Chris Grant (he/him) May 28, 2018 A 2 minute read

WooCommerce 3.4 is now available with GDPR compliance features for your store

WooCommerce, the popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress is now available, after having been in development since January, and includes some essential tools relating to GDPR compliance and your website.

While 3.4 is a “minor” release; meaning this version should be backwards compatible with sites running versions of WooCommerce greater than 3.0. It’s still recommend that your site is tested thoroughly to make sure your extensions and themes are compatible before upgrading, and of course making backups for peace of mind is essential– see this handy guide for more details.

GDPR features, tweaks, and settings

This release introduces several tools, tweaks, and settings to help with GDPR compliance:

  • User data export, erasure, and anonymization tools.
  • Settings for enabling automatic data cleanup or removal.
  • New Customizer settings for checkout fields and policy notices on the Checkout page.
  • Tweaks to logging to ensure personal data does not get logged.

These features tie into and require WordPress 4.9 to function.

GeoLite2 integration

WooCommerce uses the MaxMind GeoLite database for geolocation during checkout to automatically select the customer’s correct country. The GeoLite database has been discontinued by MaxMind, and GeoLite2 is the replacement. This release adds support for and integrates WooCommerce with GeoLite2 to ensure geolocation will continue working correctly for the forseeable future. The whole process is automatic and no further action is needed on the store owner’s part to keep geolocation working correctly.

Features for store owners

Here’s some other new features you may find useful while using WooCommerce:

  • A multisite dashboard widget that shows order information from across all sites.
  • Wildcard email support for coupon restrictions. Using the wildcard character you can set up coupons restricted to groups of similar email addresses (.edu email accounts, corporate email accounts from a certain business, etc.).
  • Users can now set their display name on the My Account page.
  • Improvements to the admin product search, including the ability to search for multiple products in the same query.