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June 15, 2018 - 12 Comments
When shoot day arrives, there are a few steps you need to keep in mind when it comes to styling, lighting, and camera settings.
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.
May 25, 2018 - 5 Comments
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.
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:
May 23, 2018 - 11 Comments
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.
May 22, 2018 - 3 Comments
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.
May 21, 2018 - 4 Comments
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.
May 3, 2018 - 9 Comments
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.
April 19, 2018 - 13 Comments
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.
March 8, 2018 - 15 Comments
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.
January 27, 2018 - 2 Comments
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.
January 21, 2018 - 6 Comments
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.
January 18, 2018 - 12 Comments
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.
January 18, 2018 - 6 Comments
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.
January 14, 2018 - 5 Comments
Attracting new visitors to your store is a tough task. Motivating those visitors to buy — even tougher.
Store owners who feel as if they’ve tried every method under the sun to bring in new customers and increase purchases might wonder “what else can I do?” For you we have a new, clever suggestion: personalized products.
Shoppers who have the ability to personalize their products tend to be more engaged, purchase more often, and spend more per visit than those who can’t customize their goods in any way. If you feel stuck in a rut, personalization might be the perfect way to get your shop moving again.
Curious about personalization? Let’s cover some of the benefits in more detail, then look at four clever ways you can offer customized goods in your own store.
December 29, 2017 - 5 Comments
As our online activities increase, so do the number of online accounts in our names. It seems as if nearly every website out there asks you to “sign up” or “sign in” — and the process is hardly ever simple. Nor are these accounts held to the same standards from one site to the next, leading to forgotten or even insecure passwords.
No one wants to create yet another account unless there’s a clear benefit to doing so. Shoppers will even go to great lengths to avoid signing in to complete a purchase, up to and including completely abandoning their cart in favor of a different store.
In short: customers everywhere are suffering from new account fatigue, and it could be hurting your store.
The obvious solution to this issue is the option of a guest checkout option, which doesn’t require shoppers to create an account or save any personal information to complete a purchase. However, adding guest checkout isn’t a smart move for every online store, and it could actually cause more problems than it solves in some cases.
Let’s have a look at how you can decide if guest checkout is a good fit for your store, based on a few important criteria like order frequency, the possibility of reorders, and the overall benefit of customer accounts.
September 5, 2017 - 7 Comments
“What got us here won’t get us there… I want to have design leading the way. A lot more user research. A lot more mockups.”
– Matt Mullenweg
At WordCamp US 2016, Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word outlined a vision for WordPress being design-led. Since then, WooCommerce has doubled down on our efforts to follow suit.
From growing our one-person design team to five (and still hiring!) to talking more to our customers — hearing what’s most important to them, and how eCommerce fits into their lives – we’re just getting started on our journey to make this transition, and we’re learning a lot!
Our hope is that you can take some of the lessons we’re learning and apply them to your business, no matter how big or small.
It’s never too soon or too late to start talking to your customers, understanding who they are, and how they made their way to you today.
May 1, 2017 - 9 Comments
It’s National Small Business Week here in the United States, a seven day period where we celebrate small businesses and all they do. Over half of Americans own or work for a small business, and about two thirds of the country’s new jobs come from them every year.
This week is a reminder for us that there’s more work to be done to support small businesses. Having a free, open-source platform and hundreds of extensions and integrations is definitely a step in the right direction. But we’re always looking for ways to do more for you and your business.
With that in goal mind, today we’re happy to announce PayPal Business in a Box, a brand new program from PayPal that’s designed to help small business owners quickly start or grow an online store.
Read on to learn what Business in a Box is, what’s included in the “box,” and how it can help you get your own small business up and running.
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