Traditionally, the battleground of the retail industry was in the real world where competitors engaged in rivalry through their concrete-based real shops. However, today, the digital world has changed the battlefield. Now, websites and mobile apps host the competition for the best.
This paradigm shift has not been without its reason. As computers, smart phones, and smart devices are rapidly increasing, everyone is spending a great deal of time on the internet. People do not have the time and resources to wander around traditional shops and marketplaces when the internet provides the best quality goods and products through a few online clicks.
As a result, several retailers have invested significant sum of resources and money for the creation of their online businesses. They are known popularly by the name “e-commerce”. However, not everyone plans and executes a business with the same strategy. Often, businesses fail to market their products and services properly. Sometimes their websites are full of glitches. As a result, customer acquisition and satisfaction is affected.
In case you are beginning to create an e-commerce solution, you do not need to worry. Fortunately, there are a number of platforms and tools for e-commerce that can improve your sales and increase your customers. One of them is WooCommerce that has become of the strongest tools in the toolbox of the online retailers.
What Is WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin provided by WordPress. The target audience of WooCommerce is the retail industry. Thus, if your website or app engages in selling products or services to consumers, then you should give a thought or two for WooCommerce integration in your business model. Despite its cool features and functionalities, WooCommerce is free for download and installation.
Advantages
In spite of being free, WooCommerce has become a leader for e-commerce solutions for a number of reasons where it poses tough competition to even the best paid platforms.
Support
There is support for many different plugins and extensions in WooCommerce. Some of these are free, while some require annual or monthly fees. These plugins and extensions are used for cart checkout, merchandizing, improving product pages, adding search, and navigation functionalities. They can also be used for the integration of different payment methods, marketing and promotions, and increasing the productivity of your business through efficient administration.
Analytics
In order to assess a business performance, many owners engage for hours in manual and computer-based tasks where they try to ascertain the growth of the business. Luckily, with WooCommerce’s tools for analytics, owners can have a thorough and detailed look at the profit margins, losses, and other critical factors associated with their products.
Additionally, performance of a product can be analyzed for any date that can be helpful for understanding consumer habits. Other functionalities offered by WooCommerce’s tools include adding the daily sales, tracking the total number of orders, generating statistics for each customer, peak sale time factor, etc.
Security
One of the biggest questions that a customer asks while checking an e-commerce solution is, “Can I trust them with my financial and personal details”
These questions are raised due to a reason. Today, cyberattacks are on a rise. Malware like trojans and ransomware often find their way into an e-commerce solution where they hack both the website owners as well as the customers. As a result, customers have become paranoid with their selection of the e-commerce stores on the internet.
However, WooCommerce has been designed with special consideration for security. Customers can engage in trustable transactions with WooCommerce solution as it is updating regularly. These security updates include techniques and solutions to detect and repel the latest cyber attacks.
Tips to Use WooCommerce Extensions and Plugins
In order to unlock the full WooCommerce potential, you can take advantage from the following tips.
Directing the Customer
Sometimes when a customer lands on a website for purchase, they are not too patient with the website’s navigational outlook. This means that they would try to search and get their desired products or services as soon as possible. Therefore, it is necessary that a customer does not have to waste too much time in clicking and navigating on your website. You can tackle this situation by thinking from the perspective of a potential customer and reducing the required clicks for a customer to get to a desired portion of the website.
You can also add your hottest selling products on your homepages. For example, suppose you have a website that sells sports equipment where your baseball gear sells the most, while your tennis equipment sells the least. In such a scenario, it does not sound fair that a customer has to utilize the same number of clicks to reach the product pages of both equipments. Hence, you can add baseball equipment on the front page of your website so customers can easily navigate to your best products
Offering Tracking Information
When a customer orders products and finalizes it, they wait patiently and anxiously for it to arrive at their homes. The entire time interval between the product’s order and its receipt is quite worrying for the customers. A little attention from your side can increase customer’s faith in your store.
You can add the extension of Shipment Tracking extension through which your products can be tracked from their packaging until the final stop to the customers. This may sound like a minor change but statistics indicate a significant increase in customer satisfaction and retention in brands that incorporate tracking information with their products.
Revolutionizing Payments
The news regarding a popular coffee shop or a retail business accepting cryptocurrency has become a common news item. As the world is moving towards Blockchain and cryptocurrencies, businesses are integrating their financial payment systems with the integration of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, etc. By using the BitPay plugin, users can pay on your WooCommerce store through Bitcoins. As many users are accumulating cryptocurrencies, you have an opportunity to appeal to a rising segment of your demographics.