Whether you’ve already been involved with the launch of a WordPress eCommerce website in the past or you are planning to start a new one this year, here are a few takeaways for you. Let’s learn about 7 great tips to get the most out of eCommerce websites developed on WordPress CMS.
#1 Product Display
Product display is the backbone of any eCommerce website because the overall sales of that website depend on the way products have been showcased. For WordPress eCommerce websites, there are plenty of plugins available to show the products however one of my favorite plugins is Product Catalog.
Product Catalog plugin offers responsive design to display your products in a sleek & easy to customize product catalog format. This plugin helps to make your product catalog easy to browse, sort, and update with product catalog categories, sub-categories, tags, and custom fields.
#2 Easy checkout system
No matter how good the design of an eCommerce website is, it will not attract more sales unless its checkout process is intuitive. Having a complicated checkout process is one of the reasons for the high abandonment rate of orders on most eCommerce websites.
Therefore, if you really want to see growth in your eCommerce sales, you must make sure to have a great checkout process. There are several plugins available for WordPress eCommerce websites like WP Ecommerce which has streamlined the checkout process to increase your store’s conversion rate dramatically.
#3 Simple signup process
Why signup is important for eCommerce businesses?
Signup or registration is the only method to capture details of your website visitors even if they don’t make purchases on your online store. These details can further be used to personalize your website members’ next visit. Not only this, but you can also use this user list for future marketing purposes.
In most eCommerce websites, the signup/registration process sucks because of its lengthy form fields for the users to fill. Fortunately, WordPress provides some great plugins like Woocommerce Signup Lite which you can use on your Woocommerce (WordPress eCommerce plugin) websites and make the signup process simpler and easier to fill.
#4 Customers FAQ
To make visitors familiar with your products, services, return policies, shipping, or even about your company, a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page could be helpful. The idea is to prevent website users from getting lost and to make them aware of the policies and products of the company. Studies have proved that having a FAQ section on an eCommerce website can increase the number of sales and reduce the number of calls for general enquires that users make to the company.
With WP Awesome FAQ Plugin, you can create an FAQ page with a list of frequently asked questions along with their answers.
#5 Product Videos
If an image is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million words. Videos are the best way to let your website users know about your products in more detail. Considering the fact that on eCommerce websites, users are expected to pay for products that they’ve never seen physically, a video about the product can definitely help them to make up their minds.
WordPress offers great plugins like WordPress Video Player for eCommerce websites to showcase videos on each product page.
#6 Building email list
When you invest money in developing an eCommerce website, you need a way to not only get more sales from website traffic but also drive these same visitors back again and again.
Why building an email list is important?
Email marketing is still considered one of the most cost-effective marketing channels because email is personal, direct, and largely transactional. And to drive email marketing campaigns successfully, an email list is the only fuel.
There are a few useful WordPress plugins for eCommerce websites to capture user emails & build a decent email list. One of those plugins is WordPress Popup – Optin Revolution. This plugin helps you to create unblockable WordPress popups to grow your list of subscribers! Optin Revolution is a killer free WordPress popup plugin although you will need to hire an eCommerce web developer in order to get unlimited customization on the optin popups.
#7 Optimized loading speed
Many studies show that the loading speed of an eCommerce website has a huge impact on its sales. An average online user will only tolerate a load time of up to 4-5 seconds. The fact that today’s online shoppers have so many sites at their fingertips, they don’t want to suffer slow websites. And if any of your web pages aren’t fast enough to load, your visitors can move on to speedier online stores.
Installing a cache plugin will have the biggest impact on your online store’s loading speed. The W3 Total Cache plugin is one of the most popular caching plugins available for WordPress websites. As claimed by its developers, this plugin can boost the loading speed of your website by 10 times.