Wufoo: Weird Name, Awesome Service

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Content / Wufoo: Weird Name, Awesome Service

Wufoo.

It’s just a great name, isn’t it?

It’s like a weird mix of a barking dog and the yodeling Yahoo! guy.

Anyway.

If you’ve never used or heard of them before, Wufoo makes building online forms painless and easy. Ask any web developer (especially those of us who have been building sites since the mid-90s) and one of the constant nagging and difficulties they’ll tell you we have is building forms. Most of the time, it’s not the actual forms themselves that’s the problem — it’s the storage and export of the information.

Wufoo changed all that.

With their drag-and-drop interface and simple embed code, building out a contact form, registration form or even e-commerce form is incredibly easy. So, now that I’ve already told you how great it is — let me explain in more detail why.

It’s Completely Platform Agnostic

As much as I love WordPress, many of the form plugins (like Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms) leave a lot to be desired. They work – don’t get me wrong – but they’re limited by the WordPress interface and the overall experience.

Since Wufoo is a third-party service, you can embed their code into any platform or HTML-based site, including using shortcodes for WordPress. If you don’t want to embed the code (or don’t have a site to embed it in), you can simply use the URL they generate to capture your information.

Easy Integrations with Mailchimp, Highrise and More

We use Wufoo for our WordPress emergency help form and contact forms, and what’s great is that when someone submits their information and issue, it automatically gets added to Highrise, the CRM software we use to track customer interactions. So rather than the contact information existing in a vacuum, it gets loaded directly into what we use to manage customers.

Wufoo can also integrate with newsletter software like Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor, making it easy to grow your subscriber base. Check out their entire list of integrations here.

Payment Processing via PayPal, Authorize.net and More

Building a shopping cart is never easy. There’s so many things to consider and account for, which makes it really over complicated if you’re only looking to collect simple payments or sell single items.

Thankfully, Wufoo integrates with PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe and more to collect payments submitted by the forms you create. It’s incredibly easy to assign pricing to fields in your form, so all of the information gets passed correctly to your payment processor. Here’s all the details on their payment integration.

I’ve been using Wufoo for years now – and I continue to suggest them to clients and partners looking for easy, drag-and-drop form management.