Whether you’re carefully considering starting a WooCommerce store, or you’ve been running one for months or even years, the end goal is the same: to be profitable. Of course, there are dozens of areas to focus improvement on for profitability, like decreasing costs or increasing prices; but none of this matters if you aren’t making sales, so let’s look at how to boost WooCommerce sales!

Setting up a functioning WooCommerce store is certainly the first hurdle, but isn’t quite enough to generate consistent and robust sales. In a field as competitive as E-Commerce, you’ll have to optimize your store to attract, engage, and convert visitors. However, thanks to technology, it’s never been easier to equip your store with everything that it needs to be profitable!

In this post, we’re going to share our top five tips for increasing WooCommerce sales, and give you actionable tactics that you can put to use today!

Use Google Analytics to Track Key Metrics

There is no one-size fits all approach to optimizing an e-commerce store. Your product, your offerings, your brand, your target audience and competitive landscape all vary. That’s why it’s so important to track YOUR key metrics.

Unlike a brick and mortar store, where you would have to closely observe and monitor customer behavior, everything is tracked with e-commerce (as long as your store is equipped with the right tracking tools). Your key metrics are SO easy to track and analyze, that it would be an absolute shame to ignore that data.

To get the best insights, you should track the entire buyer journey. You may discover key information about where, when, and why your customers are abandoning their purchase, as well as what you may do to better engage them.

Let’s take a look at a few of the most important metrics to track:

One of the most important metrics to track is Shopping Cart Abandonment. This rate will give you insights into the amount of interested users you have and sales you’ve lost due to abandoned carts. If you have a high shopping cart abandonment rate, you’ll know that this is an area where you need to work on. You will need to find the reason for this high abandonment rate, and adjust your checkout process accordingly to reduce it. Read on for some tips here!

You may also want to track your sources of incoming traffic AND their conversion rates. Simply knowing what percentage of people come from where won’t tell you too much, but if you understand how their conversion rates differ, you’ll be able to better determine where to focus your efforts, as well as what your highest volume platform is.

While people often refer to your bounce rate as an important metric, we like to look at your exit pages. Looking into what pages your customers exit on will allow you to understand at what stage of the process customers are leaving, and how you can modify your site to retain and convert visitors.

These and many more metrics are easy to track using Google Analytics. If you aren’t already using this tool – you should. Good news: it’s easy to set up! Just install any Google Analytics plugin for WordPress, follow a few simple steps to connect, and voila!

Adjust/Optimize your checkout process

Your store’s checkout process should be perfectly optimized to make the process as simple and easy as possible. If you found that your WooCommerce cart abandonment rate was high, this is a good indication that you need to adjust and optimize your checkout process. Analyze your findings and try to figure out why people are abandoning their carts.

You checkout process may be too lengthy, or maybe you don’t have preferred payment processors. In general, we recommend a one page checkout, use of faster and preferred payment methods like Stripe or PayPal, as well as a secure checkout page.

Another common reason for a high cart abandonment rate is the occurrence of errors or slow page load times in your cart and checkout pages. We recommend you thoroughly test your checkout process in a number of browsers to ensure your customers are experiencing snappy page load times, and no visible errors or glitches. If your page load times are more than 3-4 seconds, you’ll want to check with your web host to ensure you’re on an appropriate hosting plan – and your developer to make sure you have appropriate caching plugins installed.

Shipping options and their availability also play a large role in cart abandonment. After a full analysis of your current customer market, we recommend you thoroughly test the shipping rates AND zones you have set in WooCommerce Settings. An all too common error is forgetting to set a zone for a certain market you ship to, which results in no shipping methods being shown for the user – resulting in a blocked checkout.

A final common cause of high cart abandonment can be the design of your cart and checkout pages. If the “Proceed to Checkout” button isn’t clear enough on the cart page, users can be confused how to proceed once in their cart. This is a common issue in Woocommerce – especially if your cart page has other elements on it, like advertisements, or other upsold products. Additionally, if the flow of your checkout page isn’t a natural top-to-bottom or left-to-right experience, users can be confused when entering information. A common side effect of a confusing checkout page flow is a user missing a field, clicking checkout, and being unable to find the field they missed filling out – forcing them to leave your checkout in frustration.

Showcase product benefits & Add product photos/videos/reviews

You could be missing out on a lot of sales simply due to failure to position your product correctly. You need to sell your product – and just making a product page and allowing people to add it to their cart isn’t selling it.

Can a visitor who has no knowledge about your product clearly understand the benefits? Can they view high quality photos or videos of the product made with a video recording software, or hear about why other people love it?

With an online store you don’t have the opportunity to engage the customer, establish trust, or explain why your product is so great. Thus, your product page has to do that for you.

Implement Live Chat

A great way to engage and serve your customers is to make yourself available. Implementing a live chat option and letting your visitors know that you’re there to assist them and/or answer any questions will set you apart from your competitors, as well as establish trust.

If a visitor has a question or doubt about a product, they will likely search for 30 seconds at most, and probably leave if they don’t find an answer. Remember: most online shoppers are lazy. You have to make every step of the buyer journey as easy as possible. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on sales. What better way to answer questions than to do it personally?

If you know us, you know we’re big on live chat! We love answering customer questions, and we do get a lot of them! At MyWorks we use GoSquared live chat, and we have nothing but good things to say about them!

Use Email Marketing

While there are so many ways to reach current and prospective customers, none of them is quite as effective as email marketing. You have to pay for ads, and any exposure or followers reached on social media aren’t owned – and depend completely upon the platform you own.

Your email list is different. You own your email list. You don’t depend upon any other platform, and you don’t have to pay or battle any algorithms to reach your audience. Instead, e-mail marketing allows you to land right in their inbox, and reach them at a time which is most convenient to them.

If you aren’t using e-mail marketing as a way to attract visitors to your site and boost sales, you’re missing out.

You might be thinking “but I don’t have time for e-mail marketing…” but guess what – you do, because you can automate it! There are dozens of e-mail marketing automation solutions out there, but our favorite is Signpost. It allows us to easily set up marketing campaigns, and it even adjusts and personalizes them to best serve each individual person. Imagine that! Sending a prospective customer an offer when they are most likely to convert, and sending personalized campaigns to keep those current customers engaged and making purchases, as well as referring their friends! Signpost does a lot more than that, so feel free to check it out here.

There’s a long, long list of things you can do to boost your WooCommerce sales, but these are our top 5. We would love to hear from you! Do you have anything to add to the list? What are your tips to increase WooCommerce sales?

Note: Once you’ve boosted your sales, be sure to check out our WooCommerce Sync for QuickBooks plugins to seamlessly sync all of your sales data!