WooCommerce is a great plugin for running a web store on WordPress. It is quite a versatile plugin that can be used for a variety of other purposes for some reasons. Sales are classic promotions for online store. WooCommerce has built in smart sales options that come out of the box.

In this article, we’ll go over a few really smart built-in sales features for WooCommerce beginners.

What is WooCommerce? What’s it for?

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that is designed for selling products and services. With this plugin you can sell digital and physical products, manage inventory and shipping, take secure payments, and sort taxes automatically.

You keep 100% control over all your data of your store, it support mobile devices and the potential to scale your sites is limitless.

WooCommerce is the best designed and most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. In fact, it’s now the most popular eCommerce solution across all websites, powering more than 42%, and counting, of all online stores.

Let’s see why WooCommerce is the best option for selling products and services on your website.

Why WooCommerce is Perfect For eCommerce Startups

So, you know the answer what is WooCommerce. Second question: Why woocommerce is perfect? Launched in late September 2011, WooCommerce now becomes the most popular eCommerce platform, boasting over 1.6M downloads from across the globe.

Just like WordPress, WooCommerce is also free and open source. So despite its premium feel, it’s completely free for anyone to download, use and modify.

Although it’s incredibly powerful and extensible, it’s also easy for beginners to use. With WooCommerce, anyone can easily set up and run a professional online store from their WordPress website. You really don’t need to know any programming language and coding at all.

So, let’s take a look at just how WooCommerce fits the requirements.

It’s Free

There is no shortage of high quality eCommerce platform currently on offer, all of which endeavor to help merchants sell online easily and innovatively. Most of the time, the only drawback is that they all come at a price/subscription fees. WooCommerce is exceptional.

WooCommerce is completely free to download. Yet, despite being free and open-source platform, WooCommerce offers extensive features just out of the box, whilst also being extremely flexible both by nature, and via the additional of plugins.

Easy to install and set up

Installing WooCommerce is as simple as installing any other WordPress plugin to your website. It’s available to download for free from the WordPress plugin respiratory, which is accessible right from your website admin.

Huge Flexibility

The biggest benefits of WooCommerce is that merchants using the platform can exercise a whole lot of flexibility with their products, without having to know too much about the technical knowledge of things.

Products can be categorized, given sale prices, independent attributes, and many more. Additionally, WooCommerce stores are capable of selling physical, digital, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate/external products.

More Than eCommerce

WooCommerce doesn’t force users to go beyond their comfort zone when building their eCommerce store, at the same time, it opens the door for more than just eCommerce.

For example, WooCommerce users can build a fully functioning online store within a professional website, alongside an integrated blog. All of these features are harnessed in one place, and presented together seamlessly.

Powerful eCommerce features out of the box

WooCommerce comes with some amazing set of features right out of the box. Here are just a few of these:

• Sell any type of product you like: physical, digital or even affiliate
• Add unlimited products and images
• Add categories, tags and attributes (including size or color) to any product to make them easier to find and search
• Show product ratings and customer reviews on product pages, including a ‘Verified Owner’ label
• Customize online store location with currency, language and measurement units
• Product sorting and filtering lets visitors sort products by popularity, newness, rating, price or attribute
• Embed products and checkout on any page
• Geo-location auto-detects customers’ addresses to simplify shipping and tax calculations
• Choose how you’d like to process payments: use popular payment gateway providers such as Stripe and PayPal, credit cards, Direct Bank Transfer, checks or Cash on Delivery
• Choose shipping options and restrict options based on customer location
• Manage orders and customers with one-click refunds, customer accounts, and guest checkout

Vast Customization Options

WooCommerce is a rigid platform. There is a lot of room to customize and tweak your online store to make it unique. 

Currently, users can choose around 39 different WooCommerce enabled themes – many of them are free, via the WooThemes Store. Once a theme has been selected, you can then work on changing pre-set CSS styles and color themes, tweaking the code and experimenting with the special features which each theme offers.

Analytics Tool Made Easy

Analytic tool is the core tool that is used by any website owner. Many eCommerce startups may not know how to use an analytics tool to their website, nor they know what statistics need focused analysis. But WooCommerce has this features.

The built in analytics tool makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. Figures like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all clearly presented via graphs, without the user ever having to leave their admin panel.

Plugins

There are thousands of WooCommerce Plugins available, some of which are totally free, and some of which require a fee. From these plugins store, one can search and find applications relating to accounting, payment gateways, marketing, reporting and more.

Here is a small video below, made by WooCommerce, answers “What is WooCommerce”?

Get started with WordPress and WooCommerce

As we’ve mentioned, WooCommerce makes it easy to start an online store. But it doesn’t work alone to build. You’ll need the following four things to get started:

1. Hosting and a domain name
2. A WordPress powered website
3. The WooCommerce plugin
4. A WooCommerce compatible WordPress theme

How To Install WooCommerce

Installing WooCommerce is as simple as installing any other plugin from the WordPress Plugin sore.

From your WordPress dashboard you have to go to Plugins > Add New and then search for WooCommerce.

When you will get the plugin in the list. Simply click the Install Now option.

Once the installation has completed click Activate Plugin.

This will take you to the WooCommerce basic Settings page, which requires one final step before the plugin is completely installed. At the top of the screen there is a large notification asking you to install WooCommerce Pages:

Clicking on the Install button will create all of the necessary pages for your online store. After adding your pages, you’ll be redirected to the WooCommerce welcome screen:

Now, the plugin is fully installed and you should check the WooCommerce System Status to ensure that there are no immediate problems.

You can find the system status under WooCommerce > System Status. If there are any problems then you will get information on how to resolve them.

CONFIGURING WOOCOMMERCE

Now it’s time to begin configuring your web store. In the WooCommerce > Settings menu you will get numerous options. Let’s have a look at the options to configure under each tab.

Smart Sales Options Built Into WooCommerce

Hope you have successfully installed and configured your WooCommerce store. Here are the ways you can attract and delight customers with sales using options baked right into WooCommerce.

Scheduled Products discounts

One of the easiest ways to appeal to customers is with an instant discount on products. With WooCommerce store you can schedule product discount to increase sales.

You can easily set up the necessary product sales price in WooCommerce by clicking on any of your products and scrolling down to Product data. Under the General tab, product’s Regular Price, as well as a Sale Price.

If you add a Sale Price, this will appear on your WooCommerce store with the Regular Price crossed out (the exact display may vary depending on your theme).

This will display as the discount in front of shoppers during purchasing the product.

Big promotion WooCommerce sales require a great deal of preparation. So, if you want to run the sale for the future, you can schedule it for later. Just click on the Schedule button under product data tab and enter the date.

Once you click on the Schedule link two new fields will popup. The start date and end date.

Note that the sale date depends on the timezone that you have set up for your online store. To check your timezone settings go to Settings > General > Timezone. So, the start and the end date of the sale will be applied according to that timezone.

A Surprise “Flash” sale

Customers most likely expect holiday discounts and seasonal promotions. But if you don’t offer discounts other than holiday season, your customers might begin waiting to to get the discount.

But the fact is every promotion is not to be planned or marketed in advance. The element of surprise or so called “Flash sale” can be a powerful thing, and can be just as delightful than a holiday treat.

So, using the same settings as above, consider adding discounts to your products. But do it in the style as a “flash sale,” where the discounts only last for a day at most, aren’t announced in advanced, and are limited to specific products.

Set up one day sale price in the settings prior to running the WooCommerce sales and on the day of the event, notify your store’s visitors with a social media announcement, email notification, or a simple banner at home-page.

Discount on the Entire Order, via Coupon Code

WooCommerce comes with a powerful coupon creation and management system, and also it comes with a huge variety of options for extending discounts. 

WooCommerce store owners can create coupons for their customers in the admin panel by navigating to WooCommerce > Coupons.

The best ways to get started with sales in a newly build store is with a basic coupon code. These codes are usually discount between 10% and 30% off an order’s total (excluding shipping and tax charge).

Some customers like these types of discounts because they’re straightforward. They only have to type the code in the coupon code and click apply, instead of worrying about which products are eligible or if their total purchase amount is high.

Make sure that it is easy for the customers to find the coupons, maybe distribute them via email or other marketing channels.

Cart Discounts for Orders that Meets Specific Conditions

Since, you’re adding a coupon code to your store, you might have notice the “Minimum spend” and “Maximum spend” filters under the “Usage Restriction tab”.

These features allow you to create entirely different coupons that can only be applied to orders that meet specific conditions — say, orders that are minimum $100 and above, or less than $51000.

On the minimum spend side, this is a smart way to give the savings opportunity to customers while pushing them to spend more. If you know that your average order value is $45, you could offer a code for $5 off orders $50 and up. That’s an incentive for customers to spend more, and a minimum of $5 is more than usual for you.

On the other hand for maximum spend, this can help you avoid situations where a discount could potentially cut into your profit margins. 25% off $250 in clothing might not be so bad, but 25% off $3,000 in appliances.

A Category Specific Discount

The built-in WooComemrce coupon feature allows you to set up various restrictions for coupon use. Such restrictions is category-specific coupons.

You can set up coupons to only specific categories or even specific products. This is especially important when you sell many different types of products in your store. In the case of a general cart-applied coupon, a customer gets the same discount percentage on all products. Which can cut into your profit margins.

Free shipping

Free shipping is the best tool for boosting your conversion rates. When customers see this offer they can save up on delivery they are much more likely to purchase. According to a surveys it is one of the most important incentives for customers along with the price.

In WooCommerce it is easy to set up the free shipping option for your shop. And the platform provides a couple of ways to do that.

• Create a coupon code that applies free shipping. Combine this option with the order minimum value restriction (or other conditions) and the orders will come to your way. All you need to check the free shipping option.
• Check the free shipping as an available shipping option in the settings. You can apply free shipping to all shipping zones or specific zones.

Customer-specific Discount

Another great coupon feature is provide discount to specific customers by a list of their emails. In the same coupon restrictions tab, you can add customers emails who will be able to use the coupon exclusively.

Just simply add all emails of customers and separate them by commas. You can also use asterisk to add all emails that contain some specific data. For example, *@gmail.com will allow all customers with Gmail addresses to use the coupon.

This is a great option to provide membership-like discounts to customers who spend a lot of time in your store or to say thank you to customers who leave reviews about your shop online.

Additionally, you can set up specific customer discount with this option. Basically, it is customizable, all you need is just some info about your customers and their email address.

WooCommerce Smart Options for Sales: Final Words

Whether you’re just starting out and haven’t looked this features yet, want to keep your discounts as simple as possible, or are just looking for alternative ideas, these seven tips will give you the power and flexibility to run sales without needing any plugin to your store.

You may also like: Create a Multi-Vendor Store Using WooCommerce and Dokan