WordPress and WooCommerce together are an incredibly effective combination of tools. As a pair, they allow just about anyone to build their own online store, fill it with merchandise, and start making sales in just a few hours. When compared to brick and mortar business, it’s incredibly beginner-friendly which is why so many entrepreneurs are looking to the digital market for their next venture. This has led to WooCommerce powering approximately 28% of the eCommerce website market – the largest share in the industry.
However, WooCommerce on its own is a rather basic plugin. While it includes basic functionality like product support, sales tracking, and checkout as part of the package, to get the most out of it you need WooCommerce extensions. Just like its WordPress host, these extensions and integrations are what truly make WooCommerce one of the very best eCommerce platforms available for businesses of all sizes. They can allow it to do just about anything your business may need.
Below are 3 categories of WooCommerce integrations that can greatly improve your store’s functionality as well as lead to an increase in traffic & sales. Whether you’re just starting your online store or want to take your business to the next level, consider adding our plugin recommendations below.
Marketing
Customers are the driving force behind your eCommerce business. Without traffic on your site and potential customers flooding in, you’ll be out of business shortly. However, the art of cost-efficient marketing is not as simple as paying money to get sales – you’ll blow your budget quickly if you aren’t smart about your spending. Fortunately, there are plugins that you can use to maximize your marketing for increased traffic without shelling out a fortune.
Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization plugin made to bolster WordPress & WooCommerce’s already SEO-friendly build. This integration analyzes your entire website for readability (how well search engines can crawl your site), giving you hints on how to improve it as well as tools to make the changes yourself. Each blog post, product, and page will have a readability score that will let you know if it needs changes or additional content to perform better in search rankings, increasing the odds of attracting more traffic organically. With SEO being such a huge factor in your marketing, a SEO plugin like Yoast SEO is a no-brainer.
Mailchimp focuses on a different marketing avenue – email marketing. Email marketing involves directly contacting potential customers in order to attract them to your store, and the instant & expansive nature of an email makes them a wide-reaching advertising platform. With Mailchimp, you can create custom emails to send to your mailing list (which can be collected or imported in Mailchimp from your store or newsletter). The plugin also allows you to create opt-in forms on your website to grow your mailing list, increasing the effectiveness of future ads by increasing their reach.
Reporting & Analytics
Information is crucial to the long-term success of your business. Information, statistics, and analytics allow you to fine tune your business for optimal efficiency, which allows you to turn a larger profit. One of the largest benefits of online business is the abundance of data available to your through the internet and connected apps. Things like where your customers come from, what pages they visit, what products sell best, and more all give you actionable insight into your business that can’t be found elsewhere. To take advantage of this wealth of knowledge, you need the right plugin.
Metorik brings the default WooCommerce reports system up a notch with an easy to read & highly informative dashboard at its core. Here you’ll be able to see an overview of sales, customer insights, projections for growth, and more just by navigating throughout the different panels. You’ll also be able to generate custom reports for any number of metrics during a custom time period to give you insight into holiday sales, quarterly reports, traffic growth, and more – all within a single app. Connect it with apps like Google Analytics and Mailchimp to extend the functionality even further, making it one of the only reporting apps you’ll need.
Conversion
Once you’ve recruited your customers and found the best ways increase sales, it’s time to convert those potential buyers into actual customers. This conversion happens at checkout – arguably the most important step of the online sale – where you can take advantage of WooCommerce integrations to make sure everything goes smoothly. After all, losing a sale after all that marketing & analytical work because your checkout page isn’t up to par would be downright devastating.
Handsome Checkout’s goal is to make the checkout process as quick & easy as possible. With every second that it takes for a buyer to get from your product page to providing payment information, you risk them changing their mind and clicking off. A streamlined checkout process helps eliminate that risk, lowering cart abandonment. Handsome Checkout also allows you to embed custom checkout forms on any page on your site, skipping the cart entirely & processing the order directly on the page. If you’d prefer to use a custom checkout page, you can design one that not only makes checkout easy but also brings it all home with testimonials, guarantees, and more.
Stripe and PayPal Checkout make it easy for your customers to pay you with their preferred payment method. When shopping online, many customers worry about privacy. On top of using a SSL certificate on your site, offering trusted & secured payment options can help ease their worries so that you don’t lose the sale. Stripe allows for credit/debit card transactions as well as Apple Pay & other payment systems while PayPal Checkout works with PayPal – one of the most widely used payment processors online. The combination of these 2 plugins should allow you to accept payment from just about anyone, and they work together so you don’t have to choose one over the other.
Conclusion
While it is possible to simply increase sales by selling more (such as with One Click Upsells’ upselling features), other factors of your eCommerce store play a role in what kind of sales numbers you see. After all, you need customers to come to your site & actually pay you before you’ve earned a sale!
Our recommended plugins and WooCommerce integrations above give you a collection of tools to improve your online business overall, which in turn helps to boost your sales. Consider adding one – or all of them – to your WordPress site today.
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