Before we discuss the best WooCommerce plugins or why Rocket WooCommerce hosting is so popular these days, we’re going to talk about tennis…
Do you like tennis? Perhaps you play, or perhaps you’re an armchair player. You probably heard that Carlos Alcaraz just became the youngest world No. 1 player after winning the US Open in New York. He’s only 19, so that’s pretty impressive.
What platform to use for your online shop?
Do you know what else is like playing tennis? Deciding on what system to use for your online shop. Sometimes the decision-making process can go back and forth like a tennis ball during a long volley.
Incidentally, the longest tennis volley in professional tennis was over 600 shots and lasted almost 30 minutes. Not quite as long as some team meetings, but still pretty impressive.
Are you still sitting on the net wondering about eCommerce? Are you unsure about WordPress? Are you perhaps not yet familiar with WooCommerce?
It turns out that you don’t need to be a tennis champion to run a successful online store or battle a 5 set match to figure our your best option here, let’s look at some of the advantages of all three!
Advantage: Offering Your Customers an eCommerce Solution
What are the benefits of eCommerce?
So, what exactly do we even mean by eCommerce? An online shop probably, right?
ECommerce is usually defined as the sale or purchase of goods or services, through electronic transactions conducted via the internet or other computer-mediated (online communication) networks. Sounds like an online shop, right?
However, an important characteristic of eCommerce is that it’s not really a distinct sector at all.
Instead, it’s a diversification of the supply of traditional so-called ‘bricks-and-mortar’ shops into ‘clicks-and-mortar’ shops.
If you want to open up a new distribution channel or sell your products around the country or globally, the consideration of offering your items online quickly comes up.
But why should you enter the online trade? Here are some good reasons:
- eCommerce increases efficiency
- Fast and independent of store opening hours and location
- Online shopping is convenient for customers
- Provide more customer service offers
- eCommerce is easier than a bricks and mortar shop
- Good online stores go beyond just selling products and services
- Transaction and initial costs are lower
An entry into online retailing is, of course, highly dependent on the industry and often linked to the question of the benefits for one’s own company. But as a viable model for the future, it also holds great potential for expanding one’s entrepreneurial opportunities and capabilities.
Advantage: Using WordPress for Your Online Shop
Why should you use WordPress?
Suppose you want to create an online store so that you can sell your products online. While searching for the best website builder, you come across the well-known provider WordPress. Now you ask yourself, “WordPress for eCommerce – is it a good idea?”
WordPress for eCommerce offers these advantages
The popular content management system can be used for online stores and offers numerous advantages. These include:
- WordPress offers thousands of template options
- WordPress is really SEO friendly
- WordPress is free of charge out of the box
- WordPress has dozens of plugins for additional eCommerce features (like WooCommerce)
Advantage: Using Woocommerce in Your WordPress Shop
Is WooCommerce a good WordPress plugin?
WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution. It allows you to design your online store exactly as you imagine it.
Thanks to an almost endless list of extensions and more than 50 themes, WooCommerce is a great place to start your eCommerce journey.
- WooCommerce is as easy to use as the WordPress CMS itself.
- There are many compatible themes that you can use out of the box or customize.
- The plugin offers a wide range of functions from payment to fulfillment and affiliate.
- Additionally many extensions to design your individual store and services.
Aside from all the great things you can do with WooCommerce, one of the main reasons this plugin is so popular with online sellers is that it’s free. WordPress, the CMS running your shop, is also free. The only costs you have are your managed hosting costs.
Putting Your Shop Together: The Top 15 Features Your Online Shop Needs — and the Best WooCommerce Plugins to Help
You already know why you need an online shop as part of your business. You can sell goods and services easier, cheaper, and faster. So let’s do it! Your shop is going to be unique! The best! Your online shop is going to rock your customer’s world!!
Email marketing, social media reviews, online payment systems, shipping, and returns … Hmmm. Sounds like your shop is going to take a lot of programming. Where do you start?
What features should your shop have? How does WordPress have you covered? What about WooCommerce? Where do you need to lay out some cash, and where can you sit back and relax?
Let’s get the ball back in our court for a moment and ask a simple question: What features does your online shop need, how can WordPress and WooCommerce help, and what are the best WooCommerce plugins available?
We’ve broken it down for you. Take a look through the list and decide what features and plugins your shop might be missing:
Must-Have Features for Your Online Shop:
- Detailed Product Descriptions
- Product Customization
- Up-Selling and Cross-selling
- Promotions
- Social Marketing
- Payment System
- Customer Journey Management
- Integrated Shipping Solution
- Speed and Storage
- Affiliate Selling
- Third-Party Integration
- Ready-to-Use Templates
- Mobile Friendly
- Search Engine Friendly
- Reports and Analytics
Detailed Product Descriptions
If important, purchase-deciding information is missing from your product descriptions, the customer leaves the store without completing the purchase.
As a rule, customers only click on the “Buy” button when they have all the information they need to be sure that the product chosen corresponds exactly to their ideas and needs.
Good product descriptions not only increase conversions. They also reduce the rate of returned goods by ensuring in advance that the merchandise is exactly what the customer wants.
WooCommerce understands the importance of product descriptions, so they offer a lot of space for that out-of-the-box. Not only basic descriptions either. Tags, categories, and related products help your customers connect the dots.
If you need something more than the out-of-the-box solution, what about featuring product descriptions on other pages? WooCommerce has you covered with their Product Description plugin.
“Good copy isn’t easy to write, but it’s worth making the effort or hiring a professional because product descriptions have such a profound impact on the conversion process. According to data shared by OneSpace, as many as 98% of consumers have been dissuaded from making a purchase due to a lack of product information.”
Source: WooCommerce
WooCommerce Plugin: Product Description on Shop Page
Price: $39
Product Customisation
Sometimes it’s nice to offer add-ons to your products like gift wrapping, special messages, or other special options. After all, personalization is the key to customer retention.
Does your shop let customers customize products online? Product customization has made a name for itself in the eCommerce market. This might be just what sets you apart from your competition. Check out WooCommerce’s Product Add-Ons plugin.
WooCommerce Plugin: Product Add-Ons
Price: $49
Up-Selling and Cross-selling
This is where the money is really made on your online shop! Besides all that extra revenue, there are many other positive points that speak for the use of up-selling and cross-selling:
- You improve customer loyalty by anticipating their needs
- Lower your acquisition costs because the customer is already there
- You can sell otherwise unknown or older products
- It helps decrease price sensitivity
- Helps you get to know buyer behavior
- Don’t forget SEO! Interlinking is an important factor.
The WooCommerce Up-Sells and Cross-Sells for Variations plugin allows you to customize the promotion of products for individual variations.
WooCommerce Plugin: Up-Sells and Cross-Sells For Variations
Price: $49
Promotions
Blue light special! Two for one! Coupons! Everyone loves getting something on sale..
WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box SALE function is both practical and easy to use. It categorizes your sale products and flags them with a nifty SALE tag you can customize in your CSS.
They also offer one of their best-selling plugins: Smart Coupons. This plugin has everything you need to grow sales and customers using discounts, coupons, credits, vouchers, product giveaways, offers, and promotions.
WooCommerce Plugin: Smart Coupons
Price: $99
Social Marketing
We could write an entire post about social marketing. Where do we start?
What can social media do for your online store? The short answer: attention equals interaction. Nowhere else is marketing required that relies primarily on genuine, two-way interaction with prospects and customers.
Social media marketing is about much more than conveying information or merely cultivating an image. It’s about building customers. Happy customers. And happy customers leave happy reviews.
WooCommerce offers 16 different social extensions for Facebook, Pinterest, TrustPilot, and more. From their free Facebook plugin to their Followup Plugin for $99, WooCommerce understands how important being social is.
Check out the WooCommerce website for all their social plugins.
Payment System
E-wallets, such as PayPal or Apple Pay, are the leading payment methods in eCommerce. But mobile payment systems in particular continue to establish themselves. This is because customer needs are increasingly moving in the direction of convenience and choice.
A checkout process with the customer’s desired online payment method is probably one of the most important criteria when making a purchase. Your customer is usually closing the browser if your online store doesn’t offer their preferred payment method.
In addition to the free, easy-to-use, out-of-the-box payment solution for your online shop, WooCommerce offers 79 other extensions. Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Pay, and Klarna among others.
WooCommerce Plugin: WooCommerce Payments
Price: Free
Customer Journey: Shopping Cart and Reviews
Cart Abandonment Plugin
What’s one of the biggest pain points, both for us and our customers? Right. Checkout and Cart Abandonment. Often the reason most people leave their cart – or the checkout – is the design and flow of your process. They are unsure about what to click next. Or they aren’t happy with some aspect – often payment or shipping options. So they leave.
Enter the best Abandoned Cart plugin there is. This one is by Addify, and it may be one of the better investments you make for your shop.
WooCommerce Plugin: Abandoned Cart Recovery
Price: $59
Ratings and Reviews Plugin
Online customer reviews are particularly important for most shoppers. Didn’t we just talk about Social Marketing? However, the fact that people are influenced more by ratings and reviews than expert opinions or even personal recommendations from friends or acquaintances when making a purchase decision may be surprising. Don’t leave this feature off your list!
Customer reviews can have a positive influence not only on brand perception and sales but initially also on visibility in search engines. Indirectly, this means search engine optimization with the help of reviews.
Reviews were part of the general WordPress comments system, but since WooCommerce 6.7 they now have their own section. This is an out-of-the-box feature so it costs you nothing.
Enabling Product Reviews in WooCommerce
WooCommerce Plugin: Product Reviews Pro
Price: $79
Integrated Shipping Solution
Shipping is one of the most important success factors in online retailing. From the retailer’s point of view, the costs incurred by compiling the order (picking), packaging, franking, and the actual dispatch, as well as the costs that can arise from returns, must be kept as low as possible.
From the customer’s side, well, free overnight shipping is almost the standard, right? People want it fast, they want it cheap, and they want to choose their carrier. WooCommerce offers one of the best shipping plugins, so can help soothe the pain you might incur by offering free shipping.
WooCommerce offers out-of-the-box shipping AND specific plugins that connect with your preferred carrier. UPS, FedEx, Canada Post, DHL, and more.
Shipping Option 1: Paid
Check out WooCommerce’s plugin page for all their paid plugin options: WooCommerce Shipping Plugins
Bonus – For other great WooCommerce shipping options, PluginHive offers a variety of plugins to meet all of your needs.
Shipping Option 2: Free WooCommerce shipping is free and built right into the plugin too. Print labels, connect with a free carrier, and more: https://woocommerce.com/woocommerce-shipping/
Speed and Storage. The Rocket.net Difference!
Speed wins. This is really where the difference between a successful online shop and the others is really made. People want it fast. They also want it to look good. Often, great design means a slower website. An online shop has a lot to offer — but that means a lot of weight too. Shops need to balance great-looking design, with great speed.
Does your website have a lot of interactions? Are you running eCommerce or eLearning platforms? Check out our latest post on Google’s Core Updates
If you’re looking for the best combination of speed, security, and storage, then we’re going to toot our own horn for a moment!
It’s been proven that faster websites not only rank better in search engines but ultimately lead to higher conversion rates. The Rocket Platform is designed to automatically scale and optimize your store in over 275 cities around the world so it’s as close as possible to your shoppers and search engines. If you’re looking for managed WooCommerce hosting — we’ve got you covered!
“How much money am I losing due to slow website speed?” The answer, unfortunately, is much more than you think.”
Source: The Search Engine Guys
Affiliate Selling
We’re big on affiliate selling here at Rocket.net! In fact, you can join our WordPress Hosting Affiliate Program today!
Reseller hosting is when you purchase server space from a web host at a wholesale price, and then offer it to your agency’s clients at retail pricing. You’re not creating your own bank of servers, you’re reselling existing hosting platforms as if they were your own.
If you want to build an online business to generate passive income, you can and should look into Affiliate Marketing. Affiliates help to sell third-party products. This principle works equally well for services. And because affiliates recommend other products, so to speak, this business model is also called referral marketing.
WooCommerce Plugin: Affiliate For WooCommerce
Price: $129
Third-Party Integration: Multilanguage & Email Marketing
Multilanguage Plugin
While there are a lot of integrations available, two are particularly important: language and email marketing.
Not everyone speaks your language or uses US dollars, and you don’t want to miss out on a sale because you didn’t cover your bases. 78% of the population speak English in the USA, but do you really want to miss out on 22% of your potential customers? Not to mention the Canucks!
WooCommerce Plugin: WooCommerce Multilingual & Multicurrency with WPML
Price: Free
WPML $99
E-Mail Marketing Plugin
E-mail marketing can be an important success factor for your online shop too. Why? Because content and products can be tailored to each individual email contact. At the same time, e-mail is one of the most cost-effective and effective channels for customer retention and customer acquisition. Don’t leave money on the table by not plugging in your email!
WooCommerce Plugin: Mailchimp for WooCommerce
Price: Free
Mailchimp Free up to 500 contacts
Ready-to-use Templates
We already said how important speed is to your success. We also don’t need to say that your templates and themes need to be mobile-friendly either. A ready-to-use template for your online shop means saving time so you can begin to sell. Say no more!
WooCommerce offers more than 50 themes and 14 storefronts along with a huge cache of documentation so you can optimize whenever your store needs a revamp.
Search Engine Friendly
If people can’t find your shop, they can’t buy your products or services. That means your shop needs to be easily found on search engines. SEO makes your online shop visible.
WordPress has you covered here right out of the box. Starting with a built-in sitemap.xml to get you connected with Google Search, WordPress offers a lightweight, SEO-friendly structure so Google won’t raise an eyebrow.
WooCommerce offers various SEO and SEM extensions ranging from $29 to $79.
What do the SEO companies say?
Get Yoast WooCommerce add-on for $80 (annual fee), or our favourite Rank Math when it comes to the importance of WooCommerce and SEO.
Mobile Friendly
WooCommerce has always been serious about making your online shops mobile-friendly. They were already posting about optimizing your store for mobile devices back in 2015.
Why is a responsive site important for sales? Purchase over mobile devices hit 360 billion dollars in 2021.
That’s a 15% increase over 2020. It’s expected that figure is going to double by 2025. Half of all shopping revenue in the US will be over mobile devices. So your shop better darn well be mobile friendly!
WordPress has you covered here too. Not to mention the ease of mobile styling available in most theme customizations so you don’t even need to touch the media queries if you don’t want to.
WordPress and WooCommerce working together allow you to integrate all aspects of your customer’s journey easily and cheaply. Both offer great, ready-to.use templates for whatever our plan to do with your shop!
Reports and Analytics
Imagine having to control an airplane without a dashboard. Most likely, it would be a mess. The same is true for online sellers. To decide on your next step, you need to understand what’s going on in your online store:
- Where your customers are coming from
- How much they spend
- What products are popular
- How you run your promotions.
You may already be using Google, Adobe, or Magento analytics for your website and storefront. What about your other processes? WooCommerce has your shop covered.
WooCommerce Analytics Out of the Box Documentation
Note: WooCommerce Analytics only works with WordPress 5.3+.
WooCommerce Plugin: WooCommerce Google Analytics
Price: Free
Rocket.net are WooCommerce Experts – We’d Love to Show You What The Fastest WordPress Hosting Actually Means for Your Online Shops!
Customer delight means excitement from the time your visitors land on your shop page. You can’t deliver the air-conditioned mall experience, but your styling skills can turn an online shop’s tired Dollar Store look and feel into an Apple Store wow! Let us show you how all your CSS craftsmanship needn’t be lost to slow page load.
The best customer support 24/7, super fast speed, ease-of-use, and access to top tools and industry-leading resources should always come standard. We’re revolutionizing the way your WordPress site gets served up to the world, and we look forward to partnering with you in growing your business.
Book a free SEO consultation, or request an SEO audit. You are one step away from finding out how we deliver fast results. Drop us a line and let’s get to work! Discover our full range of Google SEO, Google SEM and WordPress services here.
