Everyone who are running online store with WooCommerce, wants to sell more products to get revenue. It’s not so easy to do so by simply setting up some product pages and configuring the plugin’s basic settings. You have to do everything to show off your products in the best possible light.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the best possible ways to optimize your WooCommerce products, in order to encourage more sales.
An Overview of WooCommerce
There is no doubt that WordPress is the world’s best Content Management System (CMS). With a single plugin WordPress can be an excellent platform on which to build a web store.
WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that allows WordPress users to build a web store. It is one of the best WordPress eCommerce plugin for building and growing an online business.
WooCommerce is developed by WordPress theme shop WooThemes. They hired Mike Jolley and James Koster to work on a fork of Open source WordPress plugin Jigoshop. Which later re-branded as WooCommerce. Due to its tremendous success and promise WooCommerce was acquired by Automatic, parent organization of WordPress for $30 million.
Here’s a quick overview of WooCommerce’s key features (as stated on the WooCommerce page):
- Powered by trust
- Content at the core
- A modular system
- Sell anything
- No Limits
- Worldwide community
These features only gives you the surface of WooCommerce’s functionality. While it covers the requirements of many online stores straight out of the box, when you consider the numerous premium plugins available, you should be able to build a store that completely suit your requirements.
What Can You Do With Woocommerce?
It became very popular among WordPress users because it requires minimum input to process orders, cart, inventory, taking payments, sort taxes & shipping. One of the major advantage of running an online store using WooCommerce is having a wide variety of useful extensions or plugins at your disposal. Whenever you need an extra functionality just search in the plugin option, you will get the solution.
How To Install WooCommerce
Before installing WooCommerce, you have to make sure that your current theme (Avada theme) is WooCommerce compatible. If you’re going to setting up a store, we highly recommend to use a premium theme. This is just to ensure that your theme is continually compatible with the latest version of WooCommerce. Also, if you choose a premium theme there is custom styling added to make the shop and all of your WooCommerce widgets look great.
Assume that you have the WooCommerce compatible theme. Now it’s time to install. 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.
General
As you would expect, this tab gives you some of the basic configuration for your web store. The options in this field include location, api and currency options.
Products
This field covers all of your many product settings. This includes all related thing with products like measurement units, review options, product and shop options, product image cropping, inventory options and downloadable products settings.
Tax
You can set up Tax in this option. There are lots of options for calculating tax rates, and they are complicated. Please read this before you dig into this section.
Checkout
You can set your cart and checkout pages, add terms and conditions, and select your payment gateways in this section. Bank transfer, check, COD, PayPal and credit cards are the built-in option in WooCommerce. There are plenty of plugins and extensions available through third parties to add additional payment gateways.
In checkout page you can enable coupons also. Coupons and discount codes can be a fantastic way to give loyal customers a reason to purchase with you again. Many online stores offer discounts to new members or returning customer discounts and it’s something worth considering.
Shipping
Here, you can configure every aspect of the shipping process for your store. You will also get the shipping calculations display options, you can enable and configure the following shipping options:
Choose your available shipping methods, set flat rates, enable free shipping, add international shipping options, and also choose special settings for local pickup or delivery. You can enable all of these options individually and configure the every detail of the shipping methods you choose to use.
Accounts
The accounts page provides options for setting up your user accounts page, adding custom URLs for important account pages and enabling/disabling accounts and registration.
This option allows you to configure the email options and email templates used when communication with your customers. The emails can be configured for various options such as new, processing or complete orders as well as invoices, password resets and more. You can also choose custom colors.
Webhooks
Webhooks are used to trigger some events, like opening a popup for a coupon code when customers add a product to their shopping cart. This section makes it much easier for WooCommerce to work with 3rd party plugins that you may want to use to extend the functionality of WooCommerce.
Adding Your Products
Now you have configured your store, it’s time to begin adding your products. The product creation process is exactly the same as creating a normal blog post in WordPress.
You can create categories and add tags and shipping classes to group your products. You can also add the specific shipping requirements. There is an option to add additional attributes to your products such as colors or multiple sizes.
When you add a product you will get a page similar to the standard post page with a few additional sections.
Product Data
In this section you can configure everything about the product. There are four product types available for you to choose from, they are: simple, grouped, external/affiliate or variable. The simple product type is the only one option that allows you to make the product either a digital download or virtual product.
You should make sure that each product has an SKU, which is a unique identifier for the stock management options. This section is where you can set the price of the product, any additional attributes the product has and the stock management options for the product.
There is also a fabulous section that allows you to link other products to allow you to up-sell and cross-sell to your customers. This is a great way to push your customers to buying additional products from you. The eCommerce giant Amazon is using this technique and it’s worth spending time looking at how they approach the product linking to improve your own sales.
Product Short Description
This is the bit of content that will appear just next to your product image on the actual product page. This is a great option to add a couple quick sentences or a bulleted list about your product’s features.
Product Gallery
This is the gallery of your product images. It’s usually a good idea to add a few snapshots of your product whatever it is, you are selling. So customers can check it out before they make their decision to purchase.
Reporting
After your webstore is live and you have sold some products it’s worth looking at the reporting functions of WooCommerce. You can found this option in the WooCommerce > Reports menu.
In reports you will get the details of your sales by day, month, product, category, and also your top sellers and earners. You will also get the reports for the discount coupon use. You can monitor your low and out of stock products also.
These reports are well enough to stay on top of every aspect of your business. Report function not only allow you to find out your best sellers, it also lets you see which products aren’t selling. Such information can help you to make profitable decisions. Knowing all of this information is an important aspect of running a successful eCommerce business and WooCommerce provides you with all of the data you need.
Ways to Sell More Products with WooCommerce
So far we’ve talked about what you can do with WooCommerce, How to install and configure WooCommerce, and Add Products. Now the key points discussion, How to sell more products with WooCommerce.
Here are the ways:
1. Display Product Attributes and Variations with Details
The common tendency of most of the people who want to purchase is to do research before they come to the final decision. So, you have to prepare your store considering this common tendency.
When potential customer or any people will visit your eCommerce store, you have to be ready with all the necessary information of your products that they might looking for. If they will not get the all charming information of your products they may head to another store.
So the very first way to sell more products is to fill out as much information as you can for all of your products. Give suitable product title, add a description, categories, tags and various price details. Most often the store owner forget to add attributes and variation.
You can get these settings in the Product data section of each product page:
Product attributes may be the short description of its primary characteristics. For example, product attributes may include its color and the material it’s made out of. Once added, this information will be displayed on the product page and your customer can see this information and give them some quick and vital details about the item:
After adding attributes, you can also set up product variations. These are very useful when a single product is offered in multiple types like various colors or sizes. They’ll also be shown on the product page, and the customer can choose the options they want from the drop-down menus:
You can also include different pricing information and other details for each product variation. That makes this feature a must for stores offering customizable products – benefiting both you and your customers.
2. Add an Image Gallery for Each Product
Images are very powerful tools to convince your customers to purchase from you if the images are real. Customers place a lot of significance on product imagery, using it as a key deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. If you properly utilize the power of images, it can increase your overall conversion rate.
Each product should have a primary image, which you can add in the Product image section in your WordPress dashboard. However, you can also add a full set of photographs using the Image gallery section:
If you include multiple images in different angles and in various styles, and enable you to display it both in-use and in a more staged setting, it will be more useful for convincing. Providing a product gallery with different images helps potential customers get a more complete idea of what the product looks like, and how it can fit into their lives.
Actually creating your product gallery is simple – you can just upload whatever photos you like, and rearrange them as you wish. The final appearance will depend on your theme, but it will probably look something like this:
It’s important to note that you have to upload these images in both original and high-quality version. In order to minimize the impact of so many media files on your WooCommerce store’s performance, it’s a good idea to optimize all the images you use.
3. Enable Customer Reviews
When convincing customers to make purchases, images are one of the most powerful tools. However, customer reviews are also just as influential. Consumers place a huge importance on reviews from real buyers, using them to judge whether or not a product will meet their expectation.
Therefore, it’s the best option to let people post reviews of your products on your eCommerce store. You can find the Review option under WooCommerce > Settings > Products:
This settings will let you enable reviews, and also decide who can post them. If you click on the check box of ‘Verified owners’ option then only the customer who have purchased the product from your site can review. Although this option will reduce the total number of reviews, but it can enhance your review section’s credibility. Since people will know that all of the customer comments or reviews are not spam or fake.
WooCommerce review system is functional but basic. You can also consider plugin like Customer reviews for WooCommerce to improve it’s functionality:
After installing this plugin, you can view all your customer reviews in a dedicated tab, and manage them easily. Additionally, you’ll get access to a wide range of settings:
Most importantly, you can set up email reminders to encourage customers to submit reviews. You can also personalize the messages you send. This is an excellent way to get lots of positive ratings on your product pages.
4. Provide Support via Live Chat
If you complete the tasks we’ve discussed so far, customers should have get most of the information they’ll need to choose whether they want to make a purchase. Still, there is a questions. How well and quickly you provide satisfactory answers to your customer regarding their queries.
Naturally, you’ll want to provide a contact form somewhere prominent in your store. This way you can get the information of your visitors such as phone numbers and email addresses. However, customers are impatient, so it’s smart to give them some more flexibility.
The best way to do that is to offer a live chat option:
This will let customers ask questions and get answers right away and reducing the chance that they’ll simply leave your store. You can also use this feature to increase sales on your WooCommerce store, such as by suggesting related products.
If you want to add live chat option to your eCommerce store, you’ll need to use a dedicated plugin. LiveChat for WooCommerce plugin is a good one to start:
This is very simple to set up and use. It can be mentioned that although the plugin itself is free, you will need to sign up for the LiveChat service in order to use it over the long term.
5. Offer Plenty of Payment Gateway Options
So far, we’ve been looking at techniques that encourage customers to click on ‘buy’ button. Of course, your job doesn’t finish there. Each potential customer has to go to the checkout process successfully, to get the results of all your hard work.
There are various reasons to lose customers in the middle stage of the checkout process. Fortunately, WooCommerce provides a easy-to-use system by default. However, a long or confusing checkout process(woocommerce checkout add ons can be used) isn’t the only reason customers abandon carts, there might be another reason to leave because you don’t offer enough payment gateways.
A payment gateway is simply a method to accept payments through your site. Everyone has their own choice to pay for products online. Some people like to use credit cards, while others may stick with PayPal or other payment option. You can’t offer all payment gateway on your site, but the more your store support, the more options your customers have to choose from.
By default, WooCommerce supports the payment gateway: PayPal, Stripe, direct bank transfers, and offline payments.
You will get some more payment gateway option from WooCommerce Plugin store.
There are a few payment gateway options you can include for free, such as Amazon Pay and Square. Other gateways may require a one-time payment, or monthly/yearly fees. Ensure to research each gateway carefully before signing up, so you understand its terms and requirements.
How to Sell More Products with WooCommerce: Final Words
WooCommerce is very easy to set up and you don’t need to rush out a basic storefront. Running a successful eCommerce online store requires planning, time, and commitment. Additionally some effective strategies are easy to use and very accessible.
If you’re looking to maximize your sales with WooCommerce, you have to start:
- Displaying product attributes and variations with details.
- Add an image gallery for each product.
- Enable customer reviews.
- Provide support via live chat.
- Offering plenty of payment gateway options.
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