At Universal Yums we have over 100GB of customer data in our database. This is too much to work with locally, but we still need to have a local database with settings, pages and posts from our site for doing development work.

Before updating to use High Performance Order Storage, it was very difficult to extract customer data since it was mixed in the posts and postmeta table. However, in HPOS the majority of customer is stored in dedicated tables which are easy to truncate or just skip in a database export.

In order to generate a fresh database for local use in HPOS, we first copy our production site to staging (WP Engine and most managed hosts offer this feature). Then we run a WP CLI script to truncate all the tables that contain customer data.

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At Universal Yums we generate ~120,000+ renewal orders on the 1st of every month. Before updating to HPOS we were able to process ~12-15k orders per hour without any action scheduler failures.

After switching to WooCommerce HPOS, ~25% of our renewals failed during our first renewal cycle. The action scheduler logged this error “WordPress database error Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction for query INSERT INTO wc_order_addresses”.

Eventually the action would fail with this error: “Call to a member function get_date_created() on bool”, which happened because the renewal order was never created due to the address table lock.

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At Universal Yums we ship over 100,000 packages each month. When printing shipping labels, we’d always have a few hundred rejected by the carrier as invalid. This meant we had to reach back out to the customer to get a corrected address or see if we could resolve the issue ourselves, which added time to fulfillment process.

A lot of orders with invalid addresses had fairly minor issues. For example, the city and zipcode correct, but the state was incorrect. Or the city name was spelled incorrectly. Or the zipcode had an incorrect digit. These types of issues can all be corrected automatically with address validation.

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Adding a metabox to the WooCommerce orders screen is a bit different High Performance Order Storage (HPOS). If you want to support both HPOS and the legacy order system, here’s how to do it.

<?php
namespace Your_Namespace;

use Automattic\WooCommerce\Internal\DataStores\Orders\CustomOrdersTableController;

/**
 * Class Metabox.
 *
 * Example for how to add a metabox to the order screen that supports both HPOS and legacy order storage.
 * More information: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/wiki/High-Performance-Order-Storage-Upgrade-Recipe-Book#audit-for-order-administration-screen-functions
 */
class Metabox {

	public static $instance;

	/**
	 * Main Metabox Instance.
	 *
	 * Ensures only one instance of the Metabox is loaded or can be loaded.
	 *
	 * @return Metabox - Main instance.
	 */
	public static function instance() {
		if ( is_null( self::$instance ) ) {
			self::$instance = new self();
		}

		return self::$instance;
	}

	/**
	 * Constructor.
	 */
	public function __construct() {
		add_action( 'add_meta_boxes', array( $this, 'address_validation_controls' ) );
	}

	/**
	 * Adds a metabox to the order edit screen for address validation.
	 */
	public function address_validation_controls() {
		$screen = wc_get_container()->get( CustomOrdersTableController::class )->custom_orders_table_usage_is_enabled()
		? wc_get_page_screen_id( 'shop-order' )
		: 'shop_order';

		add_meta_box(
			'address_validation_actions',
			__( 'Validate Address', 'textdomain' ),
			array( $this, 'render_address_validation_actions' ),
			$screen,
			'side',
			'high'
		);
	}

	/**
	 * Renders out the HTML shown in the metabox.
	 */
	public function render_address_validation_actions( $post_or_order_object ) {
		$order = ( $post_or_order_object instanceof WP_Post ) ? wc_get_order( $post_or_order_object->ID ) : $post_or_order_object;

		if ( ! $order ) {
			return;
		}

		// We can only validate US addresses.
		if ( $order->get_shipping_country() !== 'US' ) {
			return;
		}
		?>

		<div class="action-address-validate">
			<p>Validate the shipping address.</p>
			<button type="button" class="button format-address">Validate Address</button>
		</div>
		<?php
	}
}

Link to code on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/devinsays/0988711df0a43d7911693c8c4b2dc1d7

We implemented address autocomplete for on the checkout page at Universal Yums a couple years ago, but had never A/B tested its impact on conversions until recently.

It makes intuitive sense that address autocomplete would reduce friction as it enables customers to complete checkout faster. It has also been implemented by a number of large companies like Shopify and Doordash (which I assume have A/B tested every part of checkout) and appears to be best practice.

Although Google Places API requests are very cheap ($17 per 1000 sessions) they are not free if you exceed the $200 monthly usage credit, so I’ve always been curious if its worth the thousands of dollars we spend on it each year.

A/B Test Results

We ran our A/B test with 33k customers who made it to the checkout page. The results showed that address autocomplete did improve our conversion rate by ~1.5%.

For a $1M business, this improvement in conversion rate would lead to an additional $15k in sales- which should more than justify the cost of the API requests.

It is also fairly straightforward to implement. If you are using WooCommerce for your ecommerce site, check out the free Address Autocomplete with Google Places extension on WordPress.org.

Caveats

As with anything, results can vary depending on your customer base. The majority of our customers are based in the United States and complete their purchase on a mobile device. If you’re doing heavy volume it likely makes sense to run your own A/B test to measure the change. However, I suspect most sites will see a similar or better improvement in conversion as we did.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where your subscription order id cache (_subscription_renewal_order_ids_cache) is not building properly, it could be because the database is timing out.

If you haven’t yet made the transition to the High-Performance Order Storage, WordPress needs to do a very taxing meta query in `get_related_order_ids` in order to rebuild the cache.

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