Do your customers tell you that your eCommerce site is a joy to shop? Probably not! While some people really do love online shopping, few rave about the actual buying experience.

We shop for goods and services we need or want. Whether or not we enjoy the shopping experience is partly a personal preference, partly the ability of the merchant to read customers. Unlike brick and mortar store owners, eCommerce businesses don’t have the opportunity to judge body language and see if customers appear satisfied. At best, they can offer real-time or automated chat assistance.

When it comes to the ultimate shopping commitment, brick and mortar stores have it pretty easy. They take the payment, swipe (usually), and bag items small enough to be carried. Customers rarely change their minds and literally abandon a shopping cart once they get in line to buy.

If only eCommerce business owners had it this easy! Instead, they are presented with depressing website statistics that point out cart abandonment and site bounce rates. They don’t have a chance to turn the charm on customers who are about to make a quick exit.

While a creative, thoughtful designer can make an eCommerce site a straightforward and satisfying shopping experience, parting with your money is never fun. But there are ways to make the actual checkout process less of a hassle for customers, and maybe even lower the cart abandonment rate in the process.

The Power of Millennials and Peer Recommendations in eCommerce

In 2019, millennials are looking to social sources for shopping inspiration.

Since 2019 has just kicked off, let’s take a look at the characteristics of one of the most coveted generations of shoppers who could influence your sales this year: millennials. Then, we’ll talk about how small businesses can use this knowledge to help generate brand interest and produce some incremental revenue.

As the holiday season approaches, how are you ensuring your checkout process is optimized so you’re bringing in the most sales? After all, you can easily lose customers at multiple points even when they’ve added an item to their shopping cart. To best appreciate this, let’s take a look at the stages of a checkout process and where you can lose customers.

You could be losing almost half of your customers either due to a confusing checkout experience, a lengthy checkout, or payment security concerns! Imagine how your sales can improve simply by fixing those three checkout pain points. In this post, we’ll uncover the 5 key ways you can help boost holiday sales by improving your checkout process:

1. Building trust in your online business.
2. Removing checkout obstacles to streamline checkout.
3. Investing in mobile.
4. Expanding your market to include international customers.
5. Giving customers more payment choices.

Let’s get started.

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Small business owners have a lot to think about.

If you’re thinking of launching a business—or you’re looking to switch your website platform or merchant service—here’s one thing you’ll realize pretty quickly: you’re going to have to make decisions on aspects of business that you might have little experience with.

For example, most small business owners aren’t experts at eCommerce platforms or payments processing, but here’s a small sampling of the steps you need to consider just to get your products or services available online:

• Launching a web store: Hiring a developer, selecting the right hosting service, designing your website, choosing a shopping cart, linking it to your website.
• Setting up payments: Comparing merchant services, including services provided, costs, and fees.
• Running your business: Choosing an accounting solution, figuring out how to link it with your shopping cart, learning how to use it.

Entrepreneurs wear a lot of hats. As one, you’re probably busy focusing on other aspects of your business—production, inventory forecasting, financing—the list goes on. There’s little time left for sifting through websites, watching tutorials, and comparing options for website hosting, payment processing, and managing the books. And this could be a barrier for many small businesses who are ready to get started and eager to bring in revenue.

Resources are limited for many nonprofit organizations. It’s crucial for these companies to do their best work while making the most of what they have.

Since WooCommerce is free to use, open source, and works with WordPress, it’s the platform of choice for many nonprofits. WooCommerce lets these businesses accept donations online, sell products to support their cause, or both.

Building a robust, fully functional nonprofit website with WooCommerce isn’t hard — but you have to know what you really need. Which extensions will increase your donations, spread the word about your cause, and get more people involved with your organization? You don’t want to spend money on something only to find out it won’t help.

In thise post, we’ve collected seven extensions that we think will help nonprofits using WooCommerce be more successful online. Keep reading to find out what they are and how you can start using them now.

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Today’s post comes to us from Sue Park, the head of Small Business Partner Marketing at PayPal. She’s here to share some tips for those of you thinking about expanding your business on a global scale. Take it away, Sue!

Global prosperity and mobile adoption are creating opportunities for small businesses to reach new customers abroad. It’s estimated that by 2025, the global consuming class will grow by 75% to a total of 4.2 billion people. These 4.2 billion consumers will spend an estimated $30 trillion annually.

Whether you’re just beginning to consider the potential of opening your shop for business to international buyers, or already testing a few target markets, the stakes are high: checkout is the place where the majority of international shoppers abandon their purchases.

There are several reasons, but one of the main ones is trust. Consumers should have confidence that their payment will be handled securely, and should have the comfort and convenience of paying in a familiar currency using their preferred method.

Here’s what you should think about and take action on before you start taking payments from international customers.

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Building a store can get costly. Even the most experienced developers can find themselves overspending — a premium theme here, a cool-sounding extension there, and suddenly you’ve blown the budget.

The ability to accept payments is one of those things you almost have to spend part of your budget on. But there’s no reason you should have to waste all your money on preparing to take credit cards online, or cash from local shoppers.

There are multiple ways to take payments from your customers without spending a fortune on setup or monthly fees. From built-in processors to optional extensions, there’s a fitting solution for every budget-conscious store builder that won’t waste your money — or your time, for that matter.

Let’s explore a few ways you can take payments with WooCommerce… and do so affordably. But first, we’ll take a closer look at what it really costs to take credit card payments, and why a “cheap” payment gateway may not be as good as it sounds.

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If you’re in the process of setting up a store with WooCommerce, at some point you’ll need to enable payments. Accepting payments from your customers isn’t necessarily as easy as flipping a switch and watching the money flow in… but it doesn’t have to be complicated, either. You just need to find the right WooCommerce payment gateway for your business.

With the right payment gateway, you can make it easy for customers to pay for your products. Choosing the right gateway takes a little time, but we’ve found a few ways to narrow down your options and make the process of choosing a little easier.

Let’s explore how you can find the best payment gateway so you can get back to focusing on what matters: launching your new store.

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We know you’ve been waiting for this for a long while. Today we can happily report we have an extension allowing recurring billing using WooCommerce!

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Last week we celebrated a landmark achievement – 100,000 WooCommerce downloads. But we’re not resting on our laurels, the WooCommerce train is shifting into high gear with some exciting announcements coming soon with regards to the WooLabs team.

Today we’re releasing WooCommerce 1.5.3 which as usual packs a bunch of new features and bug fixes as well as a host of new extensions.

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From the outskirts it probably seems a little quiet compared to our usual lightening pace of WooCommerce development? Never fear though, inside WooLabs things are seriously heating up with a HUGE amount of time going into version 1.4, that will be one of our most noteworthy updates in our track history. That’s still a couple weeks away, with the exact release date kept mysteriously vague for now. We do however have something to tide you over. 4 exciting new extensions.

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