ShopSocket
The Realtime board under Analytics, before the first shopper arrives.
ShopSocket shows your WooCommerce store as it happens. Think Shopify’s Live View, for WooCommerce.
Requires the WordSocket plugin and a WPSignal account. Install WordSocket, click Connect (video), then install ShopSocket.
Try it: shopsocket.wpsignal.io is a live demo store.
For you and your team
- Every order on screen the moment it is placed, with a chime
- Who is shopping right now, the pages that brought each of them to where they are, what is in their carts, and what it is worth, with a guest who has ordered before named as a best guess
- Which carts were left behind
- Which products are in carts right now
- Low-stock and sold-out alerts as they happen
- Full-screen mode for a wall display
For your shoppers
- Stock on product pages updates without a reload
- “X shoppers have this in their cart right now” under the price
- “Someone just added this to their cart” notices
- A Live Stock block for any page
Each shopper feature can be switched off site-wide, per category, or per product. All are on by default.
What it does for your store
Never miss an order. Every new order lands on the ShopSocket board the instant it is placed, with a chime, and its status updates in place as it moves along. Keep the board open on a second screen or a wall display and stop refreshing the Orders page.
Know who is shopping right now. How many people are on your store this minute, how many are holding a cart, what is in those carts, and what it is worth. Live means the shopper is on your site at this moment, not a guess from a timestamp.
See which carts were left behind. A cart turns abandoned the moment its shopper leaves, with the revenue still in it, so you know what walked away and when.
Spot what is about to sell. The products sitting in the carts of shoppers on your site, most held first, with the number of carts holding each, one click from the product’s edit screen.
Catch stock problems as they happen. Low-stock and out-of-stock alerts reach the board at once, and the product page itself updates: the stock text changes and the add-to-cart button follows, with no reload. A shopper holding a product that sells out hears straight away, and their cart shows WooCommerce’s own notice.
Give undecided shoppers a nudge. “3 shoppers have this in their cart right now” under the price, kept current as carts change, and a quiet “someone just added this to their cart” notice for shoppers holding the same product.
Fits your theme. The storefront features bind to the classic templates and to the Product Price and Product Stock Indicator blocks. The Live Stock block puts availability, units left, and the in-cart count anywhere you like.
Where to find it
The board is under WooCommerce > Analytics > Realtime (WooCommerce > ShopSocket when Analytics is switched off). Settings are on the ShopSocket tab of WordSocket’s settings page, and each product has its own choices under Product data > ShopSocket.
Disclaimer
WPSignal is an independent service, not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify. Shopify is a trademark of Shopify Inc., named only for comparison.
Third-Party Service
ShopSocket uses the WPSignal service (api.wpsignal.io), through the WordSocket plugin, to deliver live updates to the browsers on your store. When an order is placed or changes status, stock changes, or a product is added to a cart, WordSocket sends an encrypted event to WPSignal, which relays it to your store’s open browsers. Events are not stored.
What leaves your site, and who can read it. Every event is encrypted before it leaves WordPress, with a key made from your site’s own WordPress salts, which WPSignal never has. WPSignal relays what it cannot open: it never sees an order total, a customer name, a product, or a stock level.
Inside those encrypted events:
- Order events, visible to staff only: the order number, status, total, item count, payment method, and the customer’s first name and last initial. No email, address, or line items.
- Stock and cart events, visible on your storefront: product names, links, thumbnails, and counts, plus an anonymous cart id so a shopper’s own adds and purchases are never announced back to them.
What WPSignal does see, because it needs it to deliver messages: channel names, how many browsers are connected, and an anonymous id for each shopper’s browser and cart. None of it is personal.
What stays on your site. ShopSocket keeps no table of its own. While WordSocket’s History is on (its Journeys tab), each visit WordSocket keeps carries the cart it was made with: what it held, its value and the order it became, in your own database, for the months set there, linked to the shopper’s account when they were logged in. With it off, nothing is kept beyond the WooCommerce session, and the board, the counters and this week’s figures have nothing to show. A guest whose browser remembers the email of an earlier checkout offers it to your site once per visit; it is kept for two days only when that email has placed a paid order here, shown to staff flagged as a best guess, never sent to WPSignal, and covered by WordPress’s privacy export and erasure by email.
Source code
ShopSocket is developed in the open at github.com/wpsignal/wordsocket-extensions under shopsocket/.