WooCommerce and Analytics

I wrote a post for Liquid Web on Getting Started with Analytics for your WooCommerce store.

One thing my clients often ask is whether my services include adding a site analytics package (usually Google Analytics) to their site. My usual response is that not having site analytics on their new store is like purchasing a new car and not getting the tires.

Yes, I set analytics up to work with WooCommerce for you the day your site goes live. Today we’re going to walk through adding Google Analytics to a WooCommerce site, and then more importantly, what you can do with the information once your site has been running for a while. We’ll end by looking at a few options that are not Google Analytics but will give you similar features.

You can read the rest on their site.

Adding a WooCommerce Store to Your WordPress Blog

Over at Liquid Web I addressed adding a WooCommerce store to your existing WordPress site. It includes a step by step walk through of WooCommerce setup and includes screenshots.

There comes a time in the life of many WordPress sites when you want to start selling something. Maybe you wrote an ebook, or are looking to offer a way for your users to support your work?

Whatever the reason is for looking to sell something if you’re on WordPress the easiest way to do this is to install WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a standalone plugin that sits on top of WordPress, and is very easy to use, has tons of support, and is very popular (for a good reason!).

Today I’m going to walk you through what it takes to set up WooCommerce on your WordPress blog. I’m also going to talk about a few extra plugins you may want to use to maximize your store.

Read the whole post at Liquid Web

Affiliates and WooCommerce

If you’ve ever wondered about affiliates for your site, then I tackled that topic recently for Liquid Web.

Getting traction on many stores is a hard thing. The “build it and they will come” idea just doesn’t hold up even to basic scrutiny. Many sites look at standard marketing like online ads and content marketing. A smaller number look towards adding affiliates to their store.

Today, I’m going to walk you through what it takes to have a good affiliate offering to attract high-quality people to your store. I’ll tell you some of the best methods to use to make sure that you have high-quality affiliates and to avoid fraud. Finally, we’ll look at helping your affiliates succeed and provide a quick overview of some options for setting up affiliates on your site.

Read the rest on Liquid Web

Setting up Pingdom on Your WordPress Site

I was recently doing some site optimization work for a client and find that there were a few setup steps with Pingdom that weren’t 100% clear.

Today we’re going to take a look at how you set up Pingdom to monitor your WordPress or WooCommerce site.

Taking your Online Store Offline

It’s fairly well understood that for most businesses an online store is a good thing. It will usually increase your reach into places you can’t reach from retail locations.

My latest column for Practical eCommerce talks about some tips for those online only stores so that they can make better connections offline.

Many brick-and-mortar stores have found success in migrating online. But the trend has reversed somewhat. Pure-play ecommerce companies are finding success with physical stores. We addressed the topic last month, in “Ecommerce Merchants Embrace Brick-and-mortar.” We cited the example of Warby Parker, which found that having locations for customers to try on glasses led to higher conversions.

Read Offline Sales Tips for Online Merchants

Membership Site Teardown Geeks Life

Today we’re going to look at a membership site called Geeks Life. As always we’re looking for three things.

  1. Recent decent design
  2. Regular content for users
  3. Clear call to action

Geeks life does a good job on all points. Watch the video to hear the full commentary.

Site Tear Down – The Willoughby Book Club

Today we’re going to look at The Willoughby Book Club.

As always we’re looking for three things:

  1. Reasonably recent design
  2. Content that engages readers
  3. Clear call to action

First off, the slider is not great. Not only does it do something funny on an iPad Pro, people don’t look at sliders. Something like 98% of people never look at the slider. Out of the 2% remaining 99% look at the first slide.

Sliders are only useful for telling your boss that you have all 5 of their ideas on the homepage.

After that, the design is decent. Minimal and nothing fancy which is far preferable to a design that is fancy and ugly or outdated.

For content, they really don’t have much. A bunch of text lists and stuff but nothing that’s going to get me coming back to see what’s up with the book club. I’d love to see them showing off their bundles on the site so that I see what I’m missing because I’m not subscribed. Maybe even do a reading each month for one of the books and do it right on Youtube?

Finally, call to action? Well they have a bunch so it’s not super clear the exact action I should be taking right off the bat. If this was my client I’d have them make one single call to action that linked to some video or maybe an email series that explained the club.

Overall, the site isn’t bad, but it could be refined to be a much more effective sales tool for them.

Coaching Site Teardown – Natalie Bell

Today we’re going to do a site teardown. I really just randomly searched for a site in a field where I know there are a bunch of poor sites so I have no idea who the coach is that we’re looking at.

On every site teardown we’re going to be looking for a few things:

  1. Reasonably recent design
  2. Content that engages readers
  3. Clear call to action

Today we’re going to look at Natalie Bell.

First off, the design is clearly dated. I always find this discouraging because it’s so easy to get a decent design that’s current. Head over to StudioPress or Array Themes or The Theme Foundry and purchase a recent design.

Heck even head over to WordPress.org and get a free theme that looks decent. It’s not hard to get a credibility upgrade by having a decent design.

Second, content to engage readers. Looking at Natalie’s homepage we can see that she was on the Today Show. I’m sure that this gave her a boost in credibility, but that’s really the only content we have from her. If we look at her blog, the most recent post was from late 2017 and then it quickly heads back to 2013.

Nor do I see any social media profiles like Instagram that might be driving traffic to her coaching programs.

If you want to get your membership site found, you need some content that is going to be compelling.

Finally, call to action. If we look at Natalie’s homepage, we don’t see any clear and obvious CTA’s. Her contact link in the top navigation is the same as everything else. Her “book here” or really any of her links that are CTA’s look exactly the same as the rest of the content.

Further, there are no less than 9 actions she gives you the opportunity to take right on the homepage. Keep your CTA to one main thing, that’s it. The rest of the stuff needs to not even get in the face of anyone.

Recommendations for Natalie Bell

  1. Update the design
  2. Start getting some content out there that is engaging

– If you’re not sure how to do this I recommend reading 10x Marketing
3. Get a single clear main call to action on the top of the page

Increasing WooCommerce Sales at Checkout

If you’ve got someone at your online store already making a purchase, they already trust you. That means you can use this time to provide more value to them and increase your sales.

I wrote more about this in my recent article for Practical eCommerce.

Increasing sales from shoppers that are in the process of buying is easier than recruiting new customers. In-process shoppers have jumped the trust barrier.
In this post, I’ll address five ways to increase sales from consumers who have added items to a WooCommerce shopping cart.

Read the whole article.

Will eCommerce in WordPress be ready for GDPR?

If you’re not familiar with what GDPR is, then in short it’s a strengthening of the EU rules around data privacy for consumers. We’ve written a longer piece on it as well though no blog post can cover the details extensively enough. You need to consult your legal council to see if you have any extra steps to become compliant with GDPR.

For most store owners, on top of any internal process changes that need to happen, you need to make sure that the software you use will be GDPR compliant. I was wondering that exactly for my store and my clients so I reached out to a number of the top eCommerce platforms on WordPress to understand what their plan was when it came to GDPR compliance.

WooCommerce and GDPR

WooCommerce has written an overview of what they’re planning for GDPR already. While they have tightened up some of their language and settings to be compliant with GDPR the main push is to contribute back to WordPress core.

By focusing on WordPress Core work, they are helping to make sure that every plugin available for WordPress has the opportunity to be GDPR compliant.

While the new WordPress Core features still need to be approved, currently the WooCommerce team has developed an admin tool to manage requests for personal data export. This includes a method to verify a user request does come from the user you expect. Currently it uses a system similar to the password reset process that WordPress already uses.

Without this verification step, it would be trivial to spoof an email and request data which would then be sent to a bad actor. That nefarious person would then have all the personal data that your site had on one of your customers.

WordPress and GDPR

On top of the management system for requests, there are a number of things being worked on in WordPress Core to bring it into proper compliance with GDPR. Core is working on privacy policy generators, dealing with opt-ins for comment cookies, and helper functions so you can anonymize data.

WP eCommerce and GDPR

I reached out to Justin Sainton, one of the co-owners of WP eCommerce, and they’re watching core currently. Once the core features are ready, they’ll integrate them into WP eCommerce.

Given that you have 90 days to accommodate a request for information, that should leave them plenty of time to integrate with the core of WP eCommerce so that it is fully complaint with GDPR.

Sandhills Development and GDPR

Sandhills Development runs a very popular set of plugins for WordPress stores which include Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, and AffiliateWP. Talking with them, they’re planning on taking the same tack as WP eCommerce. They’re waiting to see what WordPress Core does and then they’ll integrate with the prebuilt features in WordPress Core to become compliant with GDPR.

In fact, talking to a number of other plugin developers, most of them were focusing on working with the WordPress Core features and using them when they become stable enough to use. Many of them are working on the features to ensure that they are something that can be used easily with their eCommerce platform.

So, if you’re using a WordPress based eCommerce solution and looking at GDPR wondering what will be done, you should be in good hands on the software side. All of the vendors I reached out had developer time set aside to ensure that they were fully compliant in time for GDPR.

You will still have to talk to your legal council to see what other parts of GDPR apply to your business. You will most certainly need to be familiar with the data breach protocol and disclose any data theft to the proper authorities in the EU.

Photo by: clement127

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