Ecommerce websites has become an important part of the shopping options of the customers and more and more customers are tending towards this recently. With open source solutions like Woocommerce, Magento, VirtueMart, Opencart, Prestashop etc, building an ecommerce store has really become easier for developers. Among these options, Woocommerce (which is based on Wordpress) has really emerged as a leading solution to build ecommerce websites. Woocommerce is currently the most popular open source ecommerce solution and what it basically does is to convert a Wordpress website into a full fledged ecommerce store. Woocommerce was released on September 27, 2011, and since then this plugin has been getting acceptance rapidly among web developers, website owners and end customers equally mainly due to its adaptability and simplicity. One of the most vital factors which makes Woocommerce easily customizable is the thousands of plugins that were built by the community which literally enables any functionality to be added to the website at a single click.
A plugin is nothing but a piece of software which contains some functions which can be added to any WordPress website so as to extend any of the default functionalities or to add any new features to your wordpress website.
In this article, we are analysing some of the major plugins that are readily available in Wordpress that can make a positive impact on the sales of any ecommerce store. Let’s get on with this, as we have categorized these under different types, based on the impact that they make.
1) Plugins to enhance interactivity
The very first category of plugins that we're going to discuss is the plugins that improves the interactivity of the Woocommerce store.
Slide carousel plugins - These plugins make the website much more interactive where the products can be shown as various carousels like featured, best selling, newly launched etc which gives more intuitiveness to the website. This would also help in adding more products, as more products could be added in carousel slider than shown in a simple listing.
Infinite Scrolling plugins - The infinite scrolling plugins, allows the admin to add multiple products and the users could see these as they scroll down through the website. This would also not affect the website speed as, even though all the products are showcased in the backend, these items load in the background and showcase the products as the users scrolls down without affecting the load time of the website.
Magnifier Zoom Plugin - The magnified zoon plugins makes it possible for the visitors to see a the products where they can zoom in a particular part to see the magnified view. This would give the users a better sight of the products and can look at the items in some more depth.
2) Plugins to enhance UX
The following collection of plugins are those which boosts the user experience of the site. A few of them are listed below:
Wishlist Plugins - The Woocommerce Wishlist plugins allows the customers to create a wishlist where they can add products which they liked and also those which they are planning to buy in near future. This is a great tool for the website admin as they can pitch these customers enticing them to buy the products in the wishlist or by letting them know if there is a price drop on those.
Ajax Filter for Products - The Ajax product filter plugins makes the filtering of products easily as it doesn’t loads the page altogether, but loads the results on the same page thus making it a smooth experience to users. As the user gets the results instantly and without reloading of the page, this helps helps the users to try out various spec combinations of the product and buy the right one which suits them.
Woocommerce Product Add ons - Even though Woocommerce is the most user friendly ecommerce solutions out there, to be honest, the default product page features of it is not that attractive. Especially, if the store is about selling some customized products or products that requires some additional data to be collected, the default product Wordpress features doesn’t suffice. Woocommerce product addons plugin is a real must-have in this case as this plugin allows to add custom fields in the product detail page which the customers can select while ordering. The Woocommerce added product options plugin includes various field kinds allowed in it like custom price field, custom price formula, conditional logic, field based variations,multi select field etc which all can enhance the website to the next level.
The free version of Woocommerce product add ons plugin, which is available in Wordpress, also has a lot of good features including the number field, text field, radiofield, paragraph field, etc picture choice area and so on.
3) Plugins to enhance direct sales
Discount Plugins for Woocommerce - There are a of Woocommerce plugins which makes it possible for to set special discounts, conditional discounts, special deals, etc which can really boost the sales by a whole lot. There are number of these discount rates plugins with attributes like deals, offers or promotions, all focused on improving the checkout rate and website conversions.
Dynamic Rates and Discounts Woocommerce Plugin - Dynamic price as well as discount plugin enables the feature of establishing the discount based upon various parameters like quantity, total cart worth, previous purchase history and so on. This plugin really helps in enhancing the cross-selling and upselling from the ecommerce store as it always intuites the customers to buy more.
WooCommerce Checkout Manager - The Woocommerce Checkout Manager plugin makes it possible to customize and manage the fields on the checkout page of your Woocommerce store. This plugin helps to reorder, rename, remove and extend the checkout fields which are in the billing, shipping and other sections of Woocommerce.
4) Plugins to enhance payments part
PayPal Payment gateway plugin - Paypal is the prominent payment gateway worldwide and due to its immense popularity, once integrated, users can pay using their Paypal account easily. Even if the users don’t have payment gateway, they can pay via credit card or debit card through this gateway.
Stripe Payment gateway plugin - Stripe is among the second most popular payment gateway, after Paypal, and also has a free Woocommerce plugin that could be easily integrated with the website to collect payment via Stripe conveniently. Stripe accepts Apple pay also, which makes it easier for the users to pay using the Apple pay too.
Pay With Amazon - Amazon pay is a free Woocommerce payment plugin from the leading ecommerce giant in the world, which allows the customers to login with their Amazon account credentials and make the payment through Amazon pay.
5) Plugins to enhance the other sections
Woocommerce Multilingual Plugin - The multilingual plugins like WPML or Polylang helps to set up woocommerce stores in various languages. This plugin is also helpful when you require to run only one WooCommerce store but need to cater it to customers who speaks different languages.
Currency Switcher Plugin - The currency switcher plugin is a useful plugin when the user is from a different country than your base currency, but need to know the value of the product in their own currency. This is really important when you want to sell internationally but doesn’t need to go with the hassles of setting up different website for each country.
Social login Plugins - The popularity of the social networks websites has really helped in making the signup process easier in all website, not to mention ecommerce stores separately. There are numerous social login plugins which allows the option of accessing the web site with their social media sites accounts login credentials. Login through the most popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc makes it more very easy and comfortable for the individuals as they can easily create an account and login to the website without remembering any new credentials.
Google Analytics Plugin for WooCommerce - Google analytics is a vital element in the success for any type of website. In Woocommerce website it's actually an essential thing to track the goal conversions as well as understand the user journey so it can be used to the optimize the overall conversions from the store. It obviously provides you with a lot of traffic insights which leverages the shopkeepers to make informed decisions.
These are some of major Woocommerce plugins from the thousands of good Woocommerce plugins available in Wordpress. Managed by great community of programmers throughout the world, Wordpress and Woocommerce is still ruling the ecommerce arena with no real competition so far.