Everybody loves coupons – but too many coupons and discounts devalue your brand.

When a store overuses coupons, it’s often a sign of an inferior product or a marketing person who’s out of ideas. It can also send the message that you don’t believe in your products, and they’re not worth what you’re charging.

The best approach on coupons? Use them as a way to drive desired behaviors or to reward customers. Our friends at PHLEARN, the number one Photoshop and photography tutorial website in the world, gave us some good tips based on their vast experience running a successful education platform.

Driving behavior

Continue Reading

Are you looking to improve your eCommerce inventory management?

According to a 2017 report, 43 percent of small business owners still count inventory by hand, rely on pen and paper, and manually key in data. That’s staggering, given how fast-paced and competitive today’s market is.

It’s these kinds of manual systems that lead to supply chain nightmares – from ending up with excess stock through to poor cash flow.

How do you get a handle on your inventory cleverly and efficiently? It’s easier than you might think.

Continue Reading

Many WooCommerce merchants know about chargebacks and how to prevent them — but in case you don’t, here’s a quick overview of the key details regarding chargebacks and some preventative steps you can take today.

Why do chargebacks exist?

A “chargeback” is when a customer recalls a payment. While they can be extremely costly for retailers when abused, chargebacks exist to offer consumers protection for purchases.

The Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974 established rules for disputing credit card charges. Protections provided by the act include:

• Giving consumers 60 days to dispute a charge that was unauthorized, for the wrong amount, or for a purchase that was never delivered.
• Allowing consumers to instruct their credit card issuer to withhold payment during a dispute with a merchant.
• Limiting the amount of time for acknowledging a dispute and investigating it.
• Requiring written notification of a credit card dispute, unless the card is stolen.

The result of these protections? Chargebacks.

Continue Reading

Could a minor adjustment increase your online store’s profits by 10%, 30%, or even 50%?

Some of the world’s biggest companies, including Amazon, say yes. A few tiny changes can boost order size and profits, and help build better customer relationships.

One way to do this? Cross-selling. If you’re not doing it yet, you should be. Let’s look at how cross-selling works, why you need it, and how to get started.

Continue Reading

When shoot day arrives, there are a few steps you need to keep in mind when it comes to styling, lighting, and camera settings.

Styling and backdrop

Traditional product images are shot with a seamless white or neutral backdrop. This simplifies the editing process and gives the product a clean and focused appearance.

Continue Reading

We hope you’ve enjoyed this four part series on email marketing! To wrap it up, we want to leave you with some inspiration. Here are some emails that stand out from the crowd, from across every stage of the email lifecycle.

Onboarding

Welcome Emails: Paul Smith’s welcome email thanks their new subscribers and highlights core features of their online shop. They also include clear links to their social media profiles, so people can connect with them across the web.

Getting Started / User Guide emails: If you sell a one-of-a-kind product that customers may have trouble using, a “getting started” email gives you a chance to set them up for success by explaining its features and sharing basic how-tos. In this helpful email, Google highlights the unique selling propositions of its product, Chromecast:

Continue Reading

Email marketing is all about building a relationship with your customers by sending the right communication at the right time. This gets harder as your customer base grows. You probably don’t have time to send one-on-one messages to each one of your subscribers, so how do you scale relationship-building? Email automation.

Now that you have a sense of the email lifecycle and recommended tools, let’s look at five best practices for building customer relationships with email automations.

Continue Reading

This week we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing for WooCommerce: understanding the email lifecycle, emails best practices, and helpful tools and integrations.

WooCommerce has robust email tools built right into core. To send a greater range of messages, you can integrate your store with leading email services like MailChimp, and add email marketing extensions.

Continue Reading

The Sequoia Data Corporation introduced Compumarket, the first internet-based system for eCommerce, in 1989. Barely 20 years later, eCommerce sales are predicted to reach $2.84 billion.

But unless you pull customers towards your business, you won’t generate sales — and that’s where email comes in. According to a joint survey by DMA and eConsultancy, 80% of marketers think email is the best marketing channel for customer acquisition, and 81% consider it best for customer retention.

For the next few days we’re putting the spotlight on email marketing to look at four key topics, starting with understanding the email marketing lifecycle.

Continue Reading

One of the most popular categories for WooCommerce stores is fashion and apparel — you can sell anything from jewelry to scarves to suits to baby clothes with a WordPress store built using WooCommerce, Storefront, and Galleria.

Galleria is a Storefront child theme perfect for fashion and design stores. Monochrome and minimalist, it gives sites a classy look and is optimized for eCommerce.

Continue Reading

Conversion rate optimization is something we talk about, retweet about, and know we need to invest time in.

What does conversation rate optimization look like for a WooCommerce store? How much does it cost? Are there things that are quick to implement and will make a big difference?

Most importantly—if you have limited time to spend on conversion rate optimization, where should you begin?

Here’s a quick guide to conversion rate optimization (CRO) for WooCommerce, including how to measure your sales funnel, and redeem lost sales.

Continue Reading

One of the single best ways to create repeat customers for your eCommerce store on WooCommerce, or any eCommerce platform, is to give them an effective post-purchase experience. After all, retaining a customer is easier than acquiring a new one.

Let’s explore four ways to keep your customers engaged post-purchase.

Continue Reading

Some stores sell products that are straightforward — a shopper views it, likes it, and adds it to their cart. But for many of you WooCommerce store owners, your customers will be asked to make choices before that “add to cart” button can be clicked.

Whether these choices are simple color selections or multiple options for size and shape depends on what you sell. The one thing that won’t change is your use of product variations to make viewing and selecting the right options an simple task.

Setting up your variations is the easy part. Making those variations easy to view, browse, and buy — that’s where you might need a helping hand.

Let’s take a look at some of the best practices out there for displaying variable products on your online store, all of which will ultimately help you meet your #1 goal of selling more products.

Continue Reading

Whether or not an online store is successful depends on dozens, if not hundreds of individual factors. Success requires that magic mixture of quality products, smart timing, effective calls to action, prominence in search engines, and so on and so forth.

One of the many factors — or, more accurately, one spot that collects many of these factors — is the product page. These pages can literally make or break an online store. If they’re great, they can boost your sales; if they’re subpar, well… you can guess the rest.

Detailed, convincing, and entertaining product pages are necessary if you want your online store to thrive. But making these pages requires much more than a few photos and a line or two of text.

Today, we’ll explain what all these necessary factors are, with some choice examples from WooCommerce shops. We’ll also offer you a checklist to help you get them all in place on your own site, time and time again.

Ready to learn? Let’s jump right in.

Continue Reading

You have a plan to sell online. You’ve decided what you’re going to sell, you’ve decided to use WooCommerce, and now you need to design your store.

This stage can be difficult. Finding that perfect theme, or even selecting a designer who understands your goals, can eat up time you don’t have. And if you’ve never sold online before, you might feel as if you’re searching for something that just “looks nice,” without having a solid grasp on what’s really important.

To help you understand what’s crucial and what’s not, you should know what the most important features of a store’s design actually are. This will help you separate the designs that “look nice” from those that perform well.

Let’s take a look at the most important features of your WooCommerce store’s design so you can get started on that next crucial stage.

Continue Reading

Everything you do on your store leads your shoppers to one final, critical experience: the checkout. And this final experience is so important, yet so sensitive, that one wrong move could send those potential sales down the drain.

It’s crucial to get your store’s checkout “flow” — the transition between one field or page to another, from the start to the finish — as smooth as possible to avoid losing sales. The default WooCommerce checkout goes a long way toward making this happen, but depending on your store, industry, or products, there’s still more that could be done to make the process simple and pain-free.

Let’s take a look at how you can optimize the checkout experience for your shoppers, from removing excess fields to opening terms & condition links in new tabs.

Continue Reading