Building your own e-commerce store has never been easier. As a result, online retail has also become highly competitive. You can build a great website with all of the great tools we have available today, but it is important to know the a few of the basic practices to help drive sales and traffic to your store.
This is part 1 of 2 blog posts that will cover how to optimize your WooCommerce store. Our second blog post will cover onsite SEO optimization for your store. We hope that going over these two topics will help your store become more successful and more profitable.
Sales Optimization Tips
Improve User Experience
User experience (UX) is just a fancy way of saying “how easy is this store to use?” Is it simple to find what I want and buy it? It is a simple question that can have some very complicated answers, and it is easy over time for a simple and easy process to become complicated as you add more products and features for your store. This is a very general tip, but it is a good one to start off with because it is the post of the rest of the tips in this blog.
Improving sales begins with making it easier for people to come and buy your products.
Keep The Checkout Process Simple
A complicated and lengthy checkout process lead to cart abandonment. Make sure your checkout process is streamlined and easy to navigate. If there is no shipping, jumping straight to checkout might be a good idea.
If possible, you should also consider using a one-page checkout process to make it easier for your customers to check out. There are a lot of great plugins for WooCommerce, you can start by reviewing at a plugin offered by WooCommerce directly.
Optimize for Mobile
In 2023, it seems silly to have to mention that your mobile website is important. Most non-corporate internet traffic is viewed on phones and its obvious you must care about how well your site functions for phones and tables. However, there are still many parts of even big store websites where mobile functionality is overlooked. Buttons and forms can not be formatted correctly and you are required to scroll. Sometimes popups are tested for desktop but not mobile and are not easily clickable. Make sure to check, especially for any new features you add to your website!
Use High-Quality Images
You should use high quality photos throughout your site. Grainy images or bad stock photos are an easy way to turn off potential customers. Images of your products are often the first thing that catches a customer’s eye.
Make sure to use the highest-quality images for your products in the best possible way. On your homepage and collections pages, highly stylized photos that show your products in use can be a great idea and will add some design flair for your site.
For the product photos, however, photos should clearly display what the item looks like in detail. The product under a bright light with a white background is ubiquitous because at the buying stage, you want to offer every visual detail that a potential website buyer wants to see. The more angles and details the better with no other visually distracting elements.
Include Customer Reviews
A major factor in an online purchasing decision is reading the online reviews to understand the benefits and potential drawbacks for a product. As a result, customer reviews are one of the most important parts of your site and product pages.
WooCommerce has a customer review feature already and it will work just fine to start collecting reviews. But if you have enough customers to really need to start gathering reviews consistently and in an organized manner, you might want to consider subscribing to software.
Review software can mark a verified buyer on each review on your site, allow for upvoting and downvoting reviews, allow the customers to upload photos and help you manage emailing the customer to request reviews. All of these features are useful for automating review generation as well as helping to manage reviews coming in.
No matter what you end up picking to use, you should build some sort of plan around obtaining reviews from your customers. Some of the most popular customer review software includes CusRev and Yotpo. New software is coming out all the time, you should have plenty to pick from that will give your customers a great experience both with reading about your products and with leaving feedback.
Offer Discounts
Everyone loves a good deal, and offering discounts and promotions can be an effective way to drive sales. With WooCommerce, you can easily create and manage coupons and discounts for your customers.
You can also use plugins like WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing to offer personalized discounts based on customer behavior and purchase history. This category of plugins for WooCommerce has so many options
Offer Free or Flat Rate Shipping
Free shipping is a powerful incentive that can encourage customers to make a purchase. Consider offering free shipping on all orders, or on orders over a certain amount, to increase your average order value. Flat rate shipping can also encourage people to buy, as shipping costs added onto a cart during the checkout process is a common reason for cart abandonment.
If you do decide to implement this, make sure all customers are aware about your fantastic shipping rates. You can put it in a site-wide announcement bar that makes it clear from when the customer visits your page that you have a shipping discount.
You can also clearly indicate it in your product descriptions / features and note it in your shopping cart, where you can put a reminder for people adding items that there won’t be a huge shipping fee added to their order.
Have Product Bundles
Product bundles are a great way to encourage customers to buy more. Consider creating product bundles that offer a discount when customers buy a set of related products together. This works particularly well if you offer a lot of variants like colors, flavors or things that generally sell in sets like a spatula and a cake pan. It is a convenient user feature that also helps to increase your store average order value.
Offer Coupons
Coupons and discounts for a store can vary from the very simple (10% off all purchases!) to the more complicated, with discounts based on minimum purchases of exact SKUs or a minimum total purchase of an exact type of item, to a buy 5 get 2 free-type discount. There are lots of options for how you can offer discounts, and you can test out the many options for discounting plugins available for your store.
Conclusion
There are lots of way you can try to boost sales on your store. Try and test them to see which ones work for your customers and product offerings. The ecosystem for WooCommerce and WordPress will offer you lots of options. Check back again soon for our follow up article for e-commerce stores!
