Product Update: March 2019

We’re excited to announce that AutomateWoo 4.5 and Refer A Friend 2.3 are shipping this week! In this release we’ve a bunch of new features, performance improvements and bug fixes.

We’ve also improved how the Customer Win Back trigger functions, which may require you to update your win back workflows. Please read the section below for an explanation.

WooCommerce Points and Rewards integration

AutomateWoo now integrates with the WooCommerce Points and Rewards plugin! This integration makes it possible to create automated workflows that add or remove a user’s points. Giving points is a great way to reward specific customer actions and now, via workflows, it’s possible to easily create complex reward scenarios.

In addition, we added a new Customer – Points rule, which can be used to segment customers based on their current points balance. Finally, we created a new customer.points variable so that the points balance can be displayed in any workflow action.

Example use cases

• Add points when a customer’s total spend reaches $500
• Add points when a customer has been inactive for 6 months
• Add points when a customer abandons a cart
• Add points to a customer after their subscription is renewed 12 times
• Add points when a customer purchases a specific membership
• Add points when a customer opts-in to receive marketing communications
• Remove points when a customer cancels a subscription

If you use the Refer A Friend add-on:

• Add points to an advocate when they refer a new customer
• Add points to an advocate when they refer 5 customers

To learn more, read our workflow example: Reward customers with points for purchasing specific products.

New WooCommerce Subscription features

In this release, we’ve added a new subscription trigger, new coupon rules and support for two recently added features in the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. These features are early subscription renewals and subscriptions with no payment method at the time of signup. The added workflow components are:

• New trigger: Subscription Note Added
• New rule: Subscription – Can Renew Early
• New rule: Subscription – Has Payment Method
• New rule: Subscription – Coupons
• New rule: Subscription – Coupons – Text Match
• New rule: Subscription – Coupon Count
• New variable: subscription.early_renewal_url
• New variable: subscription.change_payment_method_url

To learn how to onboard subscriptions without a payment method read our workflow example: Onboard a subscription in WooCommerce to automatic renewals.

Improved formatting of date and price variables

This release also adds new formatting options to all date and price variables.

Previously, to set a custom format for a date variable, you had to manually specify the format which required additional knowledge about date formatting in PHP. To simplify this, we’ve added a select menu allowing you to choose one of several common date formats.

If you’re already using a custom date format, there’s no need to worry. We’ve ensured that existing custom date formats will work with the new changes.

For price variables, we’ve added a parameter that dictates how the price will be formatted. The Price option returns a fully formatted price including the currency symbol.  The Decimal simply returns the price as a numeric value with the appropriate amount of trailing decimal places.

Improvements to the Customer Win Back trigger

While the Customer Win Back trigger is one of AutomateWoo’s most popular triggers, it can be a drain on server resources. We’ve noticed over the past several months that this trigger has been problematic and confusing for people so we’ve made some significant changes in AutomateWoo 4.5 to address this.

New default field value

Firstly, we’ve added a default value to the Maximum days since purchase field. Previously, when this field was left blank, there would be no upper limit to the win back range. This release makes the default value 3 days higher than the value set for the Minimum days since purchase field.

For example, if you have a win back workflow with the minimum days set to 90 days, the maximum days value will default to 93 days. Then the workflow will look for customers whose last purchase was made between 90 and 93 days ago.

Setting a smaller date range is significantly more performant and we believe this change is actually a more logical way for the Customer Win Back trigger to function.

IMPORTANT: All Customer Win Back workflows with a blank Maximum days since purchase field will be automatically changed to use the new 3 day default value. We recommend reviewing your win back workflows after updating to AutomateWoo 4.5.

Scaling improvements

We also made some big changes behind the scenes to improve the scalability of the Customer Win Back trigger. To do this, we rebuilt how the trigger interacts with the background processor. In fact, all triggers that use the background processor, such as Subscription Before Renewal and Wishlist Reminder, have benefited from these changes.

Product review improvements and fixes

In AutomateWoo 4.5, we’ve fixed 2 bugs and made an adjustment related to how customer product reviews are counted by workflows. The changes are:

• Fixed issue where if a registered user left a review when signed out but used the same email address, it would not be included in the customer’s review count.
• Fixed issue where the customer review count included all comments by the user, not just product review comments.
• Adjusted customer review count so multiple reviews on the same product count as a single review. This matches how the New Review Posted trigger functions.

Additional changes in AutomateWoo 4.5

• New – Added action Order Item – Update Custom Field
• New – Added variables: order.admin_url and subscription.admin_url
• New – Added variables: customer.address_line_1 and customer.address_line_2
• New – Added support for decimal quantities to abandoned carts
• Tweak – Show a warning in the workflow edit view if it contains a rule that has been removed

New Refer A Friend advocate management features

Refer A Friend 2.3 introduces two new features to help you manage your store’s advocates. The aim of these tools is to prevent the abuse of referral programs.

Advocate blocking

This release makes it possible for store managers to place a block on specific advocate accounts. Blocked advocates have the following restrictions:

• They are prevented from using the email referral form and social referral buttons
• Their existing coupons can’t be used
• They can’t earn more store credit

Advocate referral limits

We’ve also added the ability to place a limit on how many referrals an advocate can make. It’s possible to set a limit per week, per month, per year or for all time. Once an advocate’s referral limit is reached they have the same restrictions as a blocked advocate.

Ready to Update?

As this is a large plugin update, we recommend you test and/or monitor any workflows that are critical to your store after updating. If you think you’ve found a bug, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

If you are running any custom code for AutomateWoo we highly recommend testing that your code still behaves as expected after updating. Did you know you can install AutomateWoo on a test site without it counting to your activation limit?

Features Suggestions and Voting

Have an idea on how to improve AutomateWoo? Check out our ideas board! You can request and vote on the features you want added to AutomateWoo or its add-ons. Votes heavily influence what features we work on. The top request at the moment is for a Customer Birthday trigger, which will be released in the coming weeks!

The ideas board is also a great way to discuss how a feature should actually work and you can even get notified when a feature you need is completed!

We’re Here to Help!

Having trouble figuring something out? Got a bug to report? Get in touch with our team!

Thank you for using AutomateWoo!