For every eCommerce store, the key to making a good profit is happy customers. It’s a good thing to have plenty of visitors on your site, but the goal is to turn visitors into customers.

Luckily for you, we can help with that. Have you ever heard about WooCommerce CRM? When it comes to WooCommerce, it will do an unbelievable job with promoting and selling your products. However, have you ever thought about upgrading your WooCommerce store with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool?

A CRM tool will help you gather crucial information about your customers. This will make it easier for you to know which products to recommend to them. This tool will also help you build better relationships with customers.

In this article, we will present to you some of the best WooCommerce CRM plugins. Some of them are free of charge, or they at least offer free trials. However, there should certainly be a few of them that will suit your business great. And don’t worry, if you are someone who is still learning, a few of them are suitable for beginners as well.

How to Choose a Propper WooCommerce CRM Plugin?

As previously mentioned, the purpose of WooCommerce CRM is to help you learn more about your customers’ desires. By getting to know that and building a better relationship with customers, you’ll be able to give them better service.

That is why you have to be careful when picking a WooCommerce CRM plugin since it has to have some specific features to be truly useful.

For instance, when using that type of plugin, you should be able to see orders that a customer has made in the past and then put a specific product, relevant to the last one a customer ordered, on sale to draw their attention. Also, you should be able to track the average amount of money that a customer contributes to your eCommerce store, among other things.

Now that you know a little more about WooCommerce CRM and what to look for in plugins dedicated to that, let’s start listing the WooCommerce CRM plugins that we’ve chosen for you!

Our Top Picks

1. Metrilo

Metrilo is one of the best CRM plugins, and it is one of several that are created for WooCommerce. But it’s also in use on other famous eCommerce platforms. With this plugin, you get a 14-day free trial to try it out. After this trial, you can choose between three different plans, and depending on which one you choose, you pay a certain amount per month. Still, be aware that Metrilo is not one of the cheapest options here, but we can guarantee you, it’s worth the money.

One of the options that you get by purchasing Metrilo is tracking how your products are selling, as well as how much time buyers spend in your store. You can even trace their orders.

There is also a feature to set up an automatic email that will remind/notify your customers about certain things. For example, if your customers have some products in their cart for some time, they will receive an email to remind them about these products.

This is just a portion of the options that Mertilo can offer you. We recommend you try the free trial it offers. You won’t regret it!

2. Agile CRM

You can use Agile CRM on any popular eCommerce platform, but there’s a unique version developed just for WooCommerce. It includes special plugins that may not work with other programs.

This custom-made Agile CRM WooCommerce plugin will enable you to transfer buyer and order data directly into your CRM. You can even follow the history of orders that a buyer has made in your store.

There is an option to activate automated “Smart Campaigns” and send special offers to a specific group of buyers.

This plugin also offers customer service via email or phone, and it is available to all buyers.

Agile CRM is free of charge just for stores that don’t have more than ten buyers. For anything above that, you will have to purchase at least the Starter plan, and its lowest price is $8.99 per month.

3. Ninjodo

Ninjodo is a CRM plugin that is ideal for beginners and smaller stores. It is simple to use, and it doesn’t have that many options as the rest of the plugins.

This tool will enable you to see the current state of orders. Plus, this plugin is available for download on your mobile phone, so you can maintain your store’s CRM from an app.

There are three different paid plans for this plugin. However, you get to test each of the plans before deciding which one you want to purchase.

4. HubSpot for WooCommerce

HubSpot for WooCommerce is one of the CRM plugins that are simple to use and ideal for small businesses. It is perfect for beginners that are trying to shoot their business into the stars.

HubSpot for WooCommerce will even offer you free deals to start with. Some of these deals are CRM, marketing, or even unlimited shoppers and contacts.

However, if you want to upgrade for some advanced features, you will have to get one of the paid offers, and the cheapest one is $40 per/month.

HubSpot for WooCommerce is for sure one of the plugins suitable for beginners since it is simple to use, and it offers a lot of free features.

5. Metorik

In its beginning, Metorik was a tool for managing reports in an online store. It slowly turned into a complete CRM tool that can deal with customers, their desires, orders, etc. Also, it’s great at communicating with customers through online marketing.

Metorik can provide you with tracking of the activities of your shoppers. Activities like if they have chosen any products and placed them into their cart, if they abandoned their cart, etc.

Metorik Engage is a feature within this tool that will allow you to engage with your customers and send them special offers, coupons, etc., by email.

When it comes to the price of this tool, it depends on the average number of orders in your online store throughout one month. The lowest price is $20 per/month. If you want to use Metorik Engage, there will be an additional payment. This feature starts at $10 and costs more as the number of customers grows.

Conclusion

If you want to have a successful and fast-growing online business, one of the keys to that is interacting with your customers to meet their desires. And the best way to do so is to invest in CRM tools.

There are many options available on the market, and this is why we have prepared this article for you; to introduce you to some of the most famous ones. All in all, there is something for everybody’s needs!

The post Best WooCommerce CRM Plugins That Will Improve the Efficiency of Your Online Store appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

If you’re considering becoming one yourself, we recommend reading the following section on B2B e-commerce in general.

What is B2B E-commerce, and How Is It Different From Regular E-commerce?

B2B or Business-to-Business e-commerce refers to a model of business where transactions take place between two businesses. One of the parties is usually the supplier of materials, and the other turns them into the final products and sells them. In recent times, however, wholesalers are becoming more popular. This means that the supplier sells finished goods in bulk while the other party sells them for profit.

This sort of business model is very different when compared to regular e-commerce, mainly in that it never deals with the end-buyer directly. If you choose to go the WooCommerce wholesale route, you’ll deal with pricing negotiations, discounts based on quantity, custom billing, etc.

WooCommerce is a great solution all around to create a business of this kind. It’s tried and tested, it’s comprehensive, and offers the possibility of creating vastly different catalogs through tags and catalog hierarchies.

What Do You Need to Build a WooCommerce B2B Wholesale Store?

If you opt for this business model, you’ll definitely need to add some extra features to your store that are not included within the basic WooCommerce package. After all, B2B is quite different than direct sales.

Some of the features you’ll have to include are:

• Multiple pricing levels
• Role-based pricing
• Varying prices for your products
• The ability to approve users when they register as a B2B buyer
• Applying discounts based on quantity or fixed discounts in general

Best WooCommerce Wholesale B2B Plugins

All of the requirements and features we’ve just listed might seem like too much to handle, and they might be. But there’s always an easier way. And in this case, it’s organizing your store through plugins.

Before installing store plugins, do not neglect the importance of security plugins as are WP Login Lockdown and WP Force SSL to ensure the security of your WooCommerce site.

Today, we’ll review two top-rated plugins that help in setting this sort of business up. The two plugins are B2BKing and B2B & Wholesale Suite. These two powerful additions can do most of the grunt work, so let’s get straight into their reviews.

B2BKing

B2BKing is a multi-purpose plugin with over 130 features. All of them can be used to your advantage to further your business and set up a B2B store much more easily. This plugin’s primary purpose is to complete everyday tasks instead of you. It can perform a massive set of functions ranging from simple tasks to more complicated ones like handling VAT and tiered pricing.

This is a freemium plugin, meaning that you can choose either its free or its paid version.

The Free Version

This version is, of course, a lot more limited when compared to the premium version, but it still comes with plenty of features you can use to your advantage. The free version could be a great starting point, and after you decide you like the plugin, you can always upgrade.

Features of the free version:

• Wholesale prices – This gives you the ability to assign different prices to the same product, up to 2 different prices in the free version
• Enabling email notifications for freshly signed up customers
• Implementing a dynamic discount rule
• Setting up as many registration roles as necessary – These range from distributor to reseller, etc.
• Managing shipment selections for logged out users
• Managing payment method options for logged out users
• Manual or automatic registration approval

While this is a good set of features, the pro version offers over a hundred additional ones, so let’s take a look.

The Pro Version

Considering the sheer amount of features this plugin offers, we’ll just briefly go through some of the most important ones; you can research the complete list here.

Main features of the pro version:

• Creating as many groups as you want
• Messaging between the store and the client
• Custom registration fields – This includes VAT numbers, company names, etc.
• Dynamic rules for tax exemptions
• Tiered pricing
• A customized information table
• Creating sub-accounts with their own permissions configuration
• Wholesale prices displayed differently depending on the user viewing them
• Custom fees and custom taxes
• Minimum or maximum order for varying payment methods
• A quote system that can replace the cart option
• Creating your own rules for free shipping

How Does It Work?

We know what you’re probably thinking, “How is this supposed to help me if I’m still new in the game?”. Well, don’t worry. In addition to explaining what this plugin does, we’ll quickly guide you through some of the most vital features, as well as explain how to configure the plugin to your liking.

Groups

Creating groups through this plugin helps you manage permissions, users, and access. For every group that you create, you can control who can access the products, how much they’re going to pay for certain products, and the payment methods they’ll use to pay for them.

There are also options to manage any sort of fees, taxes, and product visibility.

Conversations

This is a vital part of the plugin as it allows you to further improve the personal aspect of a B2B wholesale store.

There are three types of conversations you can find under “My Account”:

• Inquiry
• Message
• Quote request – This can be either your standard quote or a custom one

Whenever either of these is sent or received, there’ll be a corresponding email notification sent out. As a site administrator, you can start a conversation or reply to existing messages.

Offers

This feature allows the user to create custom offer bundles and present them to certain users or groups. You can customize them and choose the product, amount, and price. After you’ve created a bundle, the users can see it on their profiles and immediately purchase it at the set price if they so desire.

Dynamic Rules

Dynamic rules are one of the selling points of this plugin as they provide so many different options.

What you can add through this feature is the following:

• Free shipping
• Discount percentage
• Discounts based on the amount of product purchased
• Set a fixed price
• Add taxes
• Add tax exemptions
• A minimum or a maximum of products that can be purchased at once
• A rule that a specific product can only be bought in multiples
• Hide the price for certain groups of users

Registration Roles

B2B wholesaler and customer don’t have to be the only roles you assign. There can be multiple roles for different purposes. There’s also an option to let some groups and customers have automatic approval, while others require manual approval.

Registration Fields

This one is pretty self-explanatory but let’s just go over what you can do when creating registration fields. You can choose if a particular field is required for registration, the order the fields will appear in, the type of field (email, date, file upload, number, text, etc.), the field label, and so on.

What is important to note here is that the billing options are something you must pay attention to, as this dictates the relation of your chosen fields to billing.

Pricing

Now, as we’ve mentioned before, there is a free version of this plugin, but it is rather limited. So, if you want the full version, you’ll be looking at a price tag of $139, which is a pretty reasonable price considering how comprehensive this plugin is.

B2B & Wholesale Suite

B2B & Wholesale Suite is another powerful plugin that could do most of the hard work when it comes to getting a WooCommerce B2B or B2C store on the right track. It comes with 100+ features and integrates with over 20 separate plugins. Plus, since you’re getting everything packaged into a single product, your store is bound to run faster and smoother.

Some of its core features include:

• Custom pricing
• Tiered prices
• Hide or show products by groups or user
• Bulk orders
• Registration fields and custom fields
• The ability to separate B2B from B2C registrations
• Tax exemptions
• Different shipping and payment options
• Paying via invoice
• Adding product details and information tables

How Does It Work?

Just like for the previous plugin, we’ll quickly say what B2B & Wholesale Suite’s best features do and how to use them to your advantage.

Prices by Group

Just like any other business of this kind, your store will have different prices for different users. Whether that be because one store purchases more or they’re paying for product branding, you’ll have to assign custom prices.

With B2B & Wholesale Suite, you can create as many groups as you’d like and create custom pricing charts for each if you so desire.

Besides just changing the prices by group, you can also add quantity discounts.

Guest Restrictions

It’s effortless to set this feature up and what it does is the following: you can control whether or not logged-out users see the prices of your products. This feature will present logged-out users with a message saying “log in to see prices” or something similar to that.

This is what shoppers will see when you enable the “Hide shop” option.

Registrations and Custom Fields

Since this plugin was created to cater to multiple different business types such as B2B, B2C, and hybrid, it allows you to create various registration forms such as wholesaler, reseller, factory, etc. All of the registration forms come with the following fields built-in; company name, VAT number, and postcode. But you can also create a custom field for additional information if your business requires it for one reason or another.

Plus, there’s even an option to request the VAT number of a customer right on the registration form, so it’ll show up on the invoices.

Rules System

Much like B2BKing, B2B & Wholesale Suite allows users to implement and configure more than a handful of essential rules.

These include:

• Discounts – Either by the amount or other criteria
• Setting up a minimal or maximum order
• Setting up custom taxes and fees
• Hiding the price
• Free shipping – This can be modified by groups
• Tax exemptions
• Adding products with zero tax
• Not being able to purchase products directly but instead having to ask for a quote

Discussions

As we’ve already mentioned, this is a crucial step for any B2B business as it’s that level of personal contact direct sellers do not have. Using this feature, potential customers can leave you questions, message you or ask for quotes. The shop can also start discussions, as well as send email notifications when a message is either received or sent.

Shopping Lists

This a very neat feature as most B2B wholesalers have returning customers. By allowing them to create their own shopping lists, they can repurchase what they need quickly and restock before they run out. This also helps you know when you’ll need to restock your own supply.

Product Details

This is great if you want to have everything right in the open from the get-go. Your customers can know how many products they have to get in order to make a purchase, when the purchase is expected to arrive, as well as what are the free shipping options.

Pricing

The price of B2B & Wholesale Suite is $149. This might seem like a lot at first, but when you think about it, this plugin has over 100 features and integrates with over 20 separates plugins. So, all things considered, the price is reasonable.

Ready to Start!

Now that you know how to set up your very own B2B wholesale store, there’s no stopping you from getting started and opening up a business. Both of the plugins we chose to review are excellent solutions at a reasonable price. But, if you’re hell-bent on being a B2B wholesaler, then we suggest B2BKing as it was made specifically for that purpose, and you won’t get stuck with a bunch of features you never use.

If you’re planning on expanding in the future and going for a hybrid model, then B2B & Wholesale Suite is a fantastic choice.

If you have any other questions or queries, feel free to leave a comment below. Best of luck!

The post How to Set Up a WooCommerce Wholesale Store Using Powerful Plugins appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

One of the tips for making the whole process easier is to take your customers directly to the checkout page so they can place the order and purchase the item(s). There are three ways you can do this:

1. WooCommerce default settings

Under WooCommerce, go to Product settings, then the General section where you will edit Add to cart behavior. There, tick the checkbox so it will redirect your users to the cart page after adding products.

Next, under Advanced settings and Page setup, you can select the Checkout page option which will redirect your visitors to the checkout page.

Lastly, you need to change the text that says Add to cart (if you have one on your site). For this, you need to add a code snippet to the functions.php file of the current theme you are using. That will replace the current text with Buy Now.

2. WordPress plugins

This is probably the easiest method to add direct checkout, and we would recommend you use it, especially if you have little knowledge of coding or are just beginning to use WooCommerce and plugins. Using plugins also lets you add more customization to your site.

Here are some plugins we recommend you try:

Direct Checkout for WooCommerce – Skip Cart with Buy Buttons

Had enough complaints about how reaching the checkout on your online store is a hassle? Completely get rid of them by installing the Direct Checkout for WooCommerce plugin. With this plugin, you completely skip the cart and send your customers to the checkout.

How is this achieved? Using so-called buy buttons. These buttons can be placed anywhere on your site, meaning you are not limited to just the product page. This way, your checkout process is optimized, and your sales are given a boost.

The buy buttons can be created for individual products or for all products. What’s more, they are compatible with simple, variable, and affiliate products alongside simple and variable subscriptions.

Direct Checkout for WooCommerce

Direct Checkout for WooCommerce is a plugin that lets you make the process of buying a lot easier as you basically allow your customers to skip the whole Add to cart page. Next to each of the products’ images, an Add to cart button will appear which will automatically redirect your customers to the checkout page. This is helpful in reducing cart abandonment percentages.

There is also the Add to cart AJAX option where you can include single products, variable, grouped, and virtual products without reloading the whole site. You can customize the checkout fields to speed up the buying process by removing order comments, shipping address, coupon forms, etc.

There is a premium version of this plugin that allows you to add a quick purchase button and a one-page checkout where your buyers can edit their cart items on the checkout page.

Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout

Digital Goods for WooCommerce Checkout is a plugin designed for online stores that specialize in digital downloads (for example e-books). When people want to download something, they expect it to happen right away, without too much extra time spent on filling out some Add to cart fields.

This plugin makes this process quick, so your customers don’t need to fill in any unnecessary details or access the Add to cart page. And since you are dealing with online downloads, there is no need to ask for billing and/or shipping addresses.

You can set up the quick checkout for all products, exclude multiple fields, add a quick checkout button next to your products, and add those quick to buy buttons on any page. It can also be integrated with WooCommerce.

This plugin allows you to sell various types of files, pdf, e-book, photo, music, video, audio, mp3, and others.

Direct checkout, Add to cart redirect, Quick purchase button, Buy now button, Quick View button for WooCommerce

Direct checkout, Add to cart redirect, Quick purchase button, Buy now button, Quick View button for WooCommerce plugin lets you add a redirect to the checkout page. After adding a product to the cart you can redirect to any page on your site, even with AJAX. You can also disable the cart page and only show the cart on the checkout page, without using shortcodes to make this work.

Lastly, you can add a quick purchase button on your product pages and add a quick view option from the checkout page, so you don’t lose your customers right before they are about to purchase an item.

All in all, it is a versatile plugin that comes in a free version and a premium one with more features, such as disable redirect for some products, set redirects only for specific products, customer support, and set any page as an order success page.

WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor

WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor is a plugin that lets you add custom fields to your checkout page. This includes billing and shipping fields, and any additional fields you might need. You can edit and rearrange the checkout page any way you want to and add or delete as many fields as you think is necessary.

You can add different types of fields that can include text, select, checkboxes, and date pickers. You can move these around and organize your site style according to the theme you are using so you achieve the best possible customer experience and ensure everything flows naturally.

This is a premium plugin, but it costs $49 annually, so it is not too expensive and provides you with great support, and allows you to simplify your whole buying process.

3. Code snippets

This method of adding direct checkout means you will add a code snippet to the function.php file of your current theme. It is similar to changing the settings in the WooCommerce settings section we mentioned before. However, this requires a bit of coding knowledge, so we won’t get into it.

Conclusion

By making the whole purchase process simpler and quicker, you will ensure that a greater percentage of your customers also finish the process. This can be done by abandoning cart pages and making sure your customers are automatically taken to the checkout page.

You can choose how you wish to do this, but we recommend using a plugin. It is simpler and easier than to add pieces of code to your site.

The post How to Add Direct Checkout to Your WooCommerce Store and Thus Boost the Number of Completed Sales appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

According to Wappalyzer, a cross-platform utility that uncovers the technologies used on websites, Magento, Shopify, Wix, and WooCommerce are the most popular platforms. However, it is clear to see that WooCommerce is the dominant one.

Among them, WooCommerce and Magento are the most similar ones. Both Magento and WooCommerce are open-source and based on the PHP programming language. They offer free versions and can be developed by everyone from the community.

Despite their similarities, they both have different pros and cons, which make them unique. This post will cover a brief overview of the platform, and the in-depth comparison of the ease of use, plugins & extensions, scalability, security, payment options, and cost of WooCommerce and Magento.

Basic Definition: WooCommerce and Magento

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform and built on top of WordPress. It allows you to create an online store easily, accept payments and shipping, manage inventory, and more. Besides, WooCommerce gives you access to thousands of free and premium WordPress plugins and themes to grow your eCommerce business.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform built-in PHP. It allows store owners to create online stores, accept payments, and manage products. It comes with two different versions, including:

• Magento 1
• Magento 2

Both the Magento 1 and Magento 2 come with a free plan (known as Magento Community) and a paid plan (known as Magento Commerce).

However, these two versions of Magento are entirely different in terms of architecture, performance, loading time, security, payment gateways, support, etc. It can make the beginners getting started with Magento confused and do not know to use which version.

But don’t worry, as announced on the Magento official site, the life of Magento 1 is going to end in June 2020. Therefore, in this article, we are just focusing on the comparison between WooCommerce and Magento 2.

WooCommerce vs Magento Comparison

Ease of Use

One of the most crucial consideration when selecting your e-commerce platform is the ease of use. Most online store owners don’t have enough technical and coding knowledge. So they prefer eCommerce platforms, which are easy and convenient to use.

WooCommerce Ease of Use

Being a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce comes with a simple installation process. Even those who do not know much about the e-commerce platform and programming can set up and run your online store without too much effort.

To install WooCommerce, you need to install WordPress first and then WooCommerce. Everything is self-explanatory, and you can enable WooCommerce by going to the dashboard, navigate to Plugins>WooCommerce>Activate:

Furthermore, WooCommerce offers a setup wizard and detailed guideline that makes the installation process more manageable. You just need to take step by step and configure everything correctly.

Magento Ease of Use

Magento is also an open-sourced platform like WooCommerce; however, it is harder to learn. Developers and managers typically need the training to build and maintain stores. So, if you have no experience with development and plan little budget on building your site, you should skip Magento. It’s only for large corporations that aim to build high-level eCommerce sites.

It is not easy to install Magento, and most hosting companies do not offer pre-configured installers for Magento. The installation and configuration process requires well programming skills. To make the most use of the platform’s potential, you have to learn at least some code and technical terms. Once you are getting started with Magento, its steep learning curve may make you feel complicated.

Despite those drawbacks, Magento is still considered an ideal solution for eCommerce sites. It is a highly powerful platform coming with a ton of useful features and functions.

Magento offers highly sought features to improve user experience. It also allows you to create, manage, and customize multiple sites for free. The dashboard is clean and intuitive, and it’s easy to find the features you need.

Winner: In terms of ease of use, WooCommerce is the winner. Because, WooCommerce takes fewer resources, and requires less programming knowledge, but provides more user accessibility.

Plugins & Extensions

As you may know, not all eCommerce platforms are perfect and don’t need to add any functionality. It leaves place for third-party extensions, plugins, and integrations to extend the platform by offering additional features.

Magento and Woocommerce are famous for a large number of add-ons that extend the functionality and enhance the websites’ appearance.

WooCommerce Plugins

Since WooCommerce runs on top of WordPress, this gives you access to more than 56,000 plugins, including free and paid versions. If you want to find any add-on, just go to WordPress.org >Plugins, and type in the search bar, then click to the plugin your need.

Another place for you to find useful plugins for your WooCommerce site is the extension store of the WooCommerce official website.

Or you can take a look at this collection of best free WooCommerce plugins to choose the best and most suitable for your online store.

Whether you want to add payment gateways contact forms, social media, lead generation forms, or any other features, there is already a plugin available that you can use. Installing these plugins is also easy with some clicks.

You can also find out the documentation or guideline to use them, so all process requires little programming knowledge.

Magento Extensions

Like WooCommerce, Magento platform has a large marketplace of plenty of free and paid third-party extensions available for Magento that you can use. These extensions let you easily add new features and integrate other tools and services into your online store.

At the time I write this article. The total number of extensions for Magento is nearly 6000, in which 1950 extensions are free to use. Overall, the quantity of extensions in Magento is much less than that of WooCommerce. However, Magento has a lot of functionality in the core.

Winner: Both of these eCommerce platforms offer various add-ons and extensions. But as for the quantity, WooCommerce may be the winner.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability to grow your online store without affecting performance or UX of the website. Scaling your eCommerce business comes with its challenges, whatever eCommerce platform you are using. Because when your website traffic and sales increase, you will need more server resources to keep up with your business goals and growth path.

Both Magento and WooCommerce can help you build large eCommerce stores with huge traffic. However, these two platforms come with different scalability.

WooCommerce Scalability

WooCommerce store owners can scale their store to handle an unlimited amount of products. When growing your WooCommerce stores, you can face some technical challenges such as website speed, page load time, and database queries.

To scale a WooCommerce website with minimal pains, first, you need to choose the right host, clean up your site code, update everything, utilize caching strategically, and build a content delivery network. These scaling processes will keep your server resources low and allow your site to run quickly and protects you from security threats at the same time.

Developing a WordPress WooCommerce site requires some coding knowledge. If you know nothing about programming, you can get WooCommerce experts to handle it for you. Finding WooCommerce WordPress developers is easy, with various budgets under $50 per hour.

Magento Scalability

As mentioned earlier, starting and developing a Magento website requires coding skills because of the complicated programming languages and the theme inheritance system.

However, if you are good at programming or having a large budget to hire other developers to work for you, choosing to scale a Magento website may be a better choice. Since Magento offers a perfectly scalable system, it allows you to switch up your store from 10 products to 100,000. You can find it easy to grow your sites up when you want.

To scale your Magento website without hassle. You will need to check web hosting. Optimize your store for caching. Manage backups, protect against DDOS attacks by using a website firewall, and more.

If you don’t have enough skills in programming and managing large websites, then you will need to hire Magento specialists. Hiring Magento experts is not difficult. But the budget paid for them is often higher than the budget for WooCommerce specialists.

Winner: In this section, Magento may take a higher position. Because it is built with scalability in mind and offers a better scalability system than WooCommerce.

Security

According to websites hacking statistics in 2020, 30,000 websites are hacked every day on average. Besides, your website may contain a lot of customer information such as name, address, and payment details. So keeping your site secure is a top priority and challenging task for any online store owners.

Both WooCommerce and Magento let store owners implement several security measures through extensions and manual processes.

WooCommerce Security

WooCommerce is an excellent option for a beginner. With WooCommerce, you have built-in security features at a low level. To upgrade the security level, you need to install third-party plugins supporting this feature.

There are plenty of free and paid plugins helping you keep your WooCommerce store secure like Wordfence Security, Shield Security, etc.

However, before installing any plugins, you have to test its compatibility on your eCommerce site. Because according to a survey in 2016, nearly 60% of WordPress vulnerabilities are related to plugins.

Magento Security

However, as compared to WooCommerce, Magento provides more robust security for online stores with Magento Patches released frequently. While there is no platform offering 100% security, Magento becomes the pioneer in this aspect by bringing dedicated security patches to its users.

It is the latest Free security scan tool that helps you monitor your site, update malware patches, and find out unauthorized access. Moreover, you can easily add Magento 2 security extensions to protect your online store better. If there is an error on your site, Magento offers services to resolve the problem.

The downside here is that Magento security patches aren’t particularly easy to apply, so a beginner can’t do this task.

Winner: If you take security seriously and have programming experience, or don’t mind paying for help, Magento is the clear winner.

Payment Options

Online payment is an indispensable part of any eCommerce website. There are many payment gateway companies that help you integrate online payments on your website.

WooCommerce Payment Options

By default, WooCommerce offers credit cards, Cash on delivery, PayPal, and Stripe payments, which are the most popular payment options. But you can integrate your WooCommerce store with other payment options, even the regional and less popular ones through the third-party plugins.

Magento Payment Options

By default, Magento offers more payment options in comparison with WooCommerce. Magento comes with Authorize.net, PayPal, Cash on delivery, bank transfer, and purchase order payment methods. There are also extensions available for you to extend your checkout process on Magento websites with free and paid extensions such as Stripe, 2Checkout, Braintree, Skrill, and more.

Winner: Regarding payment methods, there is no clear winner. Both Magento and WooCommerce do an equally great job in terms of various default payment options and the ability to integrate with many other add-ons supporting multiple payment options.

Costs

For most beginners, the cost is one of the most significant factors when choosing a platform for their online business. When starting an eCommerce website. You need to evaluate the cost while considering how those costs will grow along with your business development.

Both Magento and WooCommerce are open-source and offer a free plan for getting started. It gives users the option to start an online store without huge investments.

WooCommerce Costs

WooCommerce free version allows you to get all the core and essential features of an eCommerce store for free, while with the paid version, you can add more advanced features, including auction, PoS, subscription, etc.

You can use WooCommerce for free; however, to run a WooCommerce store, you will need to get some basic elements of an eCommerce site like a domain name, SSL certificate, and a WordPress website hosting and page builders like Elementor and Divi.

Below are some base costs to maintain a WooCommerce store on average:

Generally, you can start an online store with WooCommerce at about $120 per year.

Magento Costs

Magento is a self-hosted open-source software. As I said before, Magento has two editions, which are free community edition and paid Magento Commerce. The free Magento community edition does not offer all features and does not come with any support.

It can be perfect for stores with less than 300,000 – 500,000 SKUs with few attributes—selling in only one currency and only one country. However, to use the Magento free version. You will need to get at least a VPS hosting plan or a cloud host like Amazon Web Services to launch your store.

Whereas paid Magento Commerce plans come with high-performance cloud hosting. Professional support, and offer much more useful features than the free version of Magento. The pricing of these plans is quite high, ranging from $22,000.00 to $125,000.00 per year.

When you want to grow your Magento website, the maintenance cost may also increase along with additional functionalities. It is much more expensive than starting a WooCommerce online store.

Winner: The cost of starting a WooCommerce store is may higher than the Magento community edition; however, running an online store with the Magento community can face a limited number of products. Limited currency, and limited regions for selling, etc. While launching a store with Magento Commerce edition can address these limitations, you have to pay a huge budget for it.

In consideration, WooCommerce may be the winner. With suitable web hosting plans. Low-cost or free extensions, and themes, setting an eCommerce site with WooCommerce are less costly than it with Magento.

Conclusion: WooCommerce vs Magento, Which Is Better for Starting an Online Store?

Both Magento and WooCommerce are eCommerce-focused platforms that you can use to build any kind of online store. However, based on your budget and your skills. You can make your consideration to choose which one meets your requirements.

WooCommerce has the advantage of a larger number of users and market share. It runs on top of WordPress, which is already the world’s most popular platform.

It also beats Magento in terms of ease of use, plugin integration, and cost of building and running an eCommerce store at scale. Therefore, if you are finding an easy to customize and cost-effective platform, then WooCommerce is the perfect fit for you.

Magento, on the other hand, is more suitable for enterprise-level businesses and big companies with their development teams or businesses who can spend money on hiring someone. It wins over WooCommerce regarding security and scalability. So if you desire to build an eCommerce site for huge incorporation and require high security, Magento is undoubtedly your first choice.

For those who concern about the cost of maintaining an eCommerce website. They are recommended to create a list of desired features and then select the platform that offers all the features at the best price.

The post WooCommerce vs Magento, Which Is Better for Starting an Online Business? appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Even though increasing sales is the ultimate objective, dynamics have changed, and it now involves giving more power and freedom to your customers by adopting new approaches to online WooCommerce sales.

It’s about using a time-tested approach of Product bundling and mix-and-match assortments as a sales technique on your WooCommerce store.

Without a doubt, bundles have a higher perceived value, which means, even if they seem more expensive than buying a single product, customers see more value associated with them.

When it comes to WooCommerce, there’s not just one but several ways to bundle and increase your WooCommerce sales. In this article, I’m going to talk about a sure-fire approach that stems from the buyer psychology and works the best – Personalized Product Bundling.

Personalized Product Bundling for the Win!

I remember visiting shops as a kid to purchase sweets in bulk during festive seasons.

The reason I remember this is because those stores would allow me to pick up different chocolates and candies of my choice and sell them as a package at a special price.

Now, imagine replicating this on your WooCommerce store and allowing the buyer to pick and choose their favorite products from your store to create a personalized package or assortment.

Isn’t that cool?!

Today, I do all my festive season shopping online, and believe me, offering personalized bundles is a superb way of providing convenience and increasing bulk purchases.

In the WooCommerce world, these personalized product bundles are nothing but ‘Custom Product Boxes.’

The Power of Custom Product Boxes

Did you know that WooCommerce store owners using Custom Product Boxes have been able to increase their sales by 20%?

Well, that’s because adding this functionality to your store increases not only the chances of bulk purchases but also increases the chances of upselling or cross-selling.

Let’s quickly look at how the Custom Product Box functionality works:

WISDM Custom Product Boxes

With Custom Product Boxes on your WooCommerce store, you can allow your customers to choose a box based on the number of items they wish to purchase.

They can then see the list of products that can be added to their custom box and accordingly pick the products they want. Now, the price of this custom box can either be fixed or be based on the products being added to the box, depending on your operating rules.

Here, there’s also an opportunity for you to take this a step ahead and make it more personal for your customers by allowing them to create their gift boxes and add a message for their loved ones. It increases your chances of building a loyal customer base.

The best part is that creating these dynamic product combos or boxes will feel like a walk in the park. What’s even better is that this kind of setup works for all the products – confectioneries, gourmet food, wine, chocolates, donuts, or just about anything under the sun.

Let’s take a look:

Applications of Custom Product Boxes

Applications of Custom Product Boxes – To state particular applications, Custom Product Boxes can be used to:

1. Sell Assortments

Think about chocolates, cupcakes, donuts, wine bottles, mechanical parts, etc. These are the kinds of products that people would particularly spend time on choosing rather than picking up randomly.

Usually, these products are never available as a pre-assorted bundle but are purchased more often as assortments. Hence, by allowing customers to create their own box as they would in any physical shop, you will not only add to their user experience but also give them a satisfying shopping experience.

Plus, there’s a good chance that your customer will end up buying more than what they had intended to! A win-win for both.

2. Offer Shopping Deals

Shopping deals are always exciting!

You can use Custom Product Boxes to set up different offer deals. This practice usually helps to sell products that are similar in cost and nature. It provides an excellent opportunity for you to offer additional product combos as shopping deals.

We’ve observed that shopping deals work great, especially during the holiday season.

E.g., If you’re running a confectionary store, you can have offers like ‘Buy a box of 5 donuts with at least 3 caramel donuts and get the 6th donut of any flavor for free.’

These shopping deals apply to almost any product you’re selling online. You can even have something like ‘Buy 3 t-shirts and get 2 for free’.

Implementing shopping deals smartly will help in luring the customers to purchase more.

I must say that while this is a traditional trick, but it is quite effective when it comes to increasing WooCommerce sales of your online store.

3. Encourage Bulk Purchases

As a store owner, one would always want their customers to purchase more or as much during their visit.

While this may seem difficult. It is not impossible if you’re mindful and ready to go beyond just the ordinary sales mechanism.

The thing I love the most about personalized product bundles is its ability to allow you to create different pricing tiers to coax your potential buyers into increasing their order size.

E.g., If you’re selling school stationery. You can have offers like ‘Buy 10 pens for $15 or 20 pens for $20’.

Pricing tier works equally great for food items as well, e.g. You can offer ‘2 kgs of chocolate for $30 and 3 kgs for $35’.

The reason creating pricing tiers works successfully is because the customer sees more value in purchasing a bundle of higher quantity.

This psychological impact creates an opportunity for you to offer packs as upsells, leading to an increase in profits.

4. Upsell Recommended Products

I watch a lot of content on Netflix, and too often, I go by the recommendations they provide based on the previous content I watched. I’ve observed a similar strategy even when I’m shopping online.

I’ve come to realize that this is a brilliant technique to upsell or cross-sell your products.

Even in your WooCommerce store, a simple trick like adding Custom Product Boxes as ‘Recommended or Linked Products bundles’ can lure your buyer into purchasing a bundle.

Here’s a tip: The bundles you recommend should be complimentary or connected to the product or bundle your customer is purchasing. It will have more impact on your customer when he sees the offer.

E.g., If your customer is purchasing t-shirts. Then recommending a trouser and a belt in a bundle would be more appropriate and appealing.

Using this trick of product recommendation works magic in increasing your WooCommerce sales if you implement it successfully.

That’s not it! There’s a lot more when it comes to the use of Custom Product Boxes.

Style the Product Bundles to Suit Your Brand

Style the product bundles to suit your brand – Enticing your customers to purchase more with different product bundling techniques adds to the user experience and your profits.

But, along with this, focusing on the styling aspects of your WooCommerce store and the presentation of your product bundles is also the need of the hour, which is often neglected.

The folks at WisdmLabs understand the importance of creating a perception about your store and resonating with customers on an emotional level.

With this thought in mind, the Custom Product Bundles allows you to customize your product pages with different layouts options. The ease of adding products to your store makes it even simpler for buyers to complete the purchase.

You can create a strong visual impact by changing the background colors, height/width of the product boxes, and many other attributes as per your choice.

To avoid any confusion and complications, you can access all of these functionalities right from the front end of your store.

With clean layouts and less friction on the page. You’ll be able to sell more bundles and communicate the value of your brand in an efficient fashion leading to an increase in revenue and brand recognition.

Conversions are tough when it comes to running an e-store; we know this all too well.

It’s all about using the right strategy and putting customers in control. Having this personalized shopping experience in your store can also boost customer loyalty.

Before implementing a new strategy or a style on your WooCommerce store, we recommend you to check out the Custom Product Bundles plugin live in action to see the functionalities and experience the ease of conducting business.

Author Bio

WisdmLabs is an open-source solutions provider for WordPress (majorly WooCommerce and LearnDash), and Moodle. We believe in creating ground-breaking plugins that have genuinely useful functionalities, time and again and help the businesses to grow.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission.

The post How to Increase WooCommerce Sales with Personalized Product Bundles appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Subscriptions are no longer limited to Netflix, Hulu, and other similar content streaming platforms alone – they’ve become a part of our lives, as more and more companies choose this payment model to offer their services.

According to McKinsey, 15% of online shoppers have signed up for one or more subscription-based services to receive various services on a recurring basis. And since there are an expected 2 billion online shoppers in the world, 15% of it cuts across a vast industry.

So if you too want to sell a service or a product, better to sell it with recurring payments through a subscription site. And fortunately, setting up a subscription site is easier than you think, thanks to WooCommerce and WordPress.

In this article, we’ll take a look at all things related to it, including how you can set up a WooCommerce based subscription site easily. Let’s begin!

Why WooCommerce Is a Good Platform to Handle Recurring Payments

WooCommerce by itself allows you to set up products that can be purchased using a single time payment. To set up recurring payments on WooCommerce, you need to use an extension called WooCommerce Subscriptions.

It is a WooCommerce official extension, so you don’t need to worry about its compatibility with the platform – it’ll work seamlessly with any WooCommerce WordPress theme or plugins you may be using.

In addition to that, it’s also much affordable in comparison to the other 3rd party solutions developed for the same purpose as it costs only $199 annually.

Let’s see how to set it up.

Steps to Install and Setup WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin

The first step to set up the plugin is, of course, to purchase it. Once that’s done, here’s how it can be installed and set up:

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Plugins >> Add New.
2. On the Add New page, type and Search for WooCommerce Subscriptions. Once you find it in the search results, hit the Install button.
3. Once the plugin has been installed, you’ll see an ‘Activate’ button in place of the Install button. Click it to activate the plugin.

You’ve installed and activated the WooCommerce Subscriptions extension. In the next few steps, we’ll tell you how to set up a subscription product using it.

Here we go:

Steps to Set Up a Subscription Product

• In the left column of your WordPress dashboard, click Products >> Add product.
• You’ll find a section similar to the one shown below on your Product creation page. This section is where you define the various parameters of your subscription product. Scroll down to this section.

• The first step is to select whether you want to set up a Simple subscription or a Variable subscription. In simple subscriptions, you can create just one variation of your subscriptions, while in Variable subscriptions, you can create different variations based on various attributes. You select between both these options from a dropdown menu available.

• The next step is to set up a price. The Subscription Price section under the General category allows you to do that. Just enter your desired price, select the payment schedule (i.e., every month, every 3rd month, every year, etc.), and add a sign-up fee if you want to add it. You can also define the period of a free trial if you’re going to offer free trials.

• If you’re creating a Variable subscription, you can also create variations of your subscription with different prices, sign-up fees, and payment frequency.

• Next, you need to define the shipping options. Navigate to the ‘Shipping’ tab and configure the shipping options. The options will be similar to native shipping options of WooCommerce. Enter the details for the attributes of the product as specified. With subscriptions, you can choose to charge shipping only once during the lifetime of a customer.

• WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin also supports coupon codes. If you want to offer some coupon codes to your customers, you can configure them by navigating to the WooCommerce >> Coupons section. If you’ve never used coupons before now, you, first of all, need to enable Coupon functionality by going to WooCommerce >> Settings >> General >> Enable Coupons.

You can manage all subscriptions to your products under WooCommerce >> Subscriptions section. Relevant actions can also be taken against any subscriptions or customers from here.

Conclusion

So that’s how you can set up a recurring payments subscription site on WordPress and WooCommerce by using the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. It’s simple to set up the plugin itself, and even simpler to set up subscription products with recurring billing.

If you still have any questions about it, please leave them in the comments below, and we’ll try to answer them. And if you’ve found this article helpful, do share it with others to help them out too!

The post How to Setup A Recurring Payments Based Subscription Site on WooCommerce appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

E-commerce and online shopping have increased significantly in recent years. There are currently between 12M to 24M e-commerce sites in the world, and people are shopping more and more online. Furthermore, the fastest growth in retail e-commerce until 2022 is expected to be India.

It is estimated that in 2021 there will be 2.1 billion digital buyers worldwide, compared with 1.66 billion in 2016. It is a significant difference.

For instance, a big part of the success of the increase of e-commerce online stores is that it is so much more comfortable than before to set up your shop. It is also easier and more reliable to shop from online stores nowadays.

WooCommerce is one of the best solutions for all WordPress users in setting up a shop and selling products or services. WooCommerce is a free open-source e-commerce plugin and is used by millions and powers over 28% of all online stores.

WooCommerce itself can be expanded using plugins specifically designed for that. Two such plugins are:

WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping – a plugin for creating and implementing advanced shipping rules, even those that apply to logged-in users only.

WooCommerce Order Export – a plugin for exporting WooCommerce order data quickly, automatically, or even on a schedule.

In today’s article, I have put together a list of the ten best free WooCommerce WordPress themes that will expectedly facilitate your choice of themes.

Best Free WooCommerce WordPress Themes 2020

Let us have a look at my selections of the best free WooCommerce WordPress themes 2020.

Astra

Astra is a multipurpose WordPress theme created by Brainstorm Force. It is a theme that suits most website niches whether you run a blog, business, portfolio or online shop. However, if you consider starting a WooCommerce shop, Astra may be one of the best theme alternatives available.

Astra is a very popular WordPress theme with over 700 000+ active installations from the WordPress theme repository. Furthermore, it has over 3,500 five stars reviews which means that users are highly satisfied with Astra.

It is a very flexible theme and you can easily customize everything such as layout, header, colors, typography and much more. Moreover, it is a blazing fast theme which is valued by search engines like Google to rank higher.

Astra is also the perfect theme for any e-commerce and WooCommerce online business. It is an easy-to-install theme. Follow all instructions and your site is up and running within minutes.

Furthermore, you can choose between the page builders Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi or any other page builder you like. For a quick start, you can choose any of the many starter templates available. I picked Elementor and the Brandstore template which turned out to be a perfect choice. My shop looked awesome.

With its inbuilt integration for WooCommerce and all Astra WooCommerce features make this theme one of the best free ecommerce themes available. However, with Astra Pro, you get even more powerful customization options and many more features.

The key features of Astra:

• WooCommerce integrated.
• Pre-Built starter templates.
• Optimized for mobile sales.
• Conversion ready checkout.
• Code-Free customizations.

Astra is a must-have theme if you want to start an online shop using WooCommerce. It is a feature-rich theme and with Astras WooCommerce features and integration to help you to increase sales and convert better.

Get Astra and boost your store’s sales.

Almaira Shop

Almaira Shop is an engaging eCommerce theme from the WordPress theme shop ThemeHunk. With this theme, you can build a perfect eCommerce online shop to retail products such as fashion, clothing, electronics, or other products, depending on which niche you are into. Almaira Shop is suitable for all kind of online business.

It is a theme with various opportunities to create an attractive online shop. The theme comes with three elegant layouts to choose from. It is also easy to install and get started with the Almaira Shop. Just follow the steps in the – Get started with Almaira Shop from your dashboard.

The key features of Almaira Shop:

• Hero slider section.
• Home shop filter section.
• Product filter section.
• Dropdown cart, and Quick view feature.
• Distraction-free checkout.

Almaira Shop is a flexible and powerful free theme with surprisingly many features included. Furthermore, you can upgrade to the Pro version of Almaira Shop if you want additional features and support.

Orchid Store

Orchid Store is an attractive free WooCommerce WordPress theme from themebeez. It is a popular theme with over 7,000+ active installations from the WordPress theme repository. Orchid Store is a very flexible theme suitable for all kinds of online shops selling products.

With Orchid Store, like so many other e-commerce themes, you need to activate a static front page. However, follow the theme documentation, and you are just fine. Furthermore, the theme comes with three beautiful pre-built demos that you can import to get started with your shop even faster.

Key features of Orchid Store:

• WooCommerce support.
• Elementor compatible.
• WooCommerce featured categories widget.
• Three variations of the WooCommerce product widget.
• Megamenu at primary navigation.

Furthermore, Orchid Store is a theme packed with excellent features and opportunities to create an all-embracing online webshop—also a big plus for all the configuration options via the live Customizer. If you lack features? It is possible to upgrade to Orchid Store Pro.

NewStore

NewStore is a free and modern WordPress theme from the ThemeFarmer shop available for Woocommerce. When you install the theme, follow the recommendations, and install the necessary plugin. Also, set up a Home and a Blog page, and you are ready to start.

Import any of the five available demos to get a head start. Or, if you want, you can build your shop with the Elementor plugin. I imported a pre-built demo—everything up and running smoothly in minutes.

When your shop is up and operating, you can fine-tune everything, such as frontpage options, via the live Customizer.

Key features of NewStore:

• WooCommerce support.
• Elementor page builder support.
• Live Customizer.
• Five selectable pre-built demos.
• Responsive design.

Overall, I think NewStore is an excellent WordPress theme for establishing a WooCommerce online shop. Just make sure you follow the recommendations and read the documentation; it facilitates and saves time.

Furthermore, it is also possible to upgrade to a pro version of NewStore here.

Envo Storefront

Envo Storefront is a free and fast WooCommerce WordPress theme from EnvoThemes. If you are considering setting up or starting an online store, the theme Envo Storefront may come in handy.

It is a theme created to integrate perfectly with the WooCommerce plugin, and page builder plugins such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin, Brizy, Divi, to name a few of the best builder plugins.

Furthermore, Envo Storefront is a WooCommerce theme optimized for speed to boost and increase your SEO results. Although the Envo Storefront is a free theme, the free version comes with many excellent features.

Key features of Envo Storefront.

• WooCommerce support.
• Page builders support.
• Speed optimized.
• Responsive design.
• Demo import.

Envo Storefront is a creative WooCommerce based theme perfect for any online store. If you want additional features and support, you may be able to upgrade to a premium version of the Envo Storefront theme.

ShoppingCart

Shopping Cart is a creative and appealing theme by Theme Freesia. It is specially created for ecommerce and online stores. The design and layout are structured and spacious and presents products in the best way.

Shopping Cart is a perfect theme for all kinds of shopping and online shops. Furthermore, the theme comes with multiple sections on the front page, which allows you to display different categories, widgets, and multiple navigations.

Since it is an ecommerce theme you need to install a couple of recommended plugins for everything to work perfectly. You can also install the Demo Import Plug-in ShoppingCart plugin if you want to make use of the demo content to get you started with your shop quicker. Therefore,  follow the directions and it will work perfectly.

The key features of ShoppingCart:

• WooCommerce support.
• Theme Freesia demo import and setup.
• Multiple layouts.
• Social media integrated.
• SEO friendly.

Within a couple of minutes, my shop was up and running. For further configuration, you can use the live customizer which contains lots of options to customize and create your perfect shop. It is also possible to upgrade to the pro version Shopping Cart.

Punte

Punte is a multipurpose WordPress theme that suits most niches of websites but especially online shops. It is a free, flexible theme from AccessPress Themes with lots of opportunities to create a perfect online appearance.

Furthermore, it is a theme with WPBakery Page Builder and Elementor page builder support. Grab one of the 12+ pre-built demos, import with a single click, and start building a winning online store. Whether it’s a site for business, corporate, restaurant, fashion, or merely a blog, Punte is an excellent choice.

Key features of Punte:

• WooCommerce support.
• 12+ pre-built demos.
• Theme options, responsive and Retina ready.
• High-Speed performance.
• Custom header and footer.

With this free WordPress theme, you can set up a comprehensive website for any purpose. Punte is suitable for WooCommece and eCommerce online shops and attractively selling your products.

Store Lite

Store Lite is a free Woocommerce based WordPress theme from ThemeinWP. It is a theme with a stylish and elegant look and feels. With its spacious design, your content and products look perfect.

However, as with so many other eCommerce and WooCommerce themes, it takes some preparation before you can get started with your shop.

Install Store Lite like all other themes, install the necessary plugins recommended. Furthermore, importing the demo requires that you read the documentation because it can be a bit tricky for a beginner. However, don’t worry, follow the guide, and your website shop is up and running within minutes.

Key features of Store Lite:

• WooCommerce support.
• Live Customizer.
• Drag & Drop homepage blocks.
• Gutenberg ready.
• Fullwidth layout and boxed layout.

I like the Store Lite for its great flexibility in the live customizer. There are lots of options to change and configure the layout and sections. Therefore, a big plus for the drag & drop homepage blocks, which allows easy handling and customization of the front page sections.

Furthermore, you can if you need more features and support upgrade to the pro version.

Shopay

Shopay is a free WooCommerce based WordPress theme from Mystery Themes. It is above all a great and beautiful looking theme, suitable for all kind of online shops selling products.

Moreover, it is a theme I enjoyed trying out. With this theme, you can create a fully-fledged WooCommerce shop with an attractive and elegant layout and design. Shopay is a feature-rich WordPress theme and includes all possible features needed for your online shop.

The key features of Almaira Shop:

• Woocommerce compatible.
• Build-in live customizer.
• Dozens of theme options.
• Unlimited color options.
• Responsive design.

It is a WooCommerce theme with multiple opportunities to create a great looking online store to sell your products in the best possible way.

However, to set up the theme correctly you must follow the instructions and if you want to make use of the demo content you have to download specific files. However, this task can be improved and simplified, in my opinion.

Also, it is possible to upgrade to the Shopay Pro version if you need more features and support.

Modern Store

Modern Store is another excellent free eCommerce WordPress theme perfect for all WooCommerce online shops. The theme is built by Compete Themes and is a popular theme in the WordPress theme repository.

When you install the Modern Store. It is also necessary to follow documentation and videos if you want to import WooCommerce dummy data. If you want to start up your shop faster.

Although, it can be a little tricky to get all the pieces in place. However, when ready, it is a great looking shop that you can present to your visitors and customers.

Key features of Modern Store:

• WooCommerce integrated.
• Elementor-friendly.
• Gutenberg compatible.
• Responsive and mobile-friendly.
• Actively developed.

The Modern Store Woocommerce WordPress theme is an additional good alternative to the other themes listed in this article. Give it a try! It is also possible to upgrade to Modern Store Pro here.

Wrapping Up

If you are considering opening a WooCommerce online shop. These free WooCommerce WordPress themes can come in handy. After all, all themes are free and wallet-friendly.

So grab one or more themes and test which of the themes that suit your purposes for selling products or services.

There are, of course, plenty of additional free WooCommerce WordPress themes you can choose. However, I have tested all the themes and I can recommend these themes to both beginners to more advanced WordPress users.

What is your favorite theme on the list? In addition, feel free to suggest a theme that you might use yourself or know of a useful WooCommerce theme. I would love to hear his opinion in the comments section below.

The post 10 Best Free WooCommerce WordPress Themes 2020 appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

As a direct consequence, these store owners have and are still, contributing to the unstoppable growth of eCommerce.

But let’s narrow down our discussion from the eCommerce industry to WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is the most popular CMS on the internet, powering over 42% of all eCommerce activities. Being such a popular platform, however, does not exempt WooCommerce store owners from optimizing their sales through CRO.

Which brings us to this question: What does CRO look like for a WooCommerce store? An excellent follow up to it would be the question of how much it costs, and whether or not it is easy to use.

If you’ve got all these questions on your mind, then this short article is for you! It’s aimed at beginners and people looking to learn about, and possibly implement CRO for WooCommerce to boost and measure the growth of their sales.

But before we go in-depth into CRO, there is the need to lay some groundwork regarding the process.

So, let’s begin.

Conversion Rate Optimization – An Introduction

Have you ever visited a website to find out about something, and just as you begin scrolling, a pop-up appears asking you to “Avail 50% Discount on Products by Signing-Up” or “Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter”?

If you have seen it, or perhaps, have taken action by subscribing, then you’ve taken a first-hand look at a CRO strategy employed by the owner.

Essentially speaking, it’s a broad term for the many processes used by owners to convert visitors on their site into customers. The customers, in turn, are not necessarily people who are purchasing your products. They could even take the form of people who have subscribed to your weekly newsletter.

When it comes to eCommerce, this is what the CRO process generally looks like.

1.    Discovery of the Product: Prospects find out about your product or service, and try to understand the benefits and the value it can add to your life.

2.    Selecting the Product: This is the point when the discovery process is complete, and prospects take the first step towards a purchase. The first step is generally landing on your website.

3.    Purchasing the Product: After discovery and selection come the purchase. Upon successful purchase, prospects are now customers.

After the purchase comes to the retargeting phase, where you send your offerings to customers.

Now, take a breather and visualize the steps your customers are seeking to purchase your products. Ask yourself, how are they being directed from discovery to purchase within your sales funnel?

Optimizing Your WooCommerce Store for Conversion

Before discussing how you can optimize, you first need to analyze the problem that exists within your sales funnel. Google Analytics is the best way to do that.

If you don’t know how to do that, here’s a quick video that helps you set conversion tracking on Google Analytics.

With conversion goals set, you’ll be able to track the number of visitors who land on your site, how many of them are making purchases, and how many of them are leaving without it. The latter part is the most important metric to track since that’s the point where your funnel is essentially “leaking.”

You would ideally want to take steps to remove those leakages in order to boost conversions. However, if you’re strapped for time, here are some basic steps you can take:

• Optimize Your Landing Pages: Preferably, you need to have a single-page checkout system to dissuade customers from getting overwhelmed and abandoning their cart.
• Use a Plugin: If you’re seeing a surge in purchases, then it’s best to make the purchasing journey as seamless as possible. Using a quick order or product display plugin usually works best in this case (more on this below).
• Simplify Your Checkout: Here, you can optimize your checkout field to be as seamless as possible.

Now, this is where we go a bit deeper, and explore the six major areas where you need to optimize your WooCommerce store to maximize conversions.

1. Simplify the Product Discovery Phase

Optimize your site’s search function:

• Introduce a live search functionality.
• Add advanced filters, and indexing to facilitate customers’ search.
• An Auto-Suggest a search box that starts displaying products when the user starts typing in the search box.
• Search by tag, keyword, or category.

Make the product analysis simple:

• Allow customers to view and compare products easily.
• Introduce a “You might also like” or “frequently bought together” functionality within your product pages.

Product Navigation Filters:

You can introduce a product navigation functionality that lets your customers filter the product pages by pattern, color, size, and industry-specific attributes – allowing them to find the right product.

Enable a quick purchase functionality on your store:

If you have recurring customers in your store, then you should allow them the convenience of not having to visit the product pages every time to purchase. Here are three ways you can go about doing that:

• – Utilize a bulk order table in your store. When introduced, this table allows your customers to purchase products directly from the table as opposed to visiting individual product pages.
•  – A reorder functionality that allows customers the option to reorder previously purchased products directly from their Account page.
•  – A product display plugin that allows you to showcase products in tabular format, allowing customers to view products, specify their quantity, add them to cart, and checkout instantaneously.

Enable live chat:

Having live chat support puts customers at ease knowing that they will have assistance when they feel stuck during a purchase.

2. Use Testimonials as Social Proof

Adding testimonials and reviews are an excellent strategy to convert visitors into paying customers. Because:

• They are useful both as a branding tool since they show legitimacy in relation to the brand.
• The more positive reviews you have on your store, the better your chances are for converting new customers.
• Lastly, more people clicking through, spending time, and purchasing from your site means an increase in rankings.

3. Use Value-Rich Content

Human beings consume more visual data than textual. In order to derive the most visual content, you need to have a strategy that takes the following content types into account.

• Product images (the more the merrier).
• Rich product descriptions.
• How-To” explainer videos.
• Knowledge Base articles.
• Documentation.

4. Create Urgency

Apart from offering discounted prices, there is another reason why discount sales and black Friday sales get overcrowded. That “Buy Now” or “Hurry Up” slogans create a sense of tension in the eyes of consumers; who feel as though they have to purchase the product before the discount deadline or the inventory is out.

For the promotional content of your product, you must use these tactics to create a sense of urgency for the consumer.

5. Simplify the Checkout Experience

This step requires you to consider the following customer-first features:

• Guest checkout functionality.
• Log-in through email or social media.
• Product prices in local currency.
• Multiple payment gateways.
• Flexible payment plans, such as “term payments”.
• “Add to Wishlist” option.

6. Give Them a Reason to Buy

Lastly, you need to incentivize users to purchase a product. To do that, you can use the following strategies:

• Offer a percentage of discounts or coupons. This strategy, when combined with step # 4, as discussed above, can bring a significant number of customers to your store.

• Offer reward points for referring products to friends or family. Referral System for WooCommerce is one plugin that helps you integrate both standalone discount referral coupons, as well as integrate the points and rewards system for WooCommerce to essentially gamify the purchase experience.
• If your users are meeting a minimum purchase quantity, for example; if they are purchasing 10  products from your store, you can offer them the option of free shipping as a gesture of goodwill.

7. Recover Your Conversions

What happens when a customer abandons a cart, leaves in the middle of the purchase, or leaves your site after visiting your product pages?

You’ve lost a conversion. Now, it’s your job to recover it. Sometimes it’s hard to recover people who have exited your sales funnel because they often do so due to valid reasons. But you need to try your level best to bring them back.

One way you can go about it is to encourage them to set up a wishlist of products that they want to purchase. For that purpose, WooCommerce Wishlists is possibly the best plugin that you can use.

If you’re seeing plenty of lost conversions, then it’s best to do a complete audit of your site and start implementing these WooCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies to perform A/B tests to see where the problems are coming from.

WooCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization Is Not a “One and Done” Thing

Once you’ve implemented these WooCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies, it doesn’t mean that you sit back, relax, and enjoy the profits. In fact, it’s so far from that, in fact, that once you start implementing those strategies. You would want to constantly monitor, and alter them to see what’s working and what’s not.

If you have the time, then it’s a good idea to see that the WooCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies that I’ve mentioned above are being followed accordingly.

The post A Quick Guide to Master WooCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Several online gateways can be used to process the payments.

Choosing the best WooCommerce payment gateways for your business depends on your type of business and requirements. If you have an online store, you can choose from plenty of options available. It is crucial to pick from the wide variety of options you have.

How to Choose the Right WooCommerce Payment Gateway?

Here is a guide to help you choose the right WooCommerce payment gateway so that your customers can pay securely and place orders online.

• The first and foremost thing you should do is ensure that the web host offers an SSL certificate for your website.
• The payment gateway should be Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards(PCI DSS).
• It is essential to get an idea about the estimate of the cost of payment gateways and the cost per transaction that eCommerce owners would have to pay. Some service providers charge upfront and some amount of percentage per transaction also.
• Choose a payment gateway that accepts multiple currencies. It will help you expand your business across the globe.
• Look for round the clock support from the service provider.

Do a little research over the internet and try to compare several payment gateways for WooCommerce. Try to gather all the information and make the right decision while choosing WooCommerce payment gateways.

Top 8 Payment Gateways for WooCommerce

PayPal

PayPal is the most popular online payment gateway that is used by millions of online stores. Being one of the oldest payment methods in the world, it gives access to all the major bank accounts, credit cards, and addresses. It offers support for over 25 currencies and has more than 200 million users.

PayPal Pro payment processing service makes it easier to process credit card payments and purchases online. It helps to make the store checkout process easy for the users.

Your users will fall in love with your WooCommerce store when you have the PayPal payment gateway on your online store, and you would surely experience an increase in your online sales with it.

Though you would have to pay a little extra ($30 monthly fee) in addition to the transaction fee, you would be able to enjoy the endless benefits and security as it is PCI compliant.

Stripe

Stripe – If you are looking for free to set up a payment method for WooCommerce, this can be the right option. The only costs you may have to worry about are the customer chargebacks. It is PayPal’s competitor when it comes to online payment gateways. It supports metered billings and subscriptions.

With Stripe, your eCommerce store can save the customer information too. It also helps you analyze the data and customize marketing strategies.

Stripe is known for offering better customer service than PayPal, but it is limited to a few countries only. It accepts over 135 currencies. It accepts all major credit cards, Bitcoin, digital payment methods like Apple Pay and Android Pay also.

This payment method is also PCI compliant, and so, you do not need to worry about the security of the payments made by customers online.

Authorize.net

Authorize.net is another oldest form of payment gateways for WooCommerce that may be used by most of eCommerce development companies. If you are worried about credit card frauds on your eCommerce store, choose this payment method.

It protects your website against credit card frauds, but you will have to pay for it. The initial setup cost for it is $49, and you will have to pay $25 as a monthly fee. That’s not all.

You will have to pay additional fees based on the transactions also. You will have to create a merchant account to collect your payments. Authorize.net works with all the other major third-party systems such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, QuickBooks, and others.

Square

Square is also a big name in the industry of payment gateways for WooCommerce. It accepts all the major credit cards across the globe and ensures faster deposits. Along with the other amazing features, it also provides physical Points of Sale (PoS), and this feature makes it unique and accessible among all the other payment processing methods.

If your business has an online and physical presence, you can accept payments through Square easily. You would not have to pay extra for online transactions. You would have to pay the charges only for POS.

It is an excellent option for automated for single and recurring transactions. It can also work with WooCommerce and WP EasyCart. WooCommerce website owners and designers can customize the gateway to match the look and feel of their website. The design of the checkout page is very attractive and user-friendly.

Braintree

Braintree – This payment gateway is an amazing way to accept online payments for a WooCommerce store. Without paying any monthly costs, one can use Braintree’s hosted services without setting up a merchant account.

It also offers advanced fraud protection features with its service. It can process over 130 currencies and is available in more than 44 countries.

Moreover, it is suitable for recurring billing options and subscription-based services, as well as donations. Braintree can also be integrated with other third-party tools such as Magento, Salesforce, 3dcart, and BigCommerce. You can use the readymade interface or customize the design of the checkout.

Skrill

Skrill is another payment gateway that is fast and secure for your website. It is formerly known as Moneybookers, which came from England. It generally follows the principle of prepaid cards. You can use it for your online transactions. You can send the money instantly & make payments using one single step.

This payment gateway is straightforward. You just need to use your e-mail Id & online banking details to receive or send. Do not worry about details, it is secure & your banking data never share with anyone.

Skrill has a charge of a 1.9% transfer fee and an approximately 3.99% margin on the exchange rates. You can also create your account on skrill, but for that, you need to make a transaction at least every 12 months.

Amazon Pay

Amazon pay is one of the popular online platforms that offer a great payment processing system. If you would like to use Amazon Pay, then you can checkout using Amazon accounts & pay via their usual payment settings.

Amazon is a known platform, and everyone mostly using it, so you can suggest your visitors pay via their Amazon account as well.

The payment is quite easy, and you can do it via credit or debit card. There has no charge for creating or register a new account. However, the seller needs to pay some payment, such as a commission of 1.9% and 35 cents per transaction.

As technology up-gradation, Amazon Pay frequently updates as well. Now, they also offer voice shopping. It is helping the online industry to expand the online business & attract more visitors. It has a secure checkout experience backed by amazon’s technology—one of the famous checkout process.

2Checkout

2Checkout is a new payment service and not a very popular service such as PayPal or Stripe. However, this payment system contains an all-in-one monetization platform that quickly maximizes your conversions. It also helps you to make your sales easier in the global market.

2Checkout is a reliable team player, and almost 500+ companies have used this payment gateway. It is also dealing with credit card payments and offers free setup for all users.

It simplifies the complexity of global payments, taxes, subscription billing, etc. Furthermore, it also helps to focus on delivering excellent customer experiences.

As far as its fees, it charges around 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. Moreover, they also charge between 1-1.5% for your international transactions. It has many valuable features and smooth to integrate with the online website.

Which Payment Gateway Should You Choose for Your WooCommerce Store?

When it comes to choosing WooCommerce payment gateways for your online store, you cannot pick one randomly. You should weigh all the pros and cons and make sure that you choose the one that matches your requirements and business goals.

Some payment gateways are suitable for specific regions and markets only. Some payment gateways can accept only some specific types of payments. You should be able to accept payments from more and more diverse customers coming from different regions who use different payment methods.

You can seek help from an expert eCommerce web development company to help you make the right decision while choosing payment gateways for your WooCommerce store. Choosing the right combination of payment methods will help you gain the maximum advantage.

The post Choosing the Best WooCommerce Payment Gateways for Your Store appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

You’re looking to book flight tickets online. You make the mistake of not purchasing them right away and *boom* a couple of days or sometimes hours later, the prices have gone up.

Altering prices based on demand or customers is a common strategy that several businesses use to drive sales or maximize profits.

In e-commerce, this is officially known as dynamic pricing.

What Is Dynamic Pricing?

A concept that’s been around for a while. Dynamic pricing is when the price of a product or service is adjusted (increased or decreased) for a specific period of time to meet demand or to influence a purchase.

The price of the product could be changed temporarily for various reasons – it could be hiked up during the holiday season. Or lowered to move out slow-moving inventory. Or could be personalized for wholesale buyers or business partners. Using price scraping software would ultimately allow you to determine the optimal price for your product or services.

With dynamic pricing, you can set the best price for your offering to maximize your profit.

How Can Dynamic Pricing Benefit Your WooCommerce Store?

E-commerce giants like Amazon, airline ticket booking sites, and popular hotels are known to implement dynamic pricing on a regular basis. That’s because the advantage of dynamic pricing is the opportunity to increase sales.

Along with this, there are several underlying benefits, such as:

1. Increased Purchase Urgency: You can convince potential buyers to make purchases quicker with limited time offers. If the price is dropped momentarily then the urgency to make the purchase increases.
2. Marketing Opportunity: Change in prices can be marketed to your target audience to lure them into making a purchase. You can also use this to coax customers into becoming members.
3. Customer Loyalty: By setting special prices for customers, you can make them feel special and keep them coming back to your store; thus, increasing loyalty.
4. Product Highlighting: By altering prices of certain products or product categories you can bring them into focus. This can primarily help you clear out stagnant inventory.
5. Price Personalization: Prices set for customers or certain user roles or groups can be used to offer buyers a personalized shopping experience.

Dynamic pricing allows you to have more control over the pricing of your product. Changes in pricing can be managed effectively without having a negative impact on your brand.

How to Implement Dynamic Pricing on WooCommerce?

There are several dynamic pricing extensions available to help you implement and control this strategy on your WooCommerce store. Using one or a combination of these extensions you can set flexible pricing in several ways. For example:

1. User-Based Pricing

With this strategy prices are set per user. This could be setting a different cost for the same product for guest buyers or setting personalized prices per customer. This works when you have a few products in your e-store.

However, dynamic pricing extensions also allow you to set prices for multiple products and customers at once using price import options.

For example, product A costs $30 for guest buyers. $20 for customer XYZ. $10 for customer JKL.

2. Advanced Category Pricing

Percentage price discounts can be set for an entire category. However, with an advanced strategy, special discounts can be set per customer for a category. This strategy works particularly well to clear out slow-moving inventory.

For example, product category A is available at a 10% discount for customer XYZ.

3. Role-Based Pricing

With role-based pricing, you can create a sort of membership store wherein customers have greater cost-saving benefits as they move up the membership ladder.

You can set different price discounts for different roles. This can also be implemented if you want to club vendor partners into a single role and offer them special discounts.

For example, all products at 10% OFF for Shop Managers.

4. Quantity-Based Pricing

Specifically for wholesale buyers, this strategy can also be put into place for regular customers to coax them into making a higher-quantity purchase. By setting increasingly higher discounts for bulk orders, you can give customers a benefit for purchasing in bulk.

For example, get 1 x product A at $30. 5 x product A at $20 (each). 10 x product A at $10 (each).

5. Dynamic Cart Discounts

When a customer adds a product to the cart, you can push them to increase their order value by offering them a special price or discount on crossing a certain cart value limit. This can drive them to purchase more products in the lure of better savings.

For example, let’s say a customer has products worth $90 in their cart. You can offer a 10% savings upon reaching a cart value of $100.

6. Demand-Driven Pricing

Holiday seasons are a great time when you see an increase in product demand. For example, the price of airline tickets or hotel rooms increases as the demand goes up. Setting prices in such scenarios can help you stretch your profit margins.

Moving Ahead

Quite simply put, dynamic pricing is a strategy that can drive success to any business.

What’s important is to figure out the most suitable option for your products or services and your customer base. Having the right plugin gives you the flexibility to implement either of the above strategies to help you boost returns. Be sure to keep tracking your competitor prices so as to maintain rates as per your industry standards.

What do you think of the strategies discussed? Is there a particular one that you’d like to try? Whether it’s a single strategy or multiple combined, it’s time to take the plunge and implement dynamic pricing on your WooCommerce store, right away!

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