How to Increase Your WooCommerce Store’s Sales in A Few and Easy Steps

With platforms such as WooCommerce creating an online store became easy, the challenge is how to generate and grow sales.

Increased sales mean more opportunities for expansion and growth. And that’s the goal of any business, right?

The goal of this article is to become the go-to resource for increased sales strategies so you can achieve your business goals most efficiently.

Let’s start.

The 4 Strategies to Follow to Increase Sales:

Before we get into the detailed tips let’s have an overview of the overall strategy we are going to follow to increase sales.

To increase sales for your online store you need to follow these 4 strategies:

• Increase Traffic
• Improve the UI and UX of your website’’
• Conversion Rate Optimization
• Offer better customer service

You need to take care of your customers at each step of their journey on your online store, from the moment they’re aware of your existence until after you have sold them your products. That way you’ll guarantee the maximum likelihood of increased growth.

Now, let’s dive into each of these strategies one by one.

How to Increase Traffic to Your Online Store?

Increased traffic is the dream for so many online stores, at the end of the day, more customers mean an opportunity to sell more. That’s why many online E-commerce owners pursue the goal of increasing traffic at any cost, even if that would damage their store’s performance in the long run.

But we won’t go that extreme, I’ll show you how to strategically grow your traffic so you can increase your sales and revenue without damaging your reputation in the long run.

Generally, there are two ways to increase your traffic:

• Organic 
• Paid

These two strategies complement each other, some store owners depend on one method over the other, but we are working strategically, so we’ll deploy each of them.

Organic traffic is best in the long run, when you build an organic channel that brings you, visitors, organically that means you didn’t pay a dime for that visitor, because you have invested the time and effort to build that organic channel.

Organic is better for the long run but it is costly to build in the short term.

On the other hand, paid media can bring you traffic from the day you launch the campaign, but each visitor will cost you money and resources and that cost may increase due to competition. So it’s great in the short term but it isn’t sustainable in the long run.

Social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and email marketing are all methods of organic marketing. You can build these channels with time as you grow your E-commerce store and then depend on these channels to bring you traffic and boost your growth in the future. Here’s a detailed SEO guide that can help you get started.

Paid media is where you pay these platforms to boost your presence and get more views and traffic to your online store through paid social media and paid search campaigns, this way you will get more traffic in the short term that you can use to boot your store and start getting sales and revenue.

How to Improve the UI and UX of Your Website?

1. Use a striking theme

When a visitor lands on your WooCommerce store the first impression is given by the theme and the layout. If it’s a unique and well thought out layout, that isn’t cluttered and easy to navigate, they are likely to stay on your website and take a closer look at things. Your theme and layout should be eye-catching.

On the other hand, if you have a cluttered and confusing layout, they are likely to leave as soon as they land on your store.

Generally, you can either choose a free theme, a paid theme or get one custom developed. Free themes are good for starting out but often lack in functionality and support. They also tend to have inferior designs when compared to paid themes. If you are serious about running a WooCommerce store a paid theme is highly recommended. You can easily get a paid theme for under $100.

If you have got some extra money to spend and want to stand out from the competition, then you can get a custom developed theme.

You can read our guide on choosing a WordPress theme if you are not sure about choosing a WordPress theme.

2. Make your visitors have a great user experience

2 major factors that affect the user experience of your website are navigation and the speed of your website.

Your website needs to have a simple navigation. If it is difficult to navigate through your website, your bounce rate is going to be high. There is stiff competition and if your website is not up to the mark with the competition then you will lose your customers to your competition. A simple navigation plays a major role in providing a good user experience.

Navigation menus need to be prominently placed and easily accessible. You should also use easy to understand words. Many websites use words such as “About” for the about us page, Contact, Services, Products, etc. These are clear and recognizable words. Users should easily understand what you mean.

The navigation structure should also be clear. It should allow anyone to land on any page and navigate to another page. The main categories should be on the top menu and subcategories should be on the sub-menu.

Another way to improve the navigation of your website is to use breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs allow customers to go back to categories they have already browsed through without the hustle of hitting the back button a hundred times. This can encourage users to stay on the site for longer. Breadcrumbs are also loved by search engines. It helps search engines to discover and index pages on your website.

A fast loading website is crucial for a good user experience. When a user searches for a query on a search engine, they see several results. They click on a relevant result and land on a blank screen. They understand the website is loading and wait a few seconds. The blank screen doesn’t go away. What do you think they will end up doing? Often, they will hit the back button, and click on a different result.

Website visitors don’t like waiting for content to load. If your website is slow users will navigate away from your website and find products or services that they are interested in from elsewhere.

You can read our guide on Do’s and Don’ts for WooCommerce Performance if you would like to improve your website’s speed.

Conversion Rate Optimization Tactics:

1. Use discounts

Discounts can easily turn hesitant customers into content customers. WooCommerce makes it easy to offer discounts. You can use a variety of plugins to give discount coupons, set up promotions, bundle offers, dynamic pricing or flash sales.

The discount offered should be enticing enough to make customers purchase. Usually, discounts under 10% may not be as effective. Not many customers will refuse discounts over 10%.

2. Use urgency and scarcity

Minor changes such as adding a countdown timer or a stock count can lead to an increase in sales. Shoppers always tend to get triggered by the fear of missing out.

“Only 5 left in Stock”

“100 people added this to cart today”

“Sale ends in 3 hours”

The examples of phrases given above tend to make customers act immediately. Urgency makes customers buy quickly. Scarcity makes them act at that time. If customers can come back any time to purchase a product, they may not be immediately intrigued to buy the item.

If a new mobile phone is being launched and customers can purchase any time, they may not pay attention to it. However, if the stock is limited on the launch, uninterested customers will start paying attention. Customers will be intrigued if they know they can only purchase it within a limited time.

3. Use upsells and cross-sells

This tactic is even used by e-commerce giants such as Amazon. Upselling and cross-selling are often misinterpreted.

Upselling involves selling a more expensive version of the product. This is usually a product that is different than the customer originally intended to purchase. For example, purchasing a high-spec gaming laptop instead of a normal one for office use. Another example is purchasing a 3-day international trip instead of a 7-day in-country trip.

Cross-selling involves selling something related to the product the customer intends to purchase. The cross-sell product was not intended to be purchased by the customer. For example, when a customer wants to purchase a laptop, you sell them a bag with the laptop and a wireless keyboard and mouse with the laptop, or you sell to them a product to clean the laptop and so on.

When using upsells and cross-sells you need to ensure you are not giving customers too many choices, which confuse them. This can make them purchase no product at all. Every additional step that customers take on your WooCommerce store can discourage customers. One way to avoid this confusion and extra steps is to bundle related products at a discounted price. Customers find it logical to get more value in a single purchase.

4. Build trust

When a customer lands on your WooCommerce store and they have never heard of your brand before, why would they purchase from you? It is difficult to convert cold-traffic. To overcome this problem, you can build trust on your WooCommerce store to ensure customers are comfortable when purchasing from you. Trust can be built by using several techniques.

First, all of your policies should be clear and easily accessible. Make sure your shipping policy, privacy policy, terms and conditions, about us page, refund policy, FAQ page are all set up and have relevant content.

Reviews are also a great way to build trust. People tend to trust when they see other people have purchased from your store. If you have a Facebook page or a Google My Business page, you can use reviews from there on your WooCommerce store. You should also allow your customers to review products on your website.

It’s also a good idea to use images in reviews. Both, of the product and the customers if possible. Visuals tend to capture a user’s attention more than text. Including product images in reviews will increase the chances of trust-building.

Be careful when using reviews not to use any fake reviews. Should your customers find out you are using fake reviews you will lose their trust. Your conversion rate and ROI will plummet in such a case.

5. Optimize your checkout page

If you have an insecure and complicated checkout process your cart abandonment rate will be high. Checkout pages should be easy to navigate through and should collect relevant information only. Many fields that ask for customer input can be irritating.

Checkout pages should be fast-processing, ideally, a one- or two-page checkout should be used. Anything more than two pages can result in a high cart abandonment rate.

A progress bar on a checkout page is a great way to let customers know how many steps they need to complete to make the purchase.

The payment process should also be secure and optimized. You should use well-known payment gateways. Ensure your customers can easily use the payment gateways you have on your website. For example, PayPal is not available in all countries. Using the PayPal payment gateway in a non-PayPal supported country can be tricky.

Why Should You Improve Customer Service for Your Online Store?

The answer is simple: Word of mouth.If you want customers to talk about you in a positive way to their friends and family you have to take care of them even after you’ve made the sale.

Retaining existing customers is easier and more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, so taking care of your customers can help in the sustainability and growth of your online store. That’s why you should never overlook this process.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to boost WooCommerce sales. The above WooCommerce tips are some of the most important ones you need to pay attention to. Always stay updated with the latest eCommerce techniques if you want to keep up with the competition. Although there is furious competition, always remember there is room for improvement.