One of the most popular platforms for creating online stores is obviously WordPress, powered by the WooCommerce plugin. This solution has a lot of fans choosing it for such advantages as affordability and ease of development. And while you may have long debates about what’s best for your business in the long run—say, Magento is costly but much more flexible to work with—building an online store is only half the battle anyway. The bigger issue is finding the most efficient approach to managing it afterward. In the end, your final goal is to increase sales on the WordPress site just created, and proper eCommerce project management goes hand in hand with achieving it.
Let’s discuss what is worth paying attention to in this regard.
How to Manage WooCommerce Store to Increase Sales
Surely, managing an online store alone won’t do the trick: to ensure high sales, you must have a good product, a convenient delivery system, and quality customer service. Suppose you have all of these… but your profit is still lower than expected. Why is this happening, and how to fix the situation?
User-friendly UI/UX
Don’t expect to increase website sales on your WooCommerce store if its design, to put it mildly, leaves much to be desired.
The thing is, the online store design is a more complex concept than just a beautiful picture and includes two main components: the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). And if you don’t understand the principles of building user interfaces and have no idea about their relationships with the user experience, the result won’t be good, and here’s why.
UI/UX design is responsible for interacting with website visitors, they’re also your customers and potential buyers. Of course, any web resource should be user-friendly, but the user focus becomes even more critical regarding online stores. After all, poor UI/UX, in this case, leads to a bad shopping experience, while your goal is the opposite.
That’s why it’s better to entrust UI/UX development to specialists: UX designers who should create a clear mechanism for the interaction of a web product with users; they can either work in conjunction with UI experts who build the user interface itself or combine both functions.
Content Optimization
Another way to increase website sales for your WordPress-based eCommerce project is to take care of content optimization. The aim is to help Google rank your online store better in their search engine and make it easier for customers to find your products on the web.
Content optimization is also a task for true experts who can analyze your target audience, compose a semantic core, select keywords, and add them in the right amount and ratio to the text. And, of course, it’s crucial to keep track of the latest SEO trends since Google has been constantly evolving and supplementing its search algorithm with new features in an effort to ensure users always find a web resource that fully meets their needs.
Marketing Techniques
Content optimization is just one of the many marketing techniques designed to help you increase online sales for your WooCommerce-powered store. Others include promotion on social networks, advertising on Google, and other popular resources, and much more.
We won’t be able to cover all the marketing secrets in our article, but Google will point you in the right direction if you’re interested. Although our opinion is that tasks of this kind are best left to professionals. An experienced marketer will help you develop an efficient promotion strategy and tell you how to broadcast your company’s image online.
Smart Catalog Management
You may be surprised how much depends on proper catalog management. Unfortunately, few business owners pay due attention to this issue.
Here are the main mistakes in managing your online catalog:
- Ill-conceived product display: for example, the first catalog rows are given only to items of a single brand or type, while your assortment is actually much broader.
- Un-catchy catalog when nothing invites consumers’ attention, leading to the low purchasing activity. You can use different matching combinations connecting products of the same color, style, or season and thus create memorable accents that intrigue customers who have opened your catalog.
- Poor handling of running out of items: these positions should be hidden or placed lower in the catalog.
- Inefficient approach to low-selling goods. Proper placement of such products in the catalog may increase their sales.
By avoiding the mistakes listed above, you’ll be able to attract and retain more customers and turn them into real buyers, which will ultimately increase WooCommerce store sales.
And by the way, there are ways to simplify catalog management, but more on that in a bit.
Tools to Streamline Online Store Management
Sometimes sales are below the desired level for one simple reason: you spend too much time on routine tasks. Of course, you won’t be able to eliminate them one hundred percent, but modern digital solutions can become your assistants, taking on some of this kind of responsibility.
Let’s give a few relevant examples.
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. CRM solutions automate and streamline your business processes. With their help, you can build a productive dialogue with customers and, as a result, sell them more.
- SEO tools. There is a vast number of various solutions for optimizing an online resource, and their list is constantly expanding. These are tools for selecting keywords, checking text uniqueness, analyzing the target audience’s preferences, and much more. Usually, every SEO specialist has their own set of favorite and proven services.
- Visual merchandising tools for simplified management of your online store and, in particular, its catalog.
Read more about visual merchandising tools and their value for your eCommerce business in our other article.
We want to dwell in more detail on the last point since catalog management is one of the most seamless, hassle-free ways to increase sales on your WordPress online store.
Let’s explain the principle of operation of such tools using the example of Sortler, a solution for optimizing visual merchandising. Its essence is that you register on sortler.com and get access to a managed virtual catalog synchronized with the real one. Everything you do within the virtual system updates the content of your actual online store too.
The most impressive feature of Sortler is the ability to create rules that automate various catalog management processes, such as:
- Product prioritization. You can instruct Sortler to place seasonal items at the top of the listing or use other prioritization logic that best suits your business needs.
- Product variety. Resort to Sortler to manage the number of brands and product types on the catalog page. This way, you’ll be able to show customers all the diversity of your range.
- Creation of matching combinations. To make your catalog stand out, create a rule by which products of the same collection, style, or color will be shown next to each other in the listing (in the quantity you specify).
- Out-of-stock management. You can decide what percentage of running-out products should be shown on the page, and the rest will automatically go down the catalog or be hidden.
- Low-selling items. Sortler may help you increase sales of products that haven’t yet shown their best side. To fix the situation, you must ask Sortler to move selected items higher in the catalog, thus making them more visible to customers. If this doesn’t work, Sortler will automatically add the discount you indicated to these underselling positions.
Never-Ending Online Store Improvement
To ensure your WooCommerce store increase sales, be ready to work on its improvement on an ongoing basis. Any eCommerce project is like a living being that can’t stay the same all the time, and here’s why:
- New technologies are emerging almost every year. At the time, for instance, the appearance of AR/VR helped online store owners to offer customers the opportunity to test a product from a distance and feel the experience of full immersion.
- Consumer tastes are changing, which should also be taken into account.
- The world doesn’t stand still, too, and challenges us occasionally. A striking example is the pandemic era when we were all forced to adapt to new conditions and move online. This affected eCommerce businesses as well.
Online store improvements include the following:
- Analysis of consumer behavior to understand what your average buyer wants and offer them exactly that.
- Implementation of new features and up-to-date technologies so that your store fully complies with the latest requirements, including those related to data security.
- Design update according to the relevant UI/UX trends.
Now you know how to increase online sales for your WordPress WooCommerce store. We hope our tips were helpful enough: they’ll work 100% if you just give them a chance.
And by the way, feel free to follow our blog, where we share valuable online store management insights with our readers.
