Originally Published on Printful.com By Patrick Rauland
WooCommerce does a great job setting up the essentials of an ecommerce website. But what should you do after the launch of your store? How do you attract the first visitor, or make the first sale? There are thousands of plugins available to WooCommerce users, and you want to pick the right ones for your business.
When it comes to deciding which plugin I want to install, I like to think which will help my store grow. It’s not about what plugin uses the newest technology, it’s about how can using one help me make more money.
Online stores can achieve that by:
- attracting more customers
- increasing customers’ average order value
- increasing customer retention
If you can do any of those you’ll make more money. And if you can improve all three you can make a lot more money. The great news is you don’t have to build this functionality yourself, you can install a plugin and achieve your goals quickly.
So let’s talk about some of the best plugins you can find on WooCommerce Extensions page that can help your store generate more revenue.
1. WooCommerce Points & Rewards
I love customer reward programs. If your store gives me reward points, I’ll definitely engage more on your site because I want to use those points. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. There’s psychology at play here because when you give your customers points, they don’t want to “waste” them. In fact, they feel inclined to make another order just to spend those points.
The WooCommerce Points & Rewards extension lets you set up all sorts of ways to collect points, like placing orders, signing up for a newsletter, and writing reviews. The customer can then redeem points and get a free product or a discount on a future order.
This is a great way to increase customer retention. It might also help you increase your customers’ average order value.
Price: Starts from $129/year
2. Cart Notices
Free shipping is something online shoppers have come to expect. Luckily, they don’t always expect unconditional free shipping. That means that you can have order minimums that unlock free shipping for your customers, and make you more money while you’re at it.
In fact, offering free shipping can increase your revenue by 30%. And the key is to let customers know about free shipping options available to them. That’s what Cart Notices is great at. You can set up a whole bunch of criteria that enables displaying dynamic, actionable messages to your customers as they check out. Let shoppers know how close they are to unlocking free shipping or what products go well together.
Price: Starts from $49/year
3. Photon (in Jetpack)
f you’re an avid WordPress user, you probably have an opinion about Jetpack. You likely either think it’s bloated, or that it has a ton of useful features. Today I just want to talk about one: Photon.
Photon is a free image content delivery network, also known as CDN. Simply put, it’s a server designed for hosting and sending images. It’s meant to reduce the strain on your server and should speed up your site. Why does it matter? Well, believe it or not, increasing your website loading speed by a couple seconds could net you 7-12% extra revenue.
There’s no downside in using this free image CDN. It will make your images load slightly faster and you won’t have to change your workflow at all. Any images uploaded to your site will also be uploaded to Photon and served from their CDN, speeding up your whole site.
Jetpack also recently announced that they now lazy load images. That means images don’t load until the user starts scrolling. This is another huge speed booster as users have fewer images to download when they first load your site.
Price: Free
4. Omnisend
It’s 5 to 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than keep an existing one. So when you do get a customer, you really want to put an effort into maintaining that relationship with them.
The easiest way to stay in touch with your customers is to encourage them to sign up for a newsletter. You can let them know about new or upcoming products, special sales, events, etc.
Omnisend can replace a lot of the smaller plugins you’re probably already using to automate email marketing and lead generation activities. This plugin is free, but you can always upgrade to a plan with more functionality down the road: from lead forms, landing pages to predefined marketing automation workflows, and more.
The best part – it’s quick and easy to install!
Price: Free. Upgraded plans from $50/month
5. Fomo
One of the downsides of an ecommerce store over a brick & mortar store is that customers can’t see whether other people are shopping at it. They don’t know if they’re the first customer and they’re being duped, or if there are thousands of other people buying at this exact moment. People feel a lot more comfortable when they see other people doing the same thing.
And that’s where Fomo (which stands for fear of missing out) can come in handy. As a store owner, you want to show other visitors that your store is active.
Use our link to get your first month free!
Thanks to this extension your website visitors will get to see notifications with recently placed orders, product reviews, new email subscriptions and more. Trust me when I say that knowing other people are actively engaging with a brand will push the uncertain visitor to do the same.
Price: Starting at $29/month
6. Jilt
You’d be surprised how many people add something to their cart, start to check out, and then completely abandon the unfinished purchase. In fact, that’s what around 70% of online shoppers do. {emoji frowning face}
There are numerous reasons why users have a really hard time checking out. Often it’s because customers:
- don’t have their credit cards close by
- are forced to create an account to finish the purchase
- have a hard time filling out forms while they’re on mobile devices
But an abandoned cart doesn’t have to be a lost sale. Give your uncertain customers a little nudge and remind them to finish their purchase.
With Jilt you can send users an email reminding them they have something in their cart. If your copy is personalized and engaging enough, your customers might return to your website and finish the purchase.
Jilt has a free plan, so you start out paying nothing. It also only takes a few minutes to set up. You can measure how successful your cart abandonment emails are by tracking total lost revenue, total recovered revenue, and recovery percentage.
Jilt gives you a chance to convert 70% of users who were super close to checking out.
Price: Free. Upgraded plans from $29/month
7. iThemes Sales Accelerator
iThemes Sales Accelerator is a great little service for generating sales reports. And believe me, following reports that tell what’s going on in your store is important if you want to scale your business successfully.
The thing I like best about Sales Accelerator is that it has an app. This means that you can check the insightful reports on the go. It gives you peace of mind that your store is always up and running. Whether you use the website or the app you can also dig into those reports to find trends (like which product is performing best) to double down on what’s working.
Price: Starts from $79/year
8. Improved Sale Badges
This little plugin has built-in designs, which means you don’t have to spend time designing and writing a code yourself. Just select a style that works for you and tweak the colors.
It’s great to have custom badges for things like:
- new products
- discounted or clearance products
- collections of products
- countdown until the end of a sale
I’m all about easy. So if there’s a tool that lets me build something fast and cheap, I’m up for it. Why would you waste your time on writing a code yourself if a plugin like this can really speed up the development?
Price: License starts from $29/year
9. WooCommerce Variation Swatches and Photos
This is one of my favorite plugins. Not because it has the most advanced functionality, but because it makes it super easy for your customers to select the product they want.
JOCO Cups uses this extension to make a gorgeous product page. They show you the height of the cup as well as the colors. If you deal with colors, textures, or sizes, you can really improve your users’ shopping experience by using this extension. It’s not just about improving their experience. It’s about making it easier for the customers to choose a product they like – when you do that your conversion rate will increase and you’ll make more money.
Not every plugin has to have the latest technology. They just have to be useful for your users. And this is one of the most useful plugins I’ve seen. Most importantly, it works really well for most products.
Price: Starts from $99/year
10. Printful for WooCommerce
I can’t not mention Printful, right? It’s a solid service that prints just about anything on demand.
I made a poster for my home office and decided to share it on my blog. The audience loved it, so I put the design on sale using Printful, and now readers can have the same poster in their office. The best part – I don’t need to store inventory or manufacture thousands of units. Posters are printed and shipped only when an order is placed. Oh, and did I mention that the whole process is automated? If you want to sell such printed products as posters, shirts, or mugs definitely look into Printful to handle all of those orders for you.
For me, having a poster for sale means extra income. Every sale that comes in is 100% taken care of. I just get the order email and smile.
Price: Free to install – only pay when an order comes in
Make the most of your WooCommerce store
There are thousands of plugins for WooCommerce, so you can’t possibly try them all. The plugins in this article are a great starting place for new or existing store owners.
When you’re thinking about adding functionality to your store make, sure it helps you make more money. Any plugin you add should:
- help you find more customers
- encourage existing customers to purchase more in each order
- get customers to purchase more often
And if you can find a plugin that helps you in multiple areas that’s even better. Go ahead and start installing some of the plugins mentioned in this article and start generating more revenue.