Top 20 Tips and Tricks for WooCommerce
Let’s go over top 20 tips and tricks for WooCommerce. Authored by Paul Simmons (InstantShift). He is an expert ecommerce consultant with more than 7 years of experience in the eCommerce development industry. Image courtesy of Markus Mainka via Bigstockphoto.
WooCommerce is rapidly growing an eCommerce solution provider for the extensive collection of plugins it offers. It is facilitating small to medium as well as large enterprises to go live and promote the products to a concerned community.
Being powered by WordPress is the among the core reasons that makes WooCommerce a priority for setting up online stores. Whether you are a beginner or have secured the basics of running an eCommerce website, using WooCommerce is not difficult anymore.
The easy plugin installation, free themes, and endless customization tutorials are removing the hurdles of managing a website for all. Following are some of the tips that may help you refine your knowledge and expertise in WooCommerce.
1. Add brands to your website
Brands are established over a long period of time so much that it no more needs advertisements. Adding brands to your website means getting an instant increase in your revenues. The users are well aware of the price, quality and features, so they blindly place orders.
Additionally, you can allow the users of your WooCommerce website to search products by brands they know and trust. It can also boost your sales because users will skip mass selection by browsing the brands only. You can easily do so with tools like WooCommerce brands plugin to endorse brand logos and categorize products according to its manufacturers.
2. Ensure the security of your website
Security of an online store is the top priority. Every day, hundreds of viruses and malware affect the websites. A minor security flaw can ruin the entire effort of owning an expensive hosting plan, setting up an entire website, and customizing for business specific needs. Install the SSL certificates and security plugins to stay safe.
3. Frequently backup your data
Along with other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce is also prone to hacking and other malicious attacks. The websites often suffer huge losses for not backing up the entire record of products, categories, customers and orders. You need the backup the entire data frequently. You can such a facility by your hosting service providers, whereas spending a little more on cloud servers is not a bad idea.
4. Add product images
To evaluate the quality, shape, style and design, etc, of your products, the end users have the only option to view the images. So, the store managers are required to upload high-quality images by utilizing the WooCommerce basic features.
Nowadays, a lot of stores are adding charm to their landing pages through professional photography. The real life images of a product remove the ambiguity of editing and Photoshop and make the people trust your website.
5. Enable quick product view
The traditional shopping allows a user to physically check a product, whereas the online stores have a technological constraint in this aspect. You can minimize it by enabling a quick product view to let the users have a close look at the material and design.
The quick view button can either be placed on the product image or below the ‘Add to cart’ option. It gives the users an opportunity to view the product in details.
6. Write a compelling sales copy
The sales copy of a product is the real bread winner of an eCommerce website. In WooCommerce, you can design a proper structure for the product description. It can start with a short introduction describing the core features, and extend to a detailed introduction that is supported by benefits and practical usage.
A compelling product description is among the various factors that may increase or decrease the conversion rate of your web shop. You need to consult a professional copywriter to brilliantly cover the key aspects of your products.
7. Embed YouTube videos
A video is an amazing form of content that has the power to convey a message effectively. The online buyers are more attracted towards the visual form of content than the textual ones. If you are planning to educate the users with the help of tutorials and user guides, make sure to create them in videos.
You are free either to upload a video from a computer system or embed it from YouTube. Embedding videos from YouTube can save web space and avoid increasing the page load speed. It also gives the users an option either to watch the videos on your website or carefully watch in a YouTube app. In either case, you ensure a message is delivered effectively.
8. Import data from another store
Most of the online stores start selling products at affordable and simple platforms, but, at a later stage, have to move to a reliable and exclusive platform like WooCommerce. If you are still running a store on Shopify, eBay or Amazon parallel to a well built WooCommerce website, you need to import the data and merge the stores. It might be difficult for you to copy each and every detail manually, whereas an import/export plugin can do it in a few seconds.
9. Create daily deals
A ‘daily deals’ section is becoming a routine thing because the online buyers are frequently visiting the online stores to avail regular discount offers. Create a discount corner on your WooCommerce website, and evaluate the increase in leads and conversions. The online stores are doing it for branding and promotions. Because, once a user finds a separate section for deals, he or she may not make purchases on the spot, but will surely revisit with confirmed shopping.
10. Offer discounts on bulk orders
Automate the calculation of discounts on bulk orders. This encourages users to have more products to save more. It is one of the effective pricing strategies to define varied prices as soon as a user selects a higher number of units. For example, one T-shirt costs $12, but if they select three, the total bill amount to $30 instead of $36. You can implement such a policy according to the nature of your business and a discount you can afford.
11. Display stock status
A stock status on the landing page has a deep impact on making the users place the orders. It shows them that the number of items available in inventory and they has a limited amount of time to purchase before they are sold out.
If the products are out of stock, the users will not have to waste time in adding items to cart and entering personal details. It can be a useful addition to the landing pages of your website.
12. Allow customers to rate and review
Displaying reviews and ratings makes your products and landing pages credible and trustworthy. The first time visitors of your website would like to know what your existing customers have to say about your products and service. To have the trust of potential buyers, encourage your loyal customers to submit reviews and rate the products. The positive feedback of your existing customer proves as precedence that you really deliver what you claim.
13. Add a slider for promotions
Promotion, advertising, and marketing are among the core pillars of reaching out a target audience. And, it consumes a lot of monthly budgets. Why not promote deals, offers, events, and latest arrivals on your website and save money? By adding sliders, you can successfully add a promotional corner to your WooCommerce website, which slides advertisements and banners with brilliant transition effects. It will surely prove a helpful tool for making the users take notice of different announcements.
14. Encourage users to subscribe
The online marketers argue that targeting your subscriber with new offers is easier than reaching out new users. Allow users to subscribe for the latest updates and newsletter to keep them posted regularly. In the routine, the users do not sign up to receive emails, so you can encourage them by giving away free eBooks, passes to events or webinar, or an attractive deal.
15. Display relevant products
The online buyers are in a hurry and their search for a product is too quickly that they do not bother to go back to a category page and view other products. To help them find more products according to their interests, you can configure a slider that displays relevant products or posts on the landing pages. Furthermore, there are tools that record the common user behavior and display relevant products accordingly. For example, a slider to display store items with a behavior of ‘who bought this also bought this.’
16. Simplify the checkout process
The final destiny of an eCommerce user is the checkout page. A merchant counts a conversion only when a user successfully finishes the entire checkout process. To help your potential buyers easily complete a transaction, remove the obstacles.
For example, a conventional checkout includes multiple steps, which is time-consuming and complex. You can cut the process short by introducing a one-step checkout method that allows the users to fill the entire details at once, have a final review and finish the order. It saves a lot of time in providing personal, billing, and shipping details at different phases.
17. Enable users to create wishlists
Every user on your WooCommerce website does not convert in his first visit. Most of them keep an eye on your discount offers and precious product listings. They either wait for a seasonal discount or need to allocate budgets for them. So, give them an option to create wish-lists on your website and pay for the products whenever they need.
The wish lists are also created to have a list of products a user needs the most but want his or her loved ones to pay for it, and present them on special occasions like birthdays.
18. Add ‘continue shopping’ button
The option to continue shopping at any stage of checkout is really a game changer. Most of the times, the users add products to cart, fill the details, but right before checkout, they need to add more products to the same order. Without such an option, they fear for the loss of details they have entered. Save their time and effort in making purchases by allowing them to add more store items to cart.
19. Allow product customization
Product customization is a competitive advantage. You may be offering a set of products that are readily available in the local market to the community you need to reach. You can gain their attention if you allow customization as per their requirements.
The conventional stores have a straight away checkout processes which do not listen to what a user may need. You can let the users speak by adding product personalization option right on its landing page. They easily select their preferences and wait for the store item specifically blended into their needs.
20. Create a simple registration form
A minimalist design for the registration is among the latest trends. The users, who opt to open an account for swift and easy shopping experience, are often reluctant to provide unnecessary information. You can simplify the sign-up procedure that only requires the basic information and nothing extra.
You can add custom fields that are specific to your business, whereas asking numerous and illogical questions may increase the abandonment rate. Make it easier for them to create accounts so that you can retarget them with special offers.
Bonus Tip: Add information to rich snippet
If you are relying on search engines to reach a target audience, you need to improve your web appearance in the SERPs. In addition to a product title, URL, and description, you can add more information in the rich snippet that enhances the click through rate. For example, you can add product name, image, price, SKU, manufacturer, stock, etc.
You can stand out from the thousands of searches by displaying additional and relevant product information. It gives a quick product recap to the users and captivates them to click.
Conclusion
With the help of plugins, theme and useful tutorials, you can unleash the limitless possibility of improving the user experience and search engine visibility of your store. The built-in features of WooCommerce are more than sufficient for a startup to showcase a set of products with basic details, whereas you can learn to enhance the functionality of your website as soon as the revenue graph goes up. Follow the above tips and you can tweak your website for better performance and usability.
