If you’re new to WooCommerce or been running a shop for a while now, we’ve put together a few WooCommerce tips to make your store even better.
1. Offer Free Shipping
Free shipping is popular, but no one wants to give away the store. That’s why a free shipping incentive, also known as unlockable free shipping, is the way to go.
The key is to find that sweet spot where the free shipping incentive maximizes sales. If it’s too low, customers don’t need to spend more. But if it’s too high, it’s not tempting enough.
Help clients find that magic number by offering a retainer service where you’ll track their sales to set the ideal threshold to offer free shipping:
- Launch the store without free shipping in order to get a baseline for the average order value.
- After a month or two, look at your data to decide what the free shipping threshold should be. You want to pick something higher than the average order value so you encourage customers to buy more.
- Set the free shipping threshold and track the data.
- After another month or two look at your data and see if you were able to increase the average order value.
- If you did, awesome. Celebrate that win. Now you might consider increasing it further and continuing to track and adjust.
- If the average order value didn’t go up, you might have set the threshold too high. Try lowering it, tracking data again, and see if a lower threshold can boost the average order value.
One test found that to increase average order values, 30% is the magic number. So you might start by setting your free shipping threshold at 30% above your average order value.
2. Include Shipment Tracking Info
Customers love to track their packages. They want to know when their order is going to arrive. Make your customers happier (and cut down on customer service requests) by automatically adding tracking info to customer emails.
You can easily do it with the Shipment Tracking extension. It does cost $50 per year, but the boost in customer satisfaction and reduction in customer service requests will be worth it.
Now there are some free plugins out there that offer a similar service, but they don’t automatically add the tracking number to customer emails. Some of them create extra emails, and that’s just unnecessary complication for your customers.
3. Use Category Pages
If your site has more than 20 products, you definitely want category pages. Category Pages help people find what they’re looking for and can boost conversions by 20%.
As you’re making categories, remember they should be:
- Mutually exclusive: A product should not end up in multiple categories.
- Collectively exhaustive: Your should have a category for everything.
4. Don’t Customize Checkout Fields
Tamper with the checkout fields at your own risk. It can be tempting to clear out some of those seemingly unnecessary checkout fields: Company and phone number might seem useless. If you’re selling digital products, you might want to ditch the address fields … but just don’t do it.
Different payment gateways use different fields for specific tasks. If you delete one they rely on, payments might not go through. You might think you’re streamlining checkout, when really you’re breaking the site.
Some payment gateways will check addresses or phone numbers for security purposes. By removing those fields, you’re removing a layer of security. That isn’t to say you can never customize the checkout fields—just be very careful if you do.
5. Take Advantage of a Thank You Page
WooCommerce doesn’t handle the post-purchase thank you page very well, and that’s a missed opportunity. Engaging customers immediately after making a purchase is a big opportunity, so don’t miss it. Their satisfaction level is perhaps at its highest, so they’re probably the most willing they’ll ever be to do something like subscribe or follow your store on social media.
Another approach is to take a psychological angle. Happy customers can be highly suggestive. Normally customers have a hard time saying what they like about a product, so this can be an opportunity to make suggestions. Talk up the very thing you hope your customers will talk up. It can pay off in word of mouth and good reviews.
So how do you customize a WooCommerce thank you page? The free WC Custom Thank You plugin will let you do it.
All of these WooCommerce tips came from our recent WooCommerce Bootcamp webinar. It’s a three-hour webinar that covers all the scary things about WooCommerce: payments, taxes, shipping, and more. Check it out to learn more about these tips for WooCommerce and lots more.
The post 5 WooCommerce Tips to Make Your E-Commerce Shop Better appeared first on iThemes.
Leave a Reply