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WooCommerce: How to Run an Affiliate / Referral Program?

There is no doubt – one of the fastest, most affordable and easiest ways to increase your WooCommerce sales is to “hire your own customers”.

You’ve probably heard of affiliate commissions, referral programs, influencer marketing, brand ambassadors and so on. Online brands are doing all they can to promote this strategy and tap into their fans’ communities.

As a WooCommerce store owner, no matter whether you sell digital or physical products, you should definitely give an affiliate program a go. Besides, what if I told you enabling such a complex system was actually super easy?

With a simple plugin you can immediately add an affiliate marketing program to your WooCommerce website, give registered affiliates their own dashboard with statistics and revenue, pay them via PayPal or Stripe either manually, immediately or monthly and basically do absolutely no coding or complex set up.

Decide your referral commission (e.g. $10 per product, or 15% per order), install the affiliate plugin, contact all your existing customers, subscribers, fans, followers and see your sales grow.

For such a little investment, your returns might be reasonable enough and there is really nothing stopping you from implementing this today.

In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most reliable WooCommerce Affiliate plugins. They all do the trick, so it’s up to you to make that final choice.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Run an Affiliate / Referral Program?

WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

If your WooCommerce store already generates a few orders per month, then it’s probably the right time to step up and start analyzing your ecommerce data.

Despite the “WooCommerce > Reports” tab within the WordPress dashboard can give you sales figures, stock takes and customer lists – we all know that’s a very basic, limited functionality. It gives you CSV export but no automation. There are no filters and no segments. It’s accurate but still not enough.

Data plays a vital role on your WooCommerce website. If you can get access to a wider range of figures, reports, screens, calculations, exports, filters, integrations, then it’s very likely you can understand how to increase your profits.

Data can help you identify problems (hello, cart abandonment – biggest responsible for low conversion rates), can help you select popular products for your cross-sell and up-sell strategy, can give you a hint on how to improve the user experience and have them check out faster – as well as giving you a hand analyzing patterns, performances and customer behavior.

In this (very long) post, we’ll take a look at ways to gather ecommerce data beyond the default “Reports” section, generate email digests, print advanced reports, filter and segment orders and customers, and much more. I will be referring to the two biggest tracking software for WooCommerce: Google Analytics and Metorik. Continue reading WooCommerce Advanced Tracking: Analytics, Reports, Exports, Segmentation

WooCommerce: Top Wishlist Plugins (Screenshots + Features)

1% is a relatively average ecommerce sales conversion rate. In other words, every 100 website visitors, 99 are not going to purchase anything from your shop – and maybe never will.

Increasing that conversion rate is everyone’s dream. Yet, CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is one of the toughest sections of ecommerce marketing. Given the same amount of traffic, how can you convert more sales?

Well, adding a wishlist functionality to WooCommerce is what I consider a vital CRO test. It might or might not work for your specific business (that’s why CRO is tough, no business is born equal), but it’s worth a 12 months trial at least. The good news is that there are great, free, reliable WooCommerce Wishlist plugins available (as well as premium of course), so this is a no-brainer really.

If you never heard of wishlists before, remember those 99 users who had no intention of buying anything on your shop right now? Well, the point I’m trying to make is that they might like to “save” a few products in a wishlist and come back later (even after months) to add those product to cart and complete the checkout.

This is very simple. You’re basically helping users with a functionality not many WooCommerce shops provide. You’re giving those 99 people at least one reason to come back to your store at a later date and – as we will see later – you can even give them magic powers such as sharing their wishlists with friends and using them publicly or privately.

Ok, let’s get started. What are the most reliable “Wishlist” plugins for WooCommerce?

Continue reading WooCommerce: Top Wishlist Plugins (Screenshots + Features)

WooCommerce: Multi-Vendor / Marketplace Solutions

Building the next Amazon is everyone’s dream.

Allowing sellers to use your online platform to reach wider audiences without holding stock, investing in shipping and warehousing and – let’s be honest – with a few dollars budget… is actually possible in WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce Multi-Vendor/Marketplace scenarios are many – not a surprise. And sometimes, a plugin is all you need to build an Etsy-alike website. Not bad for a small investment – you can focus on the marketing while the WooCommerce plugin does the rest.

However, building a full website, no matter its project specifications, is never easy. Many WooCommerce and ecommerce entrepreneurs underestimate how much work, caution, attention, patience and money are needed to develop an online marketplace.

Nothing is free – if something looks doable with a $79 plugin you also need to consider the cost of time, outsourcing, marketing and third parties (such as picking a reliable hosting).

Anyway, today we’ll take a look at some of the best plugins for turning a WooCommerce website into a multi-vendor marketplace, as well as a simple PHP snippet that might just be enough for you. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Multi-Vendor / Marketplace Solutions

WooCommerce: How do You Sell Gift Cards / Vouchers?

Let’s be honest – if you run a B2C WooCommerce store and you don’t currently sell gift cards, this is the right time to get started.

If you do a quick Google search about “Gift Card Statistics”, you will probably notice a huge trend: gift card sales are on the rise (we’re talking billions), as well as the percentage of customers spending more money than the redeemed amount.

The good news is – you can enable gift cards with a simple click of a button or, alternatively, purchase a premium plugin to get a more efficient, automated, integrated system.

Either way, there is really no excuse: you should start selling gift cards (or “vouchers”) from today, or at least test it away. Sometimes – trust me – ecommerce marketing is pretty simple: see what works (specifically on Amazon and Alibaba), and copy it.

In this post we will analyze different solutions. We’ll see how to use a simple coupon code (oh yes, you can do that), as well as taking a look at the best free and paid plugins out there.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How do You Sell Gift Cards / Vouchers?

WooCommerce: How to Get Customers to Request a Quote?

Not all WooCommerce websites are born equal. Sometimes a price and an add to cart button are just not enough.

B2B platforms, wholesalers and high-ticket businesses are usually quite flexible with their pricing and might need to give customers the freedom to request a quote.

Correct, WooCommerce can be used as a quoting engine as opposed to a standard ecommerce website (or both can be enabled at the same time if there are two different audiences).

As usual, there are different solutions. In this article, we’ll see how to use a simple code snippet to show a contact form on the single product page, we’ll see which free plugins are available on WordPress.org and – of course – we will also take a look at more advanced, premium extensions.

Either way, the beauty about WooCommerce is that with the click of a button you can customize the way it behaves!

Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Get Customers to Request a Quote?

WooCommerce: How to Increase Your Website Opt-In Rates?

This is a guest post by Maarten Belmans of Studio Wombat – if you like the article, make sure to thank him in the comments!

Popups…. they sometimes feel like the necessary evil of ecommerce websites. We all see them several times a day, and we click away from them just as often.

On the other hand, if you run one or more ecommerce websites, it’s hard to ignore them completely. After all, anyone with an email marketing campaign needs a way to capture the email addresses of potential customers.

Unfortunately, since few people get excited by popups while they’re browsing, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the average opt-in rate on a website averages 1.95%. That’s not a very impressive number.

If you are trying to grow your email list, however, you’re probably looking for a new, fun, gamified way to capture email addresses – without annoying your users. Continue reading WooCommerce: How to Increase Your Website Opt-In Rates?

WordPress: The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (WC Rome 2017)

I had the pleasure to speak at WordCamp Rome 2017. Yes, the very first WordCamp in my hometown (I left Rome in 2007 to move to Ireland)!

I was super happy to present a talk called “The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing” (OMG how difficult it was to speak in English in front of my Italian friends…).

The talk covered my 5 years of content marketing, and how I’ve seen it all while creating content on my WordPress website: during the first 2 years I wasted time and energy to write blogs no one would read. Then I found my inspiration, my path, my content strategy – and in the last 3 years website traffic has risen from 0 to 15,000+ users (and still growing) per week. Now my blog is my only source of sales leads.

I first and foremost described what mistakes (sins) I made. What about saving 2 years of your life?

Then I listed the “10 Commandments of Content Marketing” – 10 simple tips you can take away to increase your website traffic and focus on the only purpose of content marketing: teaching.

In the final part of the talk, I recommended a few WordPress plugins and email marketing strategies to implement the whole system. Continue reading WordPress: The 10 Commandments of Content Marketing (WC Rome 2017)

WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?

Well, get ready for a 2,700+ words article: becoming a WooCommerce expert won’t take you just a couple of days.

A few months won’t be enough either.

If you want to join that very small group of advanced freelancers and agencies that exclusively work with WooCommerce clients and charge top dollar, if you want to become a WooCommerce authority and build a successful career, if you want clients to come to you as opposed to you chasing them, well – you need to digest and assimilate what I’m about to tell you.

In this (long) article I will help you understand what is advanced WooCommerce, and then break this down into 5 simple steps.

Five makes-a-lot-of-sense steps you should follow in order to complete your journey.

So, want to become a WooCommerce ninja? A WooCommerce wrangler? A WooCommerce guru?

Well, despite I dislike all those ninja-like “terms”, let me tell you a thing or two. Then, join me in the comments and let’s keep the conversation going. Continue reading WooCommerce: How To Become an Advanced Developer?

WooCommerce: What Are the Must-Use Plugins?

Ah, if only there were a “simple” WooCommerce project! We would all use the same plugins, copy and paste the same content and the world would be all the same 🙂

So, let’s be clear about this question. There is no must-use plugins list for WooCommerce, as each website is custom and therefore needs different functionalities.

Having said that, many WooCommerce developers use a few identical plugins on almost every project, and this post contains an answer to that. Continue reading WooCommerce: What Are the Must-Use Plugins?

WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

As a WooCommerce user, WooCommerce blogger and WooCommerce developer I often hear this question: “What’s the best hosting platform for a WooCommerce website?“.

Well, first and foremost, there is no “best” hosting for WooCommerce (and WordPress in general).

There are so many choices out there that defining the “best” is impossible. Besides, if there were a “best” hosting provider, there would be only one hosting company left in business.

Continue reading WooCommerce: What’s the Best Hosting Provider?

WooCommerce: Display $0.00 Amount For Free Shipping Rates

In the past, WooCommerce Cart and Checkout pages used to show “$0.00” beside each free shipping rate. Now, this is gone and WooCommerce only shows the shipping rate name, without the 0 amount.

But given that many freelance clients requested this customization, today we’re bringing this back to life with just a few lines of PHP. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: How Top Brands Design Product Category Pages

eCommerce Category Description

Selling on the web is a highly competitive game. There is no shortage of both customers and competitors. Big companies crush little companies every day. But that doesn’t mean smaller websites doesn’t have any chance.

Smaller companies can beat larger companies if they focus on the right things. For that, you always need to look for opportunities and act smart when it comes to promoting your brand and products.

Leveraging search engines is one of the cheapest ways to bring customers to your website. For that, you need to make sure you are fulfilling the search query. Since Google is always looking for the best fit & best experience for users based on their query.

Category pages or product listing pages are key hub pages in any E-commerce store. Products tend to come and go but categories stay. So it’s better to build up your category pages.

For example, if you are selling necklaces, you have more than one necklace for sure. So rather than 5 necklace pages competing for the same Necklace terms, optimize the category page for necklaces while optimizing the products for specific necklace style (e.g. Crystal Necklaces). Your primary focus should be ranking your category pages for specific key terms.

Most online stores neglect their category pages and organize them in a way that it does more harm than good. If optimized correctly they can bring in good traffic for top level keywords and reap the rewards for months.

Continue reading WooCommerce: How Top Brands Design Product Category Pages

WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

Recently I was on a coaching call with a client and the “Free Sample” challenge came up. Client has 400+ products on the website and had no intention of adding a free variation to each product manually.

So, I promised to myself I was going to study a different approach. And today you get it for free – nice! Needless to say, a comment and a social media share are much appreciated. Enjoy!

Continue reading WooCommerce: Order a “Free Sample” @ Single Product Page

WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce.com is dropping its 50% extension renewals, and moving to a 100% renewal business model.

I found this out at WCEU 2017 and then via WP Tavern. Unfortunately, this announcement is not on WooCommerce blog, on its social media channels or even Automattic.

And yes, this is retroactive – we are now all paying 100% renewals. So, let’s see what I think about this “still not official” news. Continue reading WooCommerce: My Take on WooCommerce.com Switching to 100% Renewals

WooCommerce Checkout Fields Customization Guide

Checkout page plays a huge role in your eCommerce success. It is one of the most important part of your conversion funnel. This is the page that brings revenue.

It doesn’t matter how many people are visiting your website if no one makes any purchase. Complicated checkout process is one of the main reason of high shopping cart abandonment.

You should always look for ways to make your checkout process as simple as possible. If you are using WooCommerce as your eCommerce solution you can easily change the checkout page design, remove or change the existing checkout fields order.

Continue reading WooCommerce Checkout Fields Customization Guide