set up an AutomateWoo workflow to trigger on ‘order complete’. And I can set a rule that the workflow will only trigger if the order is the customer’s first purchase. And I can set an action – an email with a money-off coupon that will be sent on Tuesday at 11:00AM with a delay of 14 days.

In that case the email will go on the first Tuesday after 14 days from the purchase completion to a customer who has purchased their first product.

One thing to note. AutomateWoo workflows run only for those orders that are placed after the workflow is created, not for past orders.

The workflow will run, that is it will be triggered, as soon as a new order is placed. But the action will not run until it reaches the scheduled time, if one is set. Until then the action will stay in the queue. The default if a delay is not set, is for the action to be done immediately. Plainly, one doesn’t want to be asking for a review two seconds after notifying a customer that the product is on its way to them.

Guests versus Accounts

AutomateWoo distinguishes between guests and those who created an account. Only when ‘is transactional’ is enabled in the workflow, will AutomateWoo send emails to guests as well as to those who created an account.

Imagine one is going to send a discount to customers who fit a profile such as ‘has completed first purchase’. Then it is appropriate to enable ‘is transactional’ in the workflow. That’s because everyone who purchases deserves the offer of a discount.

Setting Coupons To Private

The documentation for AutomateWoo in this page states as follows. When you create a coupon (in WooCommerce/coupons) that you intend to use in AutomateWoo, you should set the visibility of the coupon to Private. I thought I knew why that might be, but I asked Support.

Support: That’s a good question. When a coupon is set to ‘Private’, it can’t otherwise be used. So in the context of the workflow, you want it to be private so that it can only be used in this workflow, and not during an otherwise normal checkout by a customer.

Me: Let me understand what personalised coupons are. What I mean is, are they personalised in the sense that they are tied to that workflow because the coupon is set to ‘private’? Or is there more to it so that the coupons are individual – so customer ‘A’ gets coupon zx20-A and customer ‘B’ gets zx20-B, etc?

Support: The latter part is spot on, yes. You don’t want anyone to use your “zx20-” coupon, but you’ll let individuals use “zx20-A” etc.

Me: So when I would look in AutomatWoo coupons when they are used, would I see the name of that individual coupon? And if I create zx20, does the system do all the tagging to create the coupon that is tied to each person who fits the workflow?

Support: You’re correct on both counts. The AutomateWoo workflow will, well, automate the creation of the coupon, tie them to the relevant customer, and add them to your list of coupons along with your normal coupons.

Apple Writes To Its Community In Europe

From Marginal Seat 5 September 2016

I noticed today, Monday 5 September that there is a link in the bottom right-hand corner of the home page of Apple’s UK site.

It is entitled, ‘A Message to the Apple Community in Europe’. Because the page might be relegated elsewhere or taken down at some point in the future, I have copied the full text of Tim Cook’s message here. 

This is what he says:

August 30, 2016 A Message to the Apple Community in Europe 
Thirty-six years ago, long before introducing iPhone, iPod or even the Mac, Steve Jobs established Apple’s first operations in Europe. At the time, the company knew that in order to serve customers in Europe, it would need a base there. So, in October 1980, Apple opened a factory in Cork, Ireland with 60 employees.

At the time, Cork was suffering from high unemployment and extremely low economic investment. But Apple’s leaders saw a community rich with talent, and one they believed could accommodate growth if the company was fortunate enough to succeed.

We have operated continuously in Cork ever since, even through periods of uncertainty about our own business, and today we employ nearly 6,000 people across Ireland. The vast majority are still in Cork — including some of the very first employees — now performing a wide variety of functions as part of Apple’s global footprint. Countless multinational companies followed Apple by investing in Cork, and today the local economy is stronger than ever.

Steve Jobs visits Apple’s new facility in Cork, October 1980. The success which has propelled Apple’s growth in Cork comes from innovative products that delight our customers. It has helped create and sustain more than 1.5 million jobs across Europe — jobs at Apple, jobs for hundreds of thousands of creative app developers who thrive on the App Store, and jobs with manufacturers and other suppliers. Countless small and medium-size companies depend on Apple, and we are proud to support them.

As responsible corporate citizens, we are also proud of our contributions to local economies across Europe, and to communities everywhere. As our business has grown over the years, we have become the largest taxpayer in Ireland, the largest taxpayer in the United States, and the largest taxpayer in the world.

Over the years, we received guidance from Irish tax authorities on how to comply correctly with Irish tax law — the same kind of guidance available to any company doing business there. In Ireland and in every country where we operate, Apple follows the law and we pay all the taxes we owe.

The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process. The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes. This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals. We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe them any more than we’ve already paid.

The Commission’s move is unprecedented and it has serious, wide-reaching implications. It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been. This would strike a devastating blow to the sovereignty of EU member states over their own tax matters, and to the principle of certainty of law in Europe. Ireland has said they plan to appeal the Commission’s ruling and Apple will do the same. We are confident that the Commission’s order will be reversed.

At its root, the Commission’s case is not about how much Apple pays in taxes. It is about which government collects the money.

Taxes for multinational companies are complex, yet a fundamental principle is recognized around the world: A company’s profits should be taxed in the country where the value is created. Apple, Ireland and the United States all agree on this principle.

In Apple’s case, nearly all of our research and development takes place in California, so the vast majority of our profits are taxed in the United States. European companies doing business in the U.S. are taxed according to the same principle. But the Commission is now calling to retroactively change those rules.

Beyond the obvious targeting of Apple, the most profound and harmful effect of this ruling will be on investment and job creation in Europe. Using the Commission’s theory, every company in Ireland and across Europe is suddenly at risk of being subjected to taxes under laws that never existed.

Apple has long supported international tax reform with the objectives of simplicity and clarity. We believe these changes should come about through the proper legislative process, in which proposals are discussed among the leaders and citizens of the affected countries. And as with any new laws, they should be applied going forward — not retroactively.

We are committed to Ireland and we plan to continue investing there, growing and serving our customers with the same level of passion and commitment. We firmly believe that the facts and the established legal principles upon which the EU was founded will ultimately prevail.

Breaking that down:

  • The message is addressed to the Apple Community, and by making a public statement it is telling the EC it is not going to back down and it is confident it is right.
  • Apple has been in Ireland for a long time – thirty-six years, in fact.
  • Apple is an important player in Ireland, with 6,000 employees.
  • Apple is an important player in Europe, in the USA, in the world.
  • The principle is that countries are taxed where they create value. Apple’s R&D is in the USA and that is where the value is created and that is where the tax should be paid.
  • The EC wants to retroactively remake the tax laws for Ireland and internationally.
  • This will adversely affect many companies, not just Apple.
  • If the EU wants to change its tax laws, it should do so by legislative change and this should be applied going forward and not retroactively.
  • A warning that if the EC does change the tax laws even going forward, remember what is set out in the preceding points and realise that Europe will be the loser.

Apple, Ireland, EU, Juncker, and Tax

From Marginal Seat 2 September 2016

Ireland has just confirmed that it will fight the EU tax bill imposed on Apple in Ireland.

The tax bill was imposed by Margarethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition.

According to Reuter’s, Vestager said that

since being alerted to Apple’s methods and other cases by a U.S. Senate probe in 2013, the Commission has been looking through about 1,000 such instances in the EU

This row has been brewing for years.

In 2014, the Consortium of Investigative Journalists operating out of Washington DC disclosed leaked documents they said showed Luxembourg had become a centre of corporate tax avoidance for over three hundred major international companies.

And Jean-Claude Juncker, the current President of the European Commission, was prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013, and is accused of being involved in the agreements.

As the Guardian revealed in 2014

The leaked papers show Luxembourg acting as a go-between, both enabling and masking tax avoidance, which always takes place beyond its borders. The documents are mainly Advance Tax Agreements – known as comfort letters. The leaked papers include 548 of these private tax rulings. These ATAs are typically schemes put to the Luxembourg tax authorities which, if implemented, reduce tax bills substantially. If the Luxembourg authorities approve the scheme they provide a comfort letter which is a binding agreement.

If the EU Commission wins on appeal, then a whole raft of tax matters will unravel and Luxembourg’s head will be on a plate.

It’s not just tax, though. As always, sweetheart deals are done for a reason. And if the deals are upset, there can be consequences.

In 2015, Vestager ordered Cyprus Airways to pay back millions in state aid it had received in a restructuring package.

Vestager said that under the EU rules, there must be ten years or more between state bailouts that companies receive, and Cyprus Airways had already been bailed out in 2007.

So another bailout was a disguised way for the state to subsidise the airline, which meant unfair competition with other airlines.

As a result, Cyprus Airways went out of business, jobs were lost and those ‘other’ airlines picked up the business.

So the result was that the office of the Commission for Competition in the EU reduced competition by driving one of the airlines out of business.

That may be necessary fallout of a decision to defeat tax avoidance in the EU.

But who know what the eventual consequences will be? 

And who knows what the politics within the EU will decide in the background to the forthcoming appeal, given the embarrassment to Juncker?

This could get messy.

Why It Is A Bad Idea To Mess With WooCommerce Hierarchy

I asked for some SEO advice from someone who was/is in the business of offering SEO advice. He suggested removing some parts of the URL structure to make the URLs more Google-friendly. They way this would do that, so he said, was to shorten the steps that Google would’ve to crawl to find a product.

So here’s a piece of advice for anyone in a similar position. Go do your own research before you say yes. I went checking mostly because I thought there had to be a penalty to pay with all the 301 redirects, but also because changing the URL structure so fundamentally rang alarm bells.

But I was surprised when it took about two seconds to find a warning article about changing the structure. And that warning article was right there on WooCommerce’s own pages.

Here’s the link to the article Removing product, product-category, or shop from the URLs if you want to read it in full.

In sum, the article says:

Removing /product/, /product-category/, or /shop/ from the URLs is not advisable due to the way WordPress resolves its URLs. It uses the product-category (or any other text for that matter) base of an URL to detect that it is an URL leading to a product category.

There are SEO plugins that allow you to remove this base, but that can lead to a number of problems with performance and duplicate URLs.

I thought maybe, just maybe, the article was old advice and no longer relevant. So I asked Support at WooCommerce, and Support confirmed that the article is current advice. That was about March of this year.

I went back to the SEO and he checked with his tech person in his firm and then came back and told me it was a bad idea. What took the biscuit was that he didn’t put his hand up to his mistake. Instead he tried to tell me it was a bad idea as though it was his idea. He fed back to me almost word for word what I had raised with him.

Unsurprisingly, that was the end of relationship.

The bottom line is that the problem was avoided and the URL structure remains intact. I was lucky, and avoided the problem by the skin of my teeth, as it were. I might well not have listened to the alarm bells in my head because they often don’t ring very loudly, and because I had advice from a professional SEO, who must be right, right? Wrong.

Wordfence Lockout

Somehow or other, Wordfence locks you out of your admin panel. You can wait until the lockout expires. Or perhaps you have been permanently locked out.

You know the credentials, so you just need a way to get back in. One way is to FTP in to your server and rename the Wordfence plugin so that it is deactivated. But that’s not the best way because as soon as you reactivate it you will be back to square one.

Instead, VPN in to another location, log in and then go here and set these options:

Wordfence/Dashboard/Global Options/General Wordfence Options

Delete Wordfence tables and data on deactivation
Note: This does not include Login Security settings and tables. An option to delete those must be selected separately on the Login Security settings page.

Wordfence/Login Security/Settings

Delete Login Security tables and data on deactivation
If enabled, all settings and 2FA records will be deleted on deactivation. If later reactivated, all users that previously had 2FA active will need to set it up again.

Replacing Media

Enable Media Replace is a WordPress plugin made by ShortPixel that sells itself on the rhetorical question asking whether you find it tedious to have to delete a media file before uploading another replacement file with the same name.

The first option offered is to replace the file with a file of the same type and name. The second option is to replace the file with a new file with a new name, in which case the plugin updates all the links.

Deleting a media file before adding another with the same name is hardly an onerous task. But if I were to want to swap a file out with one of the different name, then I can see the value in the ability of the plugin to change the links. And if I had 50 files to swap out then I could definitely see the benefit.

From the ShortPixel site

Q: In Enable Media Replace the image isn’t replaced. Why?

A: Almost always the image/file is actually replaced when using Enable Media Replace (EMR) but because of cache the new image/file cannot be seen.
It’s very easy to check whether that’s your case by trying to directly access the URL of an image after adding “?anything” at the end of the URL. Please, note that after “?” you can add any random string you want and this trick is used to bypass any caching from your browser to the file.

On the Support page for the plugin I asked:

If I change media files using the plugin, is it then OK to delete the plugin, or does the plugin need to be active after using for the swap to continue working?

The developer replied and said “You can delete the plugin when you don’t need it anymore. When you replace a file, it is done forever.”