SFNdesign

Category: eCommerce

  • Supercharging your WooCommerce Reviews

    My latest post at Practical eCommerce is up. This one is all about making your reviews awesome.

    It is no secret that product reviews can help merchants increase sales. Reviews are proof that others found a product valuable, or not.

    WooCommerce provides the structured data to display rating stars in search results. But product reviews, properly utilized, can do much more. They can greatly increase conversions. In this post, I’ll address four WooCommerce extensions that supercharge product reviews.

    Read the rest at Practical eCommerce

  • Automating Customer Recognition

    I wrote a new post for PracticalEcommerce on automating customer recognition:

    Consumers who interact with ecommerce companies have many milestones. They spend their first $100. They purchase their 10th product. They spend the 1 millionth dollar with a store.

    Consumers can also refer others. The first referral and the 10th and the 50th are all milestones. A customer who has earned $500 in referral fees has reached a milestone.

    How do you recognize these milestones? What can you do to show appreciation?

    Read the rest at Practical Ecommerce.

  • Abandoned Cart Recovery on Practical Ecommerce

    New post at Practical Ecommerce on abandoned cart emails, why you should do them and how to get them setup.

    In “Optimizing Checkout Flow in WooCommerce,” my previous article, I offered tips on reducing abandoned carts by streamlining the checkout process. To be clear, however, you could spend years optimizing your checkout process and not eliminate abandoned carts.

    There are options to bring shoppers back to your store once they’ve moved on to other things. One of the best ways is to send emails to shoppers about the products they’ve left in their carts.

    Read the rest at Practical Ecommerce

  • Optimizing Checkout Flow

    Abandoned shopping carts are a hurdle for online merchants.

    Abandonment rates range from 60 to 80 percent, depending on the study. Some of this is “window shopping” on the part of visitors. Some of it is due to the complexity of your checkout process.

    Thus optimizing your checkout will likely increase sales. In this post, I’ll review methods to streamline and simplify a checkout process. I’ll cite examples from the WooCommerce platform. But the broader points apply to all merchants, on all platforms.

    Read my latest post at Practical eCommerce

  • 3 Plugins every Membership Site Needs

    3 Plugins every Membership Site Needs

    There is a lot to keep track of when you’re starting a membership site.

    What is the right way to reach your potential members?

    Is your pricing right?

    Will your members stay around?

    What other tools do you need that you don’t know about yet?

    Today we’re going to look at three plugins that all membership sites need as soon as they get started. No skimping and saying you’ll get to it later. If you don’t plan the time now, you won’t get to it.

    1. Drip

    Drip is an email automation service. It’s not only email marketing like you see elsewhere, it’s automation.

    It can do stuff like tag a customer that visited a page and then send them an email to advertise the product if they didn’t purchase within 2 days.

    It can email prospects that abandoned their carts.

    And so much more.

    If you want to have the ability to knock your marketing out of the park, you need to get Drip on your membership site.

    2. Optin Monster

    Yes Drip comes with some forms you can use to get subscribers to your email list, but OptinMonster is so much more powerful.

    With OptinMonster you can set different calls to action on different posts and feed them all to Drip. You can have a popup that shows on click in a single post and then if someone is leaving the page, show them a different call to action.

    All of my clients use this to make managing their email calls to action easy.

    3. Facebook Conversion Pixel

    Maybe you’re not going to dive in to Facebook and it’s marketing potential today. Maybe it won’t be next week. But you’ll want to do it. That’s why you put the Facebook Conversion Pixel on your site right away.

    By adding it the day you get started, you start getting data on the people visiting your site right away. Later when you start getting serious about your marketing you can use this data to build an effectively targeted campaign.

    When you start a membership site make sure you use these three plugins and services to build the site you’ve dreamed of.

    PS: If you need help getting your marketing right, we should talk.

    photo by: fallentomato

  • Improve WP eCommerce checkout experience

    Many stores see most of their customers coming from a single country. Most of my clients are selling items to US customers.

    Something that’s always been a bit of a tiring issue for us has been that you can’t set the default country for Billing and Shipping at checkout. We can save most of our customers at least one click if we default the checkout process to have the country US selected.

    Luckily Justin Sainton over at Zao provided the code needed to make that happen.

    A second improvement is deals with the fact that most customers are using the same billing and shipping addresses. Why do we force users to check this box when we can automatically check it for them.

    This second chunk of code will default the ‘Shipping same as Billing’ checkbox to checked so that users don’t have to do it.

    With these 2 pieces of code in place you can save your customers time in the checkout process. Saving users time and clicks is almost always a path towards making more sales.