WooCommerce 4.1 – What’s New for Store Owners and Developers

While the dust has not yet settled on the release of WooCommerce 4.0, the WooCommerce team is back again with the new version of the eCommerce platform, 4.1. While 4.0 was the first major release of 2020, 4.1 is a minor release, keeping everything backward compatible with the previous version of WooCommerce.

Regardless of whether you’re a store owner or developer, version 4.1 has brought something special for everyone. Let’s check out in detail what’s new in WooCommerce 4.1!

For Store Owners

#A Brand-New Marketing Hub

In today’s competitive online landscape, every eCommerce business is looking for innovative ways to reach more customers and drive growth. Keeping the necessity of online store owners in mind, WooCommerce 4.1 offers the tools and resources you need to:

• Promote your products
• Communicate with your customers
• Grow and streamline your business.

To help store owners grow their businesses faster, WooCommerce introduces a brand-new, centralized marketing hub, which resides inside your Dashboard.

The new marketing tab in WooCommerce focuses on:

• Simplifying installation, configuration, and management of marketing extensions.
• Recommending the right marketing extensions to merchants at the right time
• Offering relevant articles and marketing guides to educate merchants

You can even track extension usage and accordingly optimize your integrations based on merchant usage and feedback!

However, if you have already opted-out of Marketplace Suggestions from WooCommerce >> Settings >> Advanced >> WooCommerce.com, you won’t receive these suggestions.

#A Brand-New Setup Wizard

WooCommerce 4.1 makes WooCommerce Payments available for all US customers. Means, merchants can now select WooCommerce Payments as a payment option for US-based stores with Jetpack connected. WooCommerce Payments is currently available only for US-based merchants who sell in USD.

The WooCommerce team has included it as an option in the updated setup wizard for new stores to help customers quickly discover the new payment solution.

In addition to allowing you to accept major credit and debit cards securely, WooCommerce Payments offers you an integrated payments dashboard to help you manage transactions, including payments, refunds, disputes, and deposits, right from your WordPress dashboard.

Learn more about the brand-new way to accept payments in WooCommerce.

For Developers

WooCommerce 4.1 brings plenty of performance improvements and stability fixes, taking the WooCommerce development to a whole other level.

#New Hooks and Functions

Several new hooks and functions have been introduced in WooCommerce 4.1:

#Template File Changes

The following template file has been updated:

#Nudge for WordPress Version

While WooCommerce 4.1 has made no change in the minimum WordPress or PHP requirements, it shows a notification to merchants not currently running on WordPress 5.2 to upgrade to the latest version. That’s because, from the next release (4.2) onwards, the minimum required WordPress version to run a WooCommerce store will be 5.2 (now 5.0).

Ready to get started?

That’s all about WooCommerce 4.1!

If you’re interested in testing out the new release, use the handy WooCommerce Beta Tester plugin or download the release candidate directly from WordPress.org to play with it locally on your computer.

If you face any issue while upgrading your site to WooCommerce 4.1, feel free to get in touch with our eCommerce development experts.