Category Archives:
WooCommerce Archives

Customer retention is key to building a successful and sustainable eCommerce business. Loyal customer spend more and visit more often. They are more likely to promote your store to their network. Customer retention is also less expensive than customer acquisition. Investing in customer retention and loyalty is just as important as filling the purchase funnel with new customers.

WooCommerce includes many of the features an online retailer needs to build a thriving business, but there are many WooCommerce extensions and WordPress plugins that can help you go the extra mile where customer retention is concerned.

WooCommerce UPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label

A generous return policy can make a big difference where customer loyalty is concerned. Online retail is inherently risky for customers: they can’t see the product until it’s delivered. The easier it is for them to make a return, the happier they are to take the risk. From the retailer’s perspective, a return is a lost sale and an added cost, but a store that offers an onerous returns experience is likely to lose the customer for good, along with any future revenue they may have contributed.

WooCommerce is well-equipped for handling returns, but an extension like WooCommerce UPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label, which can be used to print returns labels to include in the delivery, makes for a more pleasant returns experience.

WooCommerce Points and Rewards

Loyalty programs are a tried-and-tested customer retention strategy. By awarding points for purchases and offering discounts for points, a retailer gives customers an incentive to keep shopping. Loyalty programs influence shoppers to spend more in return for points and to return to the store to benefit from the discount they earned.

The WooCommerce Points and Rewards extension adds a configurable points system to your store. Points can be rewarded for purchases and for actions such as writing a review. The store owner decides how purchases convert into points and the maximum discounts that can be applied.

Olark Instant Chat

Rewards encourage customer loyalty, but communication is even more important. The best product page copy can leave customers uncertain about whether a product is right for them. Many sales are lost when a customer’s doubt overcomes their desire to buy. Instant chat is the most effective and efficient way to connect with customers who have questions.

With Olark, it’s straightforward to integrate instant chat into your WooCommerce pages via its official WordPress integration.

WPHelpDesk

Instant chat assuages customer doubts, but what about post-sale support? For that, a ticketing system is often the best option. Ticketing systems are built to manage and organize customer support requests. WPHelpDesk, which offers an excellent WooCommerce integration, provides a full-featured help desk with support forms that can be integrated into WooCommerce customer panels and order pages. Support requests are associated with the customer and their purchases in the ticket interface.

With these plugins and extensions, your store can offer a simple returns process, reward customers for their loyalty, and ensure that they get all the support they need before and after their purchase.

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Making it easier to log in and check out is the most effective way to reduce cart abandonment. Social media logins allow shoppers to quickly log in using their social media accounts, reducing the amount of work shoppers have to do to buy your products.

Most eCommerce customers don’t use a password manager; they should, but they don’t. It is common for shoppers to forget passwords. WooCommerce provides password reset functionality for just this eventuality, but it’s a hassle and it introduces friction into the buying process.

Anything that makes it harder to shop hurts sales. Anything a WooCommerce store owner can do to make shopping easier increases sales. Social media logins remove the friction associated with authenticating on a WooCommerce store.

How do social media logins work?

Social media logins are a form of single sign-on (SSO). The user signs in on one domain, and that domain is used to authenticate them on other domains that implement single sign-on. You’re most likely to have come across social logins via sites that invite you to “Sign in with Facebook” or “Sign in with Google”, both of which run single sign-on services.

Single sign-on works by transferring an authentication token from the domain of the single sign-on provider. When the shopper arrives at a WooCommerce store, they choose which service they would like to use to sign in. They are redirected to the SSO provider’s domain, which sends the token that authenticates them on the WooCommerce store.

The shopper only has to remember one set of login details. Because they are almost certainly logged in on Facebook or Google already, the sign-in process is nearly instantaneous.

Adding social media logins to WooCommerce

There are several single sign-on plugins for WooCommerce, but Nextend Social Login is among the most popular. Once installed, the plugin integrates with a store’s existing log in interface. It supports many of the most common social platforms that provide an SSO service, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and VKontakte. A particularly useful feature is the ability to link existing WooCommerce accounts to social media accounts, so that all shoppers benefit from social media logins.

While social media logins are great for B2B retailers, enterprise and B2B customers may prefer to use SAML single sign-on, which can integrate with a business’s preferred identity provider. WooCommerce can quite easily be hooked up to a SAML SSO platform with the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On (SSO) plugin, which provides SSO integration with major identity providers, including Google Apps, ADFS, Salesforce, Azure, IBM, Oracle, and many more.

Social media logins are easy to implement, so why not give shoppers the option to log in with their preferred social platform. Social media logins give shoppers a frustration-free experience and your store benefits from fewer cart abandonments.

 

 

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Towards the end of last month, WooCommerce 3.5 was released with new features for users and developers. As a minor release, WooCommerce 3.5 is compatible with sites running WooCommerce 3.0 or greater. There should be no plugin or theme incompatibility problems, but it’s always better to test before upgrading your live site. Hostdedi Cloud users can take advantage of our dev site creation tool to instantly and securely deploy a testing site.

REST API v3

The WooCommerce REST API provides a powerful programmatic interface for controlling a WooCommerce site and accessing its data. The third iteration of the API is the major new feature of WooCommerce 3.5. It includes a host of new endpoints and expands the features of some existing endpoints. Among the new endpoints are those for creating, listing, and updating product reviews; refunding line items; and new report endpoints for getting order, product, customer, and review counts.

Minor Tweaks For Retailers

As usual, the WooCommerce team has provided a handful of improvements to the store owner experience. One of the most interesting is the addition of a low-stock threshold for individual products. It’s now possible to trigger a low-stock notification when stock levels go below a configurable threshold. Low-stock notifications were already possible with extensions, but it’s useful to have such an important feature built into WooCommerce itself.

WooCommerce’s transactional emails have been modernized. These emails are sent when users complete an action on a store, such as placing an order, or for other notifications. The copy was getting a little stale and has been brought up-to-date. Other improvements include the ability to export products by category using the CSV exporter.

Good News For Developers and WooCommerce Professionals

In a welcome move, WooCommerce has integrated the Action Scheduler library into WooCommerce core. As the name suggests, the library is used to schedule actions, such as subscription renewals, by many popular WooCommerce extensions. By including the library in WooCommerce, all developers can access a “robust, scalable background processing solution.”

But perhaps the most interesting addition is support for a pair of feature plugins: wc-admin and Custom Product Tables. Feature plugins are used to develop new features which may later be integrated into WooCommerce. The wc-admin feature plugin is being used to develop a modern JavaScript-driven WooCommerce admin interface, an experience that meshes better with the new Gutenberg editor.

The Custom Product Tables feature plugin is focused on improving database performance by using database tables that are specifically designed for eCommerce stores. The results are promising, with a 30% speed boost on page loads in testing. Once again, the feature plugin is being developed and should not be run on a production store.

It should be stressed that feature plugins are not ready for use on a production store. They are in the early stages of active development. But if you are interested in what developers are considering for the future of WooCommerce, it’s worth taking a look.

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Slow-loading pages and unresponsive interface elements are kryptonite for online stores. Shoppers expect a pleasant experience, and there is nothing pleasant about looking at a loading indicator for ten seconds or trudging through a multi-step checkout process that takes what seems like forever to load each page.

A fast WooCommerce store depends on dozens of hardware and software components firing in the same direction. Performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting provides the store’s main engine, but configuration mistakes and software bugs can throw sand into every page load and user interaction.

This article looks at why load testing can help to keep your WooCommerce store optimized, by finding areas for improvement and change.

What Is WooCommerce Performance and Load Testing?

Performance testing measures how a WooCommerce store performs on an ordinary day. How quickly do the home and product pages load? How long does it take for the shopping cart to be displayed after the user clicks the checkout button? Performance testing provides a baseline answer to these questions.

Load testing looks at performance under pressure. It answers questions such as these: How many concurrent users can a WooCommerce store support before performance becomes unacceptably slow? How does the store perform when traffic peaks during a sale? Load testing provides information about how your store performs under real-world conditions.

Why Performance and Load Test WooCommerce?

Performance and load testing put a WooCommerce store through its paces, revealing opportunities for streamlining and performance improvements.

By testing your WooCommerce site, you’re able to see how your hosting environment, application, and any plugins you have installed will work under pressure. You’ll then be able to see what areas need improvement – if any.

How to Performance Test a WooCommerce Store

The simplest way to load test a WooCommerce site is to time how long important pages take to load. The Google Chrome browser — and other browsers — include several tools to time page-loads and identify the causes of latency.

To do this in Chrome, head to the “More Tools” entry of the Chrome menu and choose “Developer Tools”. There are a couple of interesting tabs in this interface: Performance and Audits.

The Performance tab provides load-time measurements and a waterfall diagram that displays the page’s components and how long they take to load. This can give you a clear indication of what page elements can be optimized to increase your WooCommerce store’s performance.

In the Audit tab, you will find Lighthouse, a comprehensive performance testing tool that provides a wealth of information, including performance optimization suggestions. Once you’ve navigated to this tab, simply click “Perform an audit” to start the test. You will be given results in relation to four categories.

• Performance
• Accessibility
• Best Practices
• Progressive Web app

Under each category, you will be provided with a list of audits you have failed and audits you have passed. This gives you a great springboard for implementing more advanced page optimizations.

Alternate Tools for Testing WooCommerce

If you would prefer not to use a tool from Google that requires the Chrome browser, take a look at Pingdom tools, WebPageTest, or GTMetrix.
With these tools, you can change the location you want page requests to come from. This allows you to test the speed of your site worldwide. You can also add advanced testing conditions, such as the number of tests to run, the browser the page is rendered in, and more.

Load Testing A WooCommerce Store

Loading pages individually is useful, but it doesn’t capture the full shopping experience. To do so, a test must simulate several page loads, putting items into the shopping cart, checking out, and more. Lots of tests should run concurrently to determine how the store performs under real-world traffic conditions.

Load testing is more complex than performance testing and will typically require help from a developer who can automate the process. There are several web services that make load testing easier by allowing site owners to run simulated shopping trips from the service’s cloud infrastructure.

Load Impact is one of the most popular load testing services. It allows WooCommerce retailers to record a typical shopping trip using a Chrome extension and then run the same trip multiple times simultaneously.

Cloud load testing can be expensive, but it’s possible to build DIY load testing infrastructure using cloud or dedicated servers and open source software — that’s how we load test our performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting plans.

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Recently started your first WooCommerce store or looking to expand functionality? Explore these eight WooCommerce plugins we think you should know about.

Alternatively, but not take a look at the WooCommerce hosting plans we have available on cloud? They come with auto installs and a series of optimizations designed to help you get the most out of your WooCommerce store.

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Getting feedback from customers on your WooCommerce store is important. Data, analytics, and split testing are some of the evidence-gathering tools you have at your disposal, but in order to create a complete picture, you should be asking customers what they think directly.

When your WooCommerce store goes live, there are a number of factors potential customers will consider; style, user experience, and interface are only a few. Some of these factors can be researched and managed before release, others require a process of trial, feedback, and improvement.

This article looks at the ways in which you can collect vital feedback on your WooCommerce store and how each of those channels has its own unique advantages.

Direct Vs. Indirect Feedback

There are two ways to gather customer experience feedback on your WooCommerce store: directly and indirectly. We often focus on indirect methods, particularly deductions based on measurements and observations. But direct methods — asking customers and paying attention to what they say — can help us to lock down the causes of poor performance faster.

When you observe that shoppers who arrive on a landing page have a higher than average chance of leaving the site immediately, it’s reasonable to develop a hypothesis about why that may be and carry out tests to see if changes to the page reduce the bounce rate. Perhaps you think that the copy on the page is confusing, so you make some changes and test to see what happens.

With enough hypotheses and tests, you will discover the key to reducing bounce rates, but it may take a long time to hit on the right explanation. It’s often quicker to ask a subset of shoppers. You don’t have to accept their answers as the absolute truth, but their input may help you formulate better hypotheses and design more effective tests.

Feedback Collection Channels

There are numerous channels through which you can collect feedback. Each of them offers its own advantages and disadvantages.

Surveys

Surveys are the most common strategy for eliciting user feedback. This method is great for reaching a large audience directly. WooCommerce retailers can take advantage of plugins such as WPForms to create on-site surveys or use a cloud service such as SurveyMonkey.

Creating surveys is easy, but getting customers to respond can be more of a challenge. You can simply ask customers to fill in a survey after they check out. However, it’s likely you will have better results if you offer a discount, voucher, or free gift in exchange for the shopper’s time.

The information you gather will be more useful and actionable if you ask a small number of specific questions. These results can be tested with an A/B test to see if they do actually improve conversion rate.

Call Customers

Another great way to gather customer feedback is to call them and ask questions directly. Calling customers is a great way to engage in high-quality, qualitative data collection and feedback.

However, most WooCommerce customers are not going to opt-in to a long phone discussion. This method can cause your customers to see you as a source of spam and it may stop them from making repeat purchases. Good use of discounts and vouchers can help to increase response rate, but it’s not guaranteed.

It’s important to be careful with who and how often you target customers in this way. One call will be ok for most people, but adding customers to a call list for repetitive questioning when they say they’re too busy, is a quick path to losing an otherwise loyal following.

Social Media

An active social media account that encourages conversations with customers can be a treasure trove of insights about customer experience and sentiment. You should pay attention to what users are saying in free-form conversations, but it is often more effective to give specific prompts — ask customers what they think.

Social media can be incredibly revealing due to its connection to your buyer’s journey. If you’ve set up your analytics tools correctly, you should be able to track how people are entering your sales funnel and then where they are departing.

In addition to this, social media users represent a particular segment of your market. Data gained from this channel is invaluable for defining this segment and targeting them more effectively.

Both Twitter and Facebook can embed short surveys in their feeds and promote them to particular demographics.

Support

Your support team interacts directly with customers. They handle shoppers’ complaints and questions every day. It’s likely that no employee in the company has a better understanding of the shortcomings of your WooCommerce store and the business it supports.

Have the support team take notes regarding the most common issues customers experience. Then come up with ways of reducing those issues and improving the customer experience.

Unlock the Promise of Your WooCommerce Store

eCommerce distances retailers from their customers, which is why we rely so heavily on data and analytics to make decisions. But customers can help you to understand your business — you just have to ask.

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Learn more about why you should choose WooCommerce as your eCommerce application of choice. If you’ve already gotten started, find out what the 8 WooCommerce plugins you should know about are.

Alternatively, why not see what Hostdedi WooCommerce Cloud hosting has to offer, and see why auto scaling is vital for eCommerce stores.

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The dream of marketers is to send personalized content to leads at precisely the moment it is likely to have the most effect. Although most WooCommerce hosting clients don’t have a multi-dimensional trove of data about shoppers, we do have clues that can be used to personalize and schedule content with a positive effect on conversion rates and eCommerce revenue.

Shoppers interact with WooCommerce stores: they browse products, put them in carts, make purchases, abandon carts, read blog articles, send support emails, visit and stop visiting, leave reviews, and more. Each event presents retailers with a chance to engage with their customers.

If that sounds complicated and time-consuming, that’s because it is. There are so many different processes involved in marketing that it is easy to neglect areas that might have an impact on the bottom line. As a retailer, you are focused on getting customers to your store with inbound marketing and advertising, improving the eCommerce experience with conversion rate optimization, building a brand, supporting customers, and more.

Marketing automation reduces the labor involved in marketing by automatically sending emails and other communications when they are relevant.

Let’s have a look at some examples.

Sign-Up Emails

When a customer creates an account on your store, you have an opportunity to engage them with content and promotions to help them understand your brand and the products you sell.

Abandoned cart reminders

As I have written elsewhere on this blog, it is more common for eCommerce customers to abandon carts than it is for them to make a purchase. Well-timed emails that remind customers of the products they selected can decrease abandonment rates substantially, especially if they include a coupon code or promotion.

Win-back programs

Here, engagement is triggered by something the shopper doesn’t do, namely visiting the store or buying a product. Win-back emails are intended to give shoppers who have not visited recently a good reason to do so.

In this article I have focused on email, but there are marketing automation solutions for a wide range of platforms, including social media, SMS, advertising.

Marketing Automation And WooCommerce

WooCommerce marketing automation can be implemented as an integration to a third-party marketing automation platform or as a plugin that provides similar functionality.

Marketo is a leading eCommerce marketing automation platform, and although it doesn’t provide a WooCommerce plugin, it is possible to move WooCommerce customers into Marketo via Zapier.

HubSpot, another prominent marketing automation provider, benefits from a third-party WooCommerce plugin that provides excellent integration and real-time data syncing between a WooCommerce store and the HubSpot platform.

AutomateWoo is a premium WooCommerce plugin that includes a wide range of marketing automation capabilities. Each of the marketing automation examples I mentioned – sign-up, abandoned cart, and win-back programs — are possible with AutomateWoo, in addition to card expiry notifications, product recommendations, SMS notifications, and more.

Automating WooCommerce marketing helps retailers to take advantage of the many opportunities for engagement with shoppers without the massive investment of time and money it would take to do it manually.

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One of the things we admire most about WooCommerce is its rich out-of-the-box functionality. A new eCommerce retailer can start selling in next to no time. They can focus on adding products and configuring their store without needing to install an array of extensions to add essential features.

But including every possible feature would result in a messy and bloated application, which is why WooCommerce also provides a way to add extensions that bring new tools, integrations, and features.

Even during the setup process in WooCommerce, you are given the option of installing additional extensions to add functionality to your WooCommerce store. We highly recommend new eCommerce merchants to browse the available WooCommerce extensions to get a feel for what’s possible.

In this article, we’re going to highlight six popular plugins thatvWooCommerce professionals shouldn’t be without.

What is the difference between a WooCommerce extension and a WooCommerce plugin?

In reality, nothing. Both are used interchangeably to refer to something that adds extra functionality to a WooCommerce store or a WordPress site. Plugins likely came into effect due to the use of the term for adding WordPress functionality, while extensions is used by WooCommerce to refer to plugins that only influence WooCommerce.

Product Filter for WooCommerce gives customers extra options for filtering and sorting products. Products can be filtered by price, category, color, size, availability, and many other factors. The filtering is responsive and intuitive, and is fully customizable by the WooCommerce store owner.

Product filter is a great addition to a store with more than a handful of SKUs, as it allows for store owners to make the user experience as streamlined as possible. Remember, the better UX on your store, the higher conversions will be.

On average, about 70% of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned. That means a shopper puts a product in the cart, but never completes their purchase.

Customers have lots of reasons for putting products in the cart and some have no intention of buying, but a significant proportion of abandoned carts can be “saved” if the retailer contacts the customer to remind them or send a relevant offer.

Abandoned Cart Lite is a simple extension that will email notifications to shoppers to remind them about orders that aren’t completed. Abandoned Cart Pro — the extension’s premium version — includes the ability to add unique coupons to the emails.

Have you ever found yourself feeling as though you don’t have enough options when it comes to customizing your products? Is there a field you don’t see in stock Woocommerce that you think should be there?

WooCommerce Extra Product Options extends the range of product options available to WooCommerce retailers. Additional product options can be added via checkboxes, radio buttons, date pickers, and forms, depending on the needs of the retailer.

Do you want to set custom rules for pricing on your products?

Not all stores follow a one size fits all approach and trying to customize multiple price points for a single product in stock WooCommerce can be a challenge.

WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts is an all-in-one solution for price and discount management. It can be used to create sales, bulk pricing, BOGOF offers, member pricing, loyalty programs, and more.

Manual collection of data can be so much easier. Instead of spending a significant amount of time taking data out of your WooCommerce store and entering it into a spreadsheet, why not use a Woocommerce extension that adds that functionality for you?

We are big fans of automation. Running an eCommerce store of any size is a lot of work, and much of that work involves moving data from one service to another.

Zapier is great for connecting WooCommerce to the other tools you use to run your business, including marketing tools, spreadsheets, and accounting platforms.

WooCommerce Google Analytics does exactly what the name suggests, allowing merchants to leverage the power of Google Analytics to track a variety of eCommerce-related metrics, including cart actions, product views, and user journeys.

Just make sure that you’ve created your own Google Analytics account and you’ll be ready to go once you’ve installed the extension.

Reaching an international audience usually has one large barrier to entry: language.

Whether it’s trying to reach an audience halfway around the world, or just next door, if they can’t understand your page content, they’re not going to get very far.

WooCommerce Multilingual helps to bridge this gap with automated multilingual functionality. Content created in your first language is translated into the user’s language – detected through their browser – and maintained through the entire purchasing process.

WooCommerce Multilingual also adds the ability to manage multiple currencies in conjunction with multiple languages. A great way to start expanding your eCommerce business quickly.

Something that often goes overlooked by new store owners is that of invoices and packing slips. This little addition can be the difference between looking like a professional store and something a little more amateur.

For some first-time store owners, invoices and packing slips is another area where time can easily be saved by letting an extension manage the process for you.

WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips allows you to generate and attach invoices to emails or prepare for printing with just the click of a button. Added functionality and saved time.

The Best WooCommerce Extensions

Are there any Woocommerce extensions or plugins you think we’ve missed? There are hundreds of WooCommerce extensions for retailers to choose from, so feel free to let us know about your favorite extensions in the comments.

Don’t forget to check out our list of the best AI and machine learning WordPress plugins you should be using. We also recommend look at 10 reasons to choose WooCommerce, and see why WooCommerce is a great option for eCommerce beginners and experts alike.

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Since we first added WooCommerce hosting to our lineup of performance-optimized eCommerce hosting options, we have seen huge demand from retailers looking to combine the user-friendliness of WordPress with WooCommerce’s simple yet powerful eCommerce experience. We’re delighted that so many retailers have embraced our unique spin on WooCommerce hosting, which is capable of supporting stores of any size.

Towards the end of last month, WooCommerce 3.3 was released. As a minor release, there are no big new features, but, in typical WooCommerce style, there are plenty of small enhancements that add up to an easier workday for retailers.

We’re going to have a look at a few of the enhancements that arrived in WooCommerce 3.3, but before we get to that, I’d like to talk about the little hiccup that disrupted the usually smooth release process.

One of the goals of WooCommerce 3.3 was to increase compatibility with third-party themes. However, the changes caused problems on some third-party themes, which lead to the removal of WooCommerce 3.3 from the WordPress Plugin Directory. It was a small issue, affecting the display of categories in some themes. The issue was soon resolved and WooCommerce 3.3.1 was released, which is the version you’ll get if you update WooCommerce today.

New Features In WooCommerce 3.3

• An improved order screen.
  • The order screen has been given a facelift, with larger buttons that display an order’s status on the order screen itself, saving users from having to click through to the order’s details to see its status.
• A new stock status.
  • WooCommerce 3.3 includes a new stock status for items that have stock management turned on. When a store’s stock levels reach critical, WooCommerce will show the item is “Backordered” or “Out of stock”, making it easier to see at a glance the status of specific products.
• On the fly thumbnail regeneration.
  • This one solves a minor but long-standing annoyance for retailers: from WooCommerce 3.3, image thumbnails will be automatically regenerated on-the-fly when new product images are uploaded.
• Broader theme compatibility.
  • Usually, WooCommerce retailers use WordPress themes that have WooCommerce support built-in. Ordinary WordPress themes have been known to cause problems. WordPress 3.3 adds improvements to allow just about any WordPress theme to work well with the eCommerce plugin, which means WooCommerce users can choose from a much bigger pool of themes.

Since the mixup with theme support earlier in the month, you might be tempted to hold off on updating to WooCommerce 3.3(.1). But, it is generally a good idea to install new versions of WordPress plugins as they become available. In addition to adding new features, releases typically include security fixes to close vulnerabilities in the software. If you don’t install the new release, you don’t get the fixes. The most recent version of WooCommerce has been tested on dozens of themes, and everything looks great so far.

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