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June 11, 2019 12:20 am

All About WooCommerce Plugins: How They Can Make Your Store Successful

WooCommerce is built with store owners and developers in mind. The fact that it’s free, open source, and highly customizable makes it very popular and widely used. It powers 37% of all online stores. It has been downloaded over 13 million time. 

When you download WooCommerce you get a basic store that comes with basic functions of a store like product management, order processing, checkout and shopping cart. This allows you to sell physical goods, digital goods, affiliate transactions, subscription memberships. You can also sell consulting services and more.

You also get essential management features like customer management, inventory management, sales tax management, shipping cost calculations, and coupons.

However, not all businesses are the same. For some, the basic store with the basic core features is all they will ever. For other businesses, that want to do more with their online store, the basic features are not enough.

Fortunately, WooCommerce platform can be integrated with free or premium plugins that add additional features or extensions to make their online store do more. 

You can customize and make enhancements to all aspects of your store using free and premium WooCommerce plugins. You can even write custom code to create your own custom solution. CodeCanyon has over 1,500 premium WooCommerce plugins available to help you create an online store or business that can do whatever you have in mind. In this post, I'll introduce you to the variety of WooCommerce plugins you can find in the CodeCanyon marketplace.

Let’s dive in shall we? 

Introduction 

WooCommerce logo

What are WooCommerce Plugins? 

WooCommerce plugins are software packages that:


  • extend the functionality of existing core features 

  • add entirely new functionality to your WooCommerce store

In short, they introduce extra or missing functionality to make your WooCommerce store do what you want. 

Consider them as extensions that will allow you to do a lot more with your store.

Why Do You Need WooCommerce Plugins?

WooCommerce gives you the basics to get started. The basic store is a blank slate. But the rest is up to you—to create a great store, you need plugins. 

The basic WooCommerce store gives you basic functionality to get you started running your online business. This is your storefront. It comes with: 


  • virtual shelves to display your products 

  • space for you to keep track of your inventory 

  • a way for customers to browse and choose products they like 

  • a shopping cart for customers to gather items that they've chosen

  • a checkout where you can accept payments

Finally, WooCommerce makes it easier for you to ship the merchandise to customers, since you already collected their address during the checkout process. 

Now you’re up and running. And since the basic store is a blank slate, you can turn it into so much more. You can customize and enhance all aspects of your store using free and premium WooCommerce plugins.

WooThemes home page

How Can Enhancements Improve Your Bottom Line? 

Consider the following: online stores that are visually appealing have higher conversion rates because create more customer engagement. Visual appeal also drives purchasing decisions. 

This means it is a good idea to boost the aesthetic appeal of your store by giving it a signature look to distinguish it from others. Plugins for themes, template builders, multi-layout product display, and color swatches for images will enhance the visual appeal of your store. 

Also think of organizing your products in a pattern that is attractive to the eye by adding sliders of your best selling products, multi-layout displays, or color swatches to show variety. 

To make it easy for customers to navigate your store, product search and product filter plugins are your best bet. 

You may also want to consider increased visibility in search engines so you can attract traffic to you store. A WooCommerce SEO plugin would best for this task. 

You may want to send marketing emails and newsletters to your customers. In this case you should consider an email marketing application plugin or mailchimp integration plugin. 

Also as your store grows, its operations become more complex. You many need more than one supplier for products you sell. The functionality of your basic inventory management core feature will need to be extended so it can carry out complex inventory management tasks. You may also opt to ship items from multiple suppliers directly to customers. 

And don’t forget social media. Studies have shown having social media login creates trust. Make it easy for your customers to register, login, and make purchases on your store through their social media accounts then a social login plugin will be best for this purpose. 

To make all these changes you don’t need to build new functionality from scratch. CodeCanyon has over 1,500 premium plugins for WooCommerce available.

WooCommmerce login

WooCommerce Plugins on Code Canyon

Below I’ve listed some popular and best selling WooCommerce plugins on Code Canyon according to what they do for your online store. 

Plugins to Make Your Store Look Good 

Online stores that are visually appealing have higher conversion rates because create more customer engagement. Visual appeal also drives purchasing decisions. These WooCommerce plugins will help you increase the aesthetic appeal of your store: 

Plugins for Products and Better Product Listings

The default product listing works fine, but if you want to give your customers extra features like product search or filtering, you'll need a product listing plugin. Other plugins can help you bulk edit product listings to save time, or create product variations.

Plugins to Improve Sales

There are a number of strategies you can use to improve sales to customers who come to your WooCommerce store. With these plugins you can add features such as dynamic discounts based on customer activity, gift cards and vouchers, or the ability to recover abandoned carts with follow-up emails.

Upselling & Cross-Selling Plugins

Another time-tested method to improve sales is with upselling or cross-selling. These plugins will let customers discover other products that they may wish to buy—connecting them with items they need and increasing your bottom line! 


Checkout Plugins

The checkout process is a very sensitive part of making an online sale. Any problems or confusion here can easily result in a lost sale and abandoned cart. These WooCommerce plugins will help you customize the checkout process—whether streamlining it for digital goods, breaking it into smaller steps, or allowing checkout with different currencies.

Customer Management Plugins

These plugins will make it easier for you to track your customers, view their order histories, and manage their address data. You can also make it easier for customers to register for your site with social login!


WooCommerce Marketing Plugins 

These plugins make it easier for you to craft emails for marketing to your customers by email.

Shipping Plugins

Once you've made a sale, you need to get the product to your customer ASAP! These plugins will make shipping and fulfillment easier. You'll also find plugins that will allow you to set up a more accurate shipping price calculator for checkout, so customers can choose the shipping method they want and know exactly how much it will cost.

Payments Plugins

The road to checkout should be free from obstacles. Using the following plugins will make it easy for customers to make payments on your WooCommerce store. 

Ticketing, Booking, and Calendar Plugins

If your business sells tickets to events or scheduled services like appointments, a ticketing or booking plugin can make life easier for both you and your customers.

Subscription Plugins

If your business sells subscriptions, with recurring payments and different options for subscription periods, you'll need one of these plugins to optimize your store. You'll be amazed what you can do. 

Inventory Plugins

If you're going to offer products for sale on your WooCommerce store, you'd better be sure you can fulfill any orders. That means tracking inventory. With this plugin you can keep track of product inventory so you can show your customers what is available, and so you can know when it's time to order more stock. 


Reporting and Analytics Plugins 

An essential part of managing an online store—or any kind of web business—is tracking data on site traffic, sales, etc. These plugins will help you do just that.  

Auction Plugins

This is somewhat of a niche item, but if you want to offer goods for auction on your site, the Simple Auctions plugin can't be beat.

Conclusion

One of the strengths of WooCommerce is the rich ecosystem of plugins that you can find to extend and enhance every aspect of your online store. To learn more about WooCommerce plugins check out some of our other posts here on Envato Tuts+. Or visit CodeCanyon to see the great WooCommerce plugins available for sale there.


Original Link: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/all-about-woocommerce-plugins-how-they-can-make-your-store-successful--cms-33294

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