I’ve built e-commerce sites for clients, I’ve developed e-commerce software, and I’ve lead 3 WooCommerce releases. So it’s safe to say I’m pretty into e-commerce & WooCommerce.
WooCommerce has a great welcome wizard that helps you setup all of the basic settings. But then where do you go from there? I like to help store owners get customers by maximizing acquisition channels (Google, Facebook, email marketing, trade shows, etc).
And once you start getting customers to your site it’s time to start improving your conversion rates. I have posts about social proof, video marketing, membership sites, and all sorts of things.
Once you get customers it’s time to retain those customers. That means offering loyalty programs & getting them on a newsletter so you can continue to provide value to them and you stay top of mind.
One of the best things about WooCommerce is the slick one page checkout. It's really fast since you don't need to reload any pages and it's smart enough to know when you don't need shipping information when you're only purchasing virtual/downloadable products. We like to make sure the site manager has all of the data available to them so if you have a free download available on your site WooCommerce still asks the user for all of their billing address fields which works great for most users.
One of the most powerful plugins for WooCommerce is Table Rate Shipping because it's so configurable. You can create your own rules for bulk shipping, weight based shipping, or set up shipping zones and charge different rates for each zone. When someone requests their existing shipping method only support certain zones, or charge extra for specific zones we usually point them to Table Rate Shipping because that extension can do just about anything.
It would be nice if we could take some of the functionality of that plugin out and apply it to other shipping methods (like UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc.) but at WooThemes we're very aware of feature creep and if we added these other feature the existing shipping methods would be bloated to the point of being unusable. So without adding a whole bunch of options that most users don't want the best way to do this is to write a snippet of code to do this.
For something as seemingly simple as setting up a terms & conditions page you would think that we wouldn't get many questions about it but we actually get quite a few questions.
Believe me it's not often you'll hear me say that popularity matters but sometimes in the world of programming it does.
WooCommerce has a pretty fantastic admin user interface. There's just enough tabs to only show you the data you need to see and have the rest of the data be easily accessible. If you're just editing one product it should be easy to change something as simple as the “download expiration” field. But what happens if you need to bulk edit products? Could you use the WordPress bulk editor?
The default WordPress bulk editor is great for a handful of products. But what if your company has some sort of policy change? Like one that changes how long all of your links are valid. If that's the case you could easily be editing all of the products in your store. That's where it helps to know a little code and just update the database directly.
One of the requests I hear all the time is how to remove the WooCommerce “From: $$” price on the variable product page. Some people feel that it adds unnecessary clutter to the page. The good news here is that WooCommerce is incredibly flexible. With a simple filter you can modify that price however you want or remove it entirely.
Shipping is one of the most complex aspects of e-commerce. You have to worry about shipping provider regulations, large products that have awkward dimensions & box sizes, small products that the shipping calculators incorrectly estimate and you over charge, or you could have a mix match of product sizes and it's hard to come up with a fair flat rate shipping fee.
One of the approaches many store owners take is to mark up their products a little more and then offer free shipping. I think this is brilliant idea, but what happens if you have many small items and one large item that throws off the flat rate fee? If you're using WooCommerce there's a filter you can use to disable free shipping when a specific product is in the cart.
I had a great time at WordCamp Grand Rapids last weekend. In addition to meeting awesome people I think that my presentation went really well and I had some awesome questions at the end. One of the questions I was asked during my presentation at WordCamp Grand Rapids last weekend was whether or not WordPress is even the right choice for an e-commerce solution and can it scale to handle high amounts of traffic? The answer is YES!