What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a popular extension to the most common website content management system in the world, WordPress. It transforms your WordPress site into a capable ecommerce system. Developed and launched in 2011, this easy-to-install plug-in is free if you don't need the extra features provided by paid add-ons. It is used by businesses and not-for-profits to manage online shops of widely-differing sizes, giving them the ability to sell products online.
Why should I use WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open-source platform, meaning that the core version is free for businesses to install and run on their sites. The open-source nature of the plug-in means that it is supported by developers across the world, and some of those are adding new features and developing it further.
With over four million online stores using WooCommerce to power their commercial operations, you’ll be in good company choosing WooCommerce for an online store if you already use WordPress. Besides the advantages of being easy to install within most existing WordPress websites, businesses often choose it because it is flexible, adaptable and customisable. You really can make it your own if you need it to do things it will not do out-of-the-box.
Once you’ve implemented an online shop function within your site, you’ll need to think about how you can supercharge your shop to increase sales and make your ecommerce store a success.
Success with your WooCommerce Webstore
Below we offer 10 tips to help increase site engagement, improve visitor and customer experience and take your ecommerce business to the next level.
1. Make navigation easy
Making your web shop easy to navigate for your user is essential. Customers will want to be able to clearly search for the products they are looking for using filtering options such as style, size and price. While the basic default filtering options WooCommerce provide are enough for many sites, more advanced plug-ins can be added. Make product information readily available to customers and adding to cart possible with just one click.
You can add ‘category’ tags to any products in your store and then also set up custom category pages that give a description of the category and list all products held in it. Links to these pages can be placed on your shop home page.
It is also possible to extend the default number of products that appear in results pages in order to reduce the number of clicks it takes the user to find what they are looking for.
For example, in a website with 1,000 products available, increasing the number of results per page to 400 would mean it takes only two clicks to find the last 200 items. For a larger web shop, the use of category filters can help to bring down the number of results so the user could also navigate the pages in just a few clicks.
You may also find it beneficial to install a WooCommerce extension that increases the number of ways the user can sort their results, for instance allowing the user to sort results alphabetically or in reverse alphabetical order, instead of just by price or upload date. This could be very helpful with shops selling anything with clearly defined named creators or titles, including music, films, books and artwork, helping the user to see it displayed in a logical order, with all works by one creator at a time.
The checkout process should be straightforward and efficient. Think about your customer journey and how they will use your WooCommerce shop. Are there any ways you can make the process smoother for your customer to complete the purchase of your product or service? Suggestions include adding a direct link to the shopping cart in your main navigation, perhaps in a drop-down menu beneath the main shop page. This makes it quick and easy for shoppers to find their cart again after previously adding something to it, if they don’t want to add anything else before checking out and paying.
Giving users the flexibility to use their preferred method of payment by offering multiple payment options can be one way to do this. Install a payment gateway such as WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, which offers 23 payment methods, including credit and debit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and buy now, pay later options.
There are also a number of plug-ins that facilitate the automatic calculation of shipping costs. These vary in their sophistication, but some will cater to the calculation of international shipping charges as well as to those for shipping within the UK. Typically, shipping costs can be calculated either at a flat rate per item (which is simpler to set up but runs the risk of costing you money where the items are heavier than average) or based strictly on weight, which is more accurate. If you are using weight-based calculations, you will need to record the product weight for every product in your shop, which is easily done in the field provided for this by the WooCommerce system.
Some popular automatic shipping calculation plug-ins are WooCommerce Royal Mail, Evri, & DPD Shipping Calculator Pro, all of which allow specific shipping prices to be set at checkout. WooCommerce Shipping & Tax can additionally automate tax calculation and the printing of shipping labels. There are other extensions available that are dedicated to the printing of invoices and packing notes too. Consider what functions would be helpful for your business and your customers, and if you search with the right keywords, there’s a strong chance that you will find a ready-built extension that adequately meets those needs.
Ensuring your web shop and checkout process are both functional and simple for shoppers to use will tend to increase rates of purchase. An intuitive, efficient buying experience is also likely to help encourage buyers to return for repeat purchases, further increasing your online sales, provided that you follow through with timely delivery and a good standard of customer service after each sale is made.
2. Provide accurate, high-quality images
Taking care over the quality of your product images is an important key to success with your WooCommerce shop. While taking product photos and optimising them for the web can be somewhat time-consuming, it is time well-invested, because your product images are your virtual shop window on everything you sell, and people want to know exactly what the items they are thinking of buying will look like.
If you are selling anything second-hand, including books, records, craftwork, decorative crockery, or all manner of other collectibles, a valuable tip is to avoid the use of generic product photographs for those items, because customers will be disappointed to receive an item that is different to what was displayed. Keep your photographs real and accurate to the actual products you are selling.
Users will expect images to be of high resolution, ideally with the option to zoom in to a larger version of the picture than displays at first on the product listing page. Many web shops now show a 360-degree view of products or even a short video. Consider if these are necessary for your product and if additional viewing angles could persuade more customers to make a purchase.
Resize your images with Photoshop, or it’s free counterpart Photopea. We find 1000 x 1000 pixels to be in many cases a good compromise for image quality and file size. If you are displaying high-end products for which fine visual details matter, such as jewellery and artwork, or anything pre-loved for which visual cues to condition are important to prospective buyers, then larger original images to which the user can zoom would be generally preferable. Whatever your preferred default image size, you can then use a tool such as Compressor.io to compress images or use a protocol called lazy loading to make sure that featuring your product images does not impact on your site load speed.
Many customers will be viewing your web shop on mobile devices, so it is recommended to optimise the shop experience for multiple screen sizes, in order to ensure that you offer the same high-quality user experience on mobile as on desktop.
3. Think about your marketing channels
Your choice of which marketing channels to utilise to promote your web shop will be dependent on the types of products you offer, but collectively, these should be thought of as powerful tools that can help put your product in front of a wider audience and push potential customers to your site.
Email marketing, social media and paid advertising are all worth considering. Think about where your ideal customers are likely to be and what appeals to them. Marketing your web shop not only can lead to direct sales, but also has the advantage of increasing your brand awareness and widening your customer base for the future.
4. Don’t forget about SEO
SEO is an important factor to bear in mind when creating your WooCommerce store. Optimising your product titles and descriptions will help with the visibility of individual products direct from search, especially if they are uncommon items or ones that are not widely sold with dedicated product pages on the Internet.
You should also aim to optimise the headings and meta descriptions of your main shop page and any individual category pages for relevant generic searches, and to make sure that the home page of your overall website indicates the presence of your shop as an important feature of the site, and links prominently through to it.
All the above measures should help search engines to direct relevant potential customer traffic to your shop (there are many more things you can do off the website, which are outside the scope of this article).
Google favours sites that are authentic and helpful to the user, so be careful not to over-optimise your content for search keywords in ways that result in it reading unnaturally and awkwardly. You should be guided by how the end user, your customer, will view your site. Does your optimised product description still read well and answer any questions the prospective customer is likely to have about your product? Does it encourage them to make a purchase, rather than putting them off?
Keep product write-ups as factual as possible, prospective buyers will sense over-exaggerated, sales heavy descriptions and are not likely to be impressed by them. While it is fine to explain how a product and its features may be useful or appealing to customers, it is not necessary or generally helpful to sales to insert highly subjective or emotional vocabulary while doing so.
5. Offer high-quality customer support
First-class customer service is generally now expected from online web stores. If you offer anything less, customers will simply go elsewhere, along with perhaps leaving a bad review. Don’t run the risk of tarnishing your brand reputation - you should ensure that the level of customer service you offer is of the highest quality. Make online assistance and relevant information on policies such as shipping destinations you serve readily available throughout the process of using your online store, and offer multiple ways for customers to get in touch, including email. If you run your shop as a full-time business, you should also have a telephone number available in working hours.
Consider displaying an FAQ page that answers common questions your users may have in order to allow them to solve problems they have come up against on a self-help basis, without the need to contact you.
If the size of your business allows it, you may also wish to offer an instant messaging service that will connect your user with a dedicated customer service representative via a live chat. This can be helpful for guiding customers through any part of the buying process they may be having difficulty with, as well as for resolving queries regarding products that have not yet been received or were not as expected. Helpful plug-ins that make this possible for your WooCommerce shop include JivoChat and Tidio.
Clearly, a live chat service is not going to be practical for a small one-person or two-person business, and might not be even for one with up to ten employees, but larger shops such as Amazon regularly provide this service, in some cases in preference to email as queries can be solved quickly and efficiently. There can also be issues with unpredictable surges in demand, leading to queues of customers waiting for a representative to answer them, which can lead to a negative customer experience unless you have adequate staff resources on tap.
If you do use a live chat service, make it clear when this service is available especially where you have overseas customers who will be active outside of regular office hours. Consider how you can accommodate the needs of all your customers out-of-hours.
6. Show customer reviews
Great reviews build trust and enhance the reputation of your business. Show positive customer reviews on your web shop and specific product reviews on related product pages. Users will be put at ease when they see favourable reviews for your products and brand and be more likely to make a purchase on the site. The plug-in, Widgets for Google Reviews, developed by Trustindex gives the option to gather all your reviews from Google, Which?, Facebook, Etsy and more in one place and display on your site.
Build reviews for your business through an after-purchase follow-up email or survey. This can help to build up positive reviews for your business on Google in the first instance. Depending on the nature of your business, you may also want to attract positive reviews on Tripadvisor, Trustpilot or other influential reviews websites. It is also a good way to gain general customer feedback on your business, to help you to identify improvements to be made in the future.
7. Run sales and provide loyalty schemes and rewards
At certain times of year, it can be beneficial to run sales in order to increase turnover and clear out old stocks. Depending on what you are selling, you may find you wish to run regular sales towards the end of the summer (e.g. in August), at the start of the year (typically in January), or to coincide with those offering so-called Black Friday deals (i.e. in November). Or you might wish to only run one-off sales at quieter times.
Sales can be controlled by WooCommerce extensions that allow you to specify discounts in percentage value terms, either throughout your shop or for certain product categories only. It is also possible to specify individual products you wish to put on sale.
Also consider what loyalty programmes or rewards you can offer to users who complete a purchase. Percentage discounts, money off a next purchase or loyalty points for purchases can be good ways to attract customers back to your ecommerce site for repeat purchases. Any loyalty points scheme will need to be carefully considered in terms of the effective monetary value placed on points and what they can be exchanged for by the customer. Typical supermarket loyalty schemes that do not charge a monthly subscription fee offer an effective discount of no more than 1%, but that can still be enough to motivate users to spend more and to loyally return to shopping at the same supermarket.
Referral schemes that pay a fixed sum of money or a percentage commission to the referrer and that further offer a discount to the referee can be a good way to widen your customer base. Use your existing customers and their networks in order to gain new customers. You should, however, carefully consider the cost of customer acquisition in the light of the benefits you propose to avoid running the risk of trading at a loss. For instance, a fixed £25 referral fee would not make economic sense for a referral that leads to sales with a value of £100 or less unless your profit margin is more than 25%.
Sending special offers via email marketing to loyal customers who have opted in to receive marketing emails can be another way to highlight current products that they may have missed and attract them back to spending money in your shop.
8. Ensure tight web shop security and privacy policies
Your ecommerce store will need to be secure in order to retain the confidence of buyers. Users making purchases will be inputting personal information such as addresses, phone numbers and potentially even card details (though these are more likely to be handled by third-party payment providers rather than by your website or your staff directly).
Prospective customers will want reassurance that their personal data is protected. It is now simple (and expected) to have an SSL certificate on your site, and to display a privacy policy page that reassures people that you will not divulge their details to third parties.
In relation to this, it is also important that you exercise your own policies responsibly. When customers trust your business with their names, addresses and telephone numbers in making purchases, you should not reveal these to anyone you know.
It is equally important that anyone else with admin access to your shop, including your web agency (if applicable) abide by your privacy rules and understand the importance of securing the confidential information in the website.
The security of your WooCommerce website can be supported by ensuring that all plug-ins are updated at the earliest opportunity. Many updates involve patches to recently identified security vulnerabilities, so this is important. You should also monitor your site regularly so that you can spot if anything is amiss before most of your customers do, or ensure that there are tools in place which do this automatically.
Installing a firewall will also help to prevent any suspect traffic from accessing your site. The use of strong passwords should be a requirement for all accounts with admin access to your WooCommerce store or the overall website of which it forms a part, and you may also wish to impose it as a requirement on your customers to help protect their accounts from unauthorised log-ins and fraudulent purchases in their names. In many cases, a strong password generator can be used.
Configuring your firewall to block brute-force password-guessing attacks will also help to prevent your site from being compromised by hackers. For example, in the free version of Wordfence for WordPress, it is possible to automatically lock out anyone who makes five incorrect password guesses for up to two days, which is a useful security measure to implement on any WordPress website, including those with WooCommerce stores attached.
You may also wish to enable two-factor authentication on all administrator accounts as an additional protection against unauthorised log-ins beyond that afforded by the password. 2FA (as it is typically known for short) requires a second step to the log-in process, for example sending a code to a telephone number or to your email address, in order to verify that the person making the log-in attempt is authorised to do so.
Some 2FA plug-ins can be sensitive to clock time so it is a good idea to check when you are setting it up that the time set on the server clock matches the real time in order to avoid later log-in problems due to a time mismatch.
9. Be guided by customer journey data
When your WooCommerce shop has been set up, you will not know which product pages are getting visited unless you enable some form of user analytics plug-in on your site. The industry-standard one today is Google Analytics 4, which can offer sophisticated insights into customer behaviour and buying patterns, but is sensitive to customer opt-outs of cookie permissions and may provide only very partial data when run on a site with a cookie options bar as a result.
A fairly sophisticated free alternative to GA4 that runs without sending any data to the USA or to any external location is the WordPress plug-in Independent Analytics. Because it is fully GDPR-compliant, it can legitimately be run on the website for your WooCommerce store without the use of a cookie bar, leading to no loss in traffic from opt-outs, which is a major advantage in terms of giving you accurate data on page browsing.
Whatever analytics plug-in you may choose, the information it records and presents to you can be used to your business advantage. For example, it can help you to identify which pages on your website are serving as effective landing pages from search engines. Also, evidence of low engagement on certain pages can guide you to modify those pages with a view to improving user experience. Similarly, evidence of customers dropping out of the purchase journey after a particular screen can guide you to amend the user interface at that point in the customer journey in order to improve sales conversion rates. Indeed, in GA4 and some other analytics tools you can track the entire sequence of steps taken by each customer and identify at what point they left the site, which can usefully direct you to focus your efforts on improving the pages from which they dropped out with a view to increasing both the sales conversion rate and the total browsing time of future visitors to your website.
Both GA4 and Independent Analytics will automatically record views of all individual product pages. You can also set up custom events to track actions such as items added to cart and completed purchases. This way, you can gather important data on how your customers interact and use your web store.
10. Choose a suitable theme
If you aren't having a custom design done for your website, there is a range of themes available to choose from for your WooCommerce shop. Some are free, while others charge an annual fee and tend to be tailored to a variety of different specific service uses, so look for ones which may be a good match to your type of business. Two of the biggest sites selling WooCommerce themes are Template Monster and ThemeFores/Evanto.
When choosing your theme, consider what is included and how much data it will require to be loaded into memory each time a page displayed in that theme is accessed by a user of your website. The total amount of data that needs to be downloaded in connection with a specific theme is sometimes known as the ‘weight’ of the theme. In combination with the actual content of the page, such as photographs and text, it will have an impact on your page loading speed. A longer page load time could increase bounce rates, causing a decrease in sales on your site, as well as impacting on your visibility in search engines.
You should also check how the theme behaves at different page widths and on a variety of mobile devices. This helps to ensure that your web shop is responsive and offers a good quality experience across all devices.
WooCommerce for Business
WooCommerce allows businesses easily to start trading with an online web shop. But with so much competition in the online market place, opening your web store is just the start of your ecommerce journey. You will also need to work on making it visible.
Using our tips above will help you to maximise the potential of WooCommerce for your business, increase your sales and keep your customers coming back.
At GWS, we specialise in developing and maintaining successful ecommerce websites with WooCommerce stores. If you would like to enquire about the use of WooCommerce for your online selling needs, or about setting up an ecommerce store on any platform, please send us a message or give us a call. We would be happy to advise and help with your project.
