If you’re a designer, photographer, or developer, Creative Market is a great way to start selling digital products online. You have a ready-to-go marketplace with little barrier to entry. But as you grow your store and expand your product lines, you’ll want to consider a more customizable eCommerce option that doesn’t take a significant share of your sales revenue.

While Creative Market does provide benefits like a built-in audience and brand recognition, WooCommerce offers endless flexibility and functionality without taking a percentage of your hard-earned money.

Read on to learn why WooCommerce is the best Creative Market alternative, how to sell digital products with WooCommerce, and what a few store owners have done to succeed online.

If you’re an artist, writer, musician, or game developer, you’ve experienced the ups and downs that come with making a living in a creative field. Patrons — fans of your work who offer support through small, regular contributions — are key to ensuring that there’s enough in your bank account to let you keep producing for your loyal audience.

Until now, Patreon has been the standard third-party site for creatives looking to set up a support structure. But after they made news by deleting some accounts whose content didn’t align with certain views, lots of people realized they’d rather have their own platform, where they’re in complete control. Enter: WooCommerce. 

eCommerce stores have two basic strategies to get products found online — purchase ads or improve search rankings. The most cost-effective option is search engine optimization (SEO). While it takes time and effort to make organic search work for your business, it costs a lot less long-term than a paid ad strategy. 

Successful SEO focuses on your products. Why? Because, in most cases, people who are ready to buy — the people you hope will find your site — search for the products they’re looking for. If someone is looking for facial cream, they’re not going to type “makeup” or “beauty products” into a search engine. They’ll type something like “facial cream,” “face lotion,” “skin lotion,” or “facial ointment.” For your products to show up in search results, your product pages need to be built around specific, buyer-optimized keywords related to what you sell.

Below, you’ll find specific strategies to accomplish this and help shoppers find your products through organic search. Block out time each week to work through the entire list; it will be well worth the time you invest. 

Note: this guide focuses on product-based search engine optimization. For basic SEO principles, read Top Ten SEO Tips for eCommerce Stores.

Managing sales tax is a thankless task for any business. You won’t get props for collecting the correct sales tax from a customer, or for filing returns and remitting tax properly and on time, but you’ll sure catch hell and be penalized for getting it wrong.

While sales tax requirements are never considered easy, they’re particularly difficult in the following 10 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Tennessee, and Texas. Another two deserve honorable mention: Alabama and Kansas.

The complexity of sales tax collection, remittance, and returns in the above states creates a perfect storm that makes sales and use tax filing in these jurisdictions uncommonly painful. Contributing factors include:

• Home rule
• Non-traditional sales tax
• Sales tax holidays

For most of business history, a referral was a real person telling another real person about something terrific:

• “Hey, you should try this new service out.” 
• “I used this product and love it.”
• “I was dealing with the same thing you are. This is what I used and it worked well.”

That’s the language of a real referral, and it has a far greater impact on a buyer’s behavior than ‘referral traffic,’ which typically means traffic that comes to your site from links on other websites (as opposed to traffic from Google, Bing, or other search engines).

This kind of referral traffic is great and there are a number of well-known ways to boost it. Some are relatively simple; others are very labor intensive. However, there’s one lesser-known method that provides the best chance of receiving a real, high-quality referral — one that’s likely to turn into a new customer, subscriber, or follower.

The checkout process is one of the most important steps in the buyer journey — it’s the last chance you have to convince shoppers to make a purchase. But a whopping 63.23% of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned. That’s a lot of online shoppers who decide to purchase a product but change their minds at the last second.

There are a variety of factors that impact abandoned carts (like shipping costs and payment options), but the checkout page itself also plays a role. If it’s too complicated, too long, or requires information that’s too personal, customers might leave and purchase a similar product elsewhere.

One way to optimize your checkout page? Customized checkout fields based on your business needs and target audience. For example: If you don’t typically sell to companies, remove the Company Name field. If you send customers birthday surprises, include a Date of Birth field. If you sell pet products, it may make sense to ask for Type of Pet.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how to customize your checkout page to meet the needs of both your target audience and business.

If you have a car, you almost certainly have a steering wheel. If you have a website, you probably have an About page. But do you really know how to use it well?

Many online stores drastically underutilize their About pages. It’s the one place on your site that people approach with a degree of trust. They’re thinking about spending money with you, and they visit your About page looking to trust you. 

Once you establish trust, you can nudge visitors to take the next step — buy a product, watch a video, take a quiz, sign up for a free trial — but that first step is key. 

How can you make sure your About page is doing its job? Here are the five primary goals you’re aiming for:

People are spending more time on their phones than ever before. We use them for almost everything — banking, investing, checking the weather, monitoring workouts, listening to music, navigating, and, of course, shopping. 

Nearly 55% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, and 60% of online shoppers use their phone to find a product first. If your store doesn’t provide a seamless user experience on mobile, you risk losing a big chunk of your potential customers.

But how can you optimize your online store to increase mobile conversions?

Every time someone makes a purchase online, there are a wealth of psychological factors that come into play. So understanding how the human brain works, and more specifically, how people decide to buy, can contribute to the success of your online store.

Utilizing buyer psychology is about more than just making sales. It helps you provide a better user experience, connect on a personal level with your buyers, and offer the best solution for your customers. 

Consider how you can use the following psychology principles to improve your store experience.

If you’re starting a business, you’ll need to understand accounting principles to judge your organization’s health and progress towards its goals.

Businesses are built on transactions. The basics of accounting begin with a system for recording and reporting your transactions. Even if you plan to outsource accounting and bookkeeping, you need to be able to read and understand your financial reports and that means understanding a few basic business setup and accounting principles.

A common myth we hear is that WooCommerce can’t scale. But the truth is that the flexibility of WooCommerce, along with its unrivaled community of developers, makes it a great solution for large stores.

Scaling is the ability to grow your online store without sacrificing performance or user experience. And if you want to continue to increase revenue, these are two critical areas that you shouldn’t overlook. 

Learn more about why WooCommerce is a good choice for your growing store and how to prepare for a large volume of products, orders, and site visitors.

Are you considering moving your store from Shopify to WooCommerce?

Changing eCommerce platforms might seem like a big hurdle to overcome, but it is easier than you might think to move your products, customers, and orders to WooCommerce. 

In fact, there is a solution that’s virtually hands-off and ensures a worry-free migration process. There’s no need for any technical knowledge; just connect the two platforms and you’re ready to go!

Below, you’ll learn why WooCommerce is a great choice for your online store and how to seamlessly move from Shopify to WooCommerce.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday mark the beginning of the holiday shopping season in America, but fewer people than ever are lining up in front of big-box retailers. Instead, they’re avoiding the crowds and shopping online.

In 2018, Cyber Monday was the biggest eCommerce sales day in U.S. history, with $7.9 billion in revenue. This is a huge opportunity for online stores!

But with this opportunity comes massive competition. To be successful this Black Friday, you need to consider more than the deals you offer and the products you stock. You need to make sure that your website is prepared to handle the increase in traffic, that users hear about deals and can easily find what they’re shopping for, and that there are tactics in place to follow up with them and create loyal fans of your brand for years to come. 

We just wrapped the second annual WooSesh, a virtual conference that included more than 1,500 WooCommerce store owners and developers. It was a lot of fun, and in this post, we’re going to share just a few of our top takeaways.

Let’s take a look at nine things we learned from WooSesh 2019!

WooCommerce 3.8 delivers new WooCommerce Product Blocks and a few enhancements for all store owners, plus new hooks and tweaks for developers. We’ll break it down for you below.  

What’s new in 3.8

WooCommerce 3.8 is likely our last minor release of 2019 and should be fully backward compatible with all WooCommerce releases since 3.0.

As always, we highly recommend following best practices and making a backup of your site before updating WooCommerce. More at: How to Update WooCommerce.

Recurring revenue. Monthly revenue. Passive income. Continuity. Subscriptions. All of these labels represent the same goal – to form a foundation of business income that arrives every month.

But no matter what you call it, it feels great to get paid each month without having to make a single new sale.

The merits of a recurring income approach to your business have inspired entire industries. 

Here are a few of the benefits:

• A baseline of income that arrives in your bank account before you’ve won a single new customer.
• Customers on subscription models stay loyal longer.
• Recurring customers have higher lifetime values.
• Recurring customers are more likely to make referrals.
• Subscriptions serve customers better by saving them time and reducing the effort required to buy.

And make no mistake, nearly every business is capable of creating a line of products or services that can be purchased on a subscription basis. Monthly payment models can be used to sell everything from software to smoothies, coffee to clothes, healthcare services to car care.