WooCommerce is the number one tool for creating eCommerce stores with WordPress. It’s free to use, easy to set up and has everything you need built-in. Its ongoing popularity has led to hundreds of other plugins being created that can add features to both the backend and the front end of your online store. Here, we’ll look at five WooCommerce plugins we think are indispensable.
- Metrilo
The Metrilo plugin provides a combination of analytics, CRM, and email automation functionality to your eCommerce store that can boost your marketing potential. The plugin tracks a range of performance indices as well as the way users interact with your site, providing detailed reports on traffic numbers, sales, campaigns and products. These enable site owners to evaluate and compare the ROI of their marketing channels and create customer profiles for personalised marketing campaigns. In addition, it can be used to send automated emails to ensure that marketing opportunities are well-timed. - YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter
The customer experience is crucial if you want to increase sales and improve customer retention. One plugin that helps make the shopping experience better for your customers is the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter.
Once installed and configured, your customers can find the products they want faster and with much less hassle by selecting the things they are looking for: size, price, colour, style, brand – you name it. With this kind of plugin, you can bring the types of customer-friendly features used by eBay and Amazon direct to your own site. - YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier
Zoom magnifiers are a common feature of almost every eCommerce site and not having one puts you at a disadvantage with competitors. However, with so many people now shopping on their smartphones, plugins like the YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier are essential to help potential customers get a close-up view of your products on the small screen.
While there is a range of zoom plugins available, the YITH Magnifier has a number of useful and easy to configure options. It works on mobile devices, you can customise the zoom area, it enables you to create a thumbnail image slider and you can alter the behaviour of the slider, too. - Beeketing for WooCommerce
Beeketing for WooCommerce plugin provides eCommerce sites with a comprehensive suite of sales and marketing tools aimed at various parts of the sales funnel. The tools assist with email marketing, offers and discounting, countdown promotions and upselling and cross-selling.
The features provided by Beeketing include the ability to create a variety of pop-ups, such as for coupons, email subscription, related items and those designed to reduce abandonment rates.
It’s upselling and cross-selling features enable customers to be shown products related to those already in their cart and you can even create product bundles with multi-buy discounts. You also have the option to put any upsell on the cart checkout page or to be shown once the sale has been completed.
With personalised shopping being a favourite of consumers, one of the key advantages of Beeketing is that it uses the visitor’s movements on your site to create personalised product recommendations. Like those on Amazon, these are shown in the form of a slider with titles such as Customers Who Viewed This Also Viewed, Frequently Bought Together, Best Sellers, Recommended for You, etc. In addition, other promotional features can be displayed, for example, countdown timers, discount codes and free delivery signs.
This is just a sample of the many tools on this plugin. There are lots more very useful ones we haven’t mentioned here. - WooCommerce Direct Checkout
Cart abandonment can cost eCommerce sites a significant amount in lost business and one of the principal causes is an over-complex checkout process. The longer it takes to checkout and the more things you require a customer to do to make a purchase, the more of them will give up and look for somewhere where it’s easier and quicker to buy.
To help stream your checkout process, take a look at the WooCommerce Direct Checkout plugin. This enables you to add a ‘Continue Shopping’ button so customers don’t have to waste time jumping back and forth from the cart, you can change the text on the ‘Add to Cart’ button and you have the option to redirect customers so they skip the cart page completely and go direct to the checkout.
Designed by WooCommerce, itself, the aim of this plugin is simply to increase conversion rates by reducing the numbers who abandon the shopping cart.
Conclusion
While there are hundreds of WooCommerce add-on plugins available, we think the five we have chosen here are indispensable for today. They help automate sales and marketing, make it easier for shoppers to find and view the products they are looking for, especially on mobile phones, and they make it quicker and easier for them to check out. If you are looking for reliable hosting for your eCommerce site, check out our wide range of hosting solutions.
