WooCommerce provides store owners a tremendous amount of control over how their store looks, operates, and sells. This control is the one that makes it a platform of choice for serious ecommerce businesses.
It is also the reason why it is so easy to make decisions that inevitably decrease sales without being obvious enough to encourage someone to take action to rectify the situation.
The problem with most stores that have bad performance on WooCommerce is that they don’t have one single major issue.
They aren’t gaining traction and are experiencing a slow drop in sales, through several touchpoints, because of errors, which seem small on their own, but also work together to create a significantly substandard customer experience that the store owner did not anticipate. Identifying the typical errors is the first step in rectifying them.
Ignoring Page Load Speed
Speed isn’t a technical measurement. It is a conversion measurement. Numerous studies of the ecommerce industry have consistently found that a 1-2 second delay in page load time results in measurable decreases in conversion rate.
Customers who find their store very slow, do not wait. They go away, sometimes without understanding or even caring why they got the urge to leave.
WooCommerce builds up speed issues in typical ways. Excessive scripts on each page. Images of products uploaded without compression at full resolution.
There is no caching layer to provide a better service to repeat visitors. A host with a lower level of traffic than the store does is no longer appropriate.
When it comes to performance, WooCommerce best practices involve making it a priority and not just another item on a checklist of things to do before going live. Reduce image sizes when uploading.
Install and configure a caching plugin. Regularly audit and prune any non-performing plug-ins. When large changes have occurred since the initial installation, revisit the hosting environment.
Writing Product Descriptions That Inform Without Selling
Product descriptions that are more like a specifications sheet answer the question “what is this?” and don’t necessarily answer the question “why should a person want this?” There’s the difference between a customer who understands the product and one who purchases it.
A good product description starts with the customer and what they are trying to do, and only then follows the description of the product. They speak the same language as the customers do when they’re talking about the issue, not the way that the store owner views the product.
They reply to the questions a knowledgeable salesperson would ask a customer: what is it, but what will it do for me, what are other options, and will it be appropriate for my situation.
This is not a long description of rodeo. It’s more about describing products in a way that’s oriented toward the customer’s decision rather than the product’s features. A short, customer oriented copy is always more effective than a long feature copy that fails to relate features to benefits.
Underinvesting in Product Photography
The customer who purchased on-line is not able to touch, feel, and examine the product in person. The only thing that can replace that real world experience is good product photography, which in turn can affect customer confidence in their purchase.
Whether stores are shooting from only one angle, using lower quality photos, or taking photos in a different style throughout their catalog, they are saying something about their brand, and about their products. Poor photography is an indicator to the customer about the product, even if it’s great.
Product imagery practices for WooCommerce involve presenting multiple angles of any product, providing zoom options for customers to inspect detail, including lifestyle images of products where it’s hard to imagine their size, and adding size reference images to products that are too large to easily imagine.
This refers to the main products, not ‘bonus’ items sold at ‘bargain’ shops. These are minimum standards for any retail outlet where the customer is unable to inspect the merchandise before purchasing.
Making Checkout More Complicated Than It Needs to Be
Each extra step, form or decision at the checkout is a chance that a customer will lose interest in buying. The default checkout for WooCommerce works fine, but it can be rather horrendous when it is misconfigured, too many plugins are added, or when it’s not used correctly and straightforward optimizations aren’t made.
One of the biggest checkout pitfalls is a requirement to create an account before buying products and services. Among the most frustrating abandonment scenarios is when customers meant to purchase and were then hit with a registration requirement, since they had an intention and were blocked by the store. Guest check-out should be provided at all times.
Friction has no value: Unnecessary form fields create friction. Not asking for a phone number when there is no operational need, not asking for a fax number because you’re used to using an old template, leaving multiple address lines that could be joined: each of these costs a bit of mental effort and time when the customer is already feeling impatience with the process.
The speed of the checkout page is another factor that needs to be considered separately. The consumer who has decided to purchase and is forced to wait for a slow or unresponsive checkout page is in a state of frustration, a frustration that directly leads to abandonment. The checkout page is the most important page on the eCommerce store in terms of performance and reliability.
Neglecting Mobile Shoppers
Mobile commerce is not a trend that is still emerging. It has been and still is the major shopping channel for a large number of online shoppers. If a WooCommerce store does not offer a good mobile user experience, they are not providing a second channel. It’s failing to deliver on its core business to a significant portion of its customers.
There are many different problems with mobile in WooCommerce stores, they can be very apparent and very subtle. Photos which do not scale proportionally. Buttons that are too small to press well.
Text that needs to be scrolled horizontally. A checkout process that demands exact alignment of the taps to the form fields. In fact, these issues may be hidden from the store owner’s radar, as he/she typically visits the store on desktop first and mobile second.
One of the key steps of following WooCommerce best practices is to test the entire customer journey on real mobile devices, rather than on the device simulation mode of a browser. Mobile views that are simulated do not simulate how the mobile view behaves in touch with the user, how the network performance is, or how the browser is rendered.
Ignoring the Post-Purchase Experience
Many WooCommerce stores think that the customer journey stops at the order confirmation page. What happens after the customer makes a purchase decides if they are a repeat customer, a customer reviewer or a referral source, all of whom are more valuable economically than the initial purchase.
It is my claim that most stores underutilize the single most imminent opportunity they have to make a sale, post-purchase email. A confirmation email that only restates order information is a lost chance to remind customers of their purchase, and to establish the foundation for future sales.
Following up with an e-mail after delivery asking how it’s going for the buyer, and requesting a review, can create social proof that may attract people to make a purchase in the future. If a targeted recommendation email can be sent at a suitable time that’s based on the customer’s buying history, then repeat purchases can be achieved for free.
These are not high-level marketing programs. They are simple communications that the majority of WooCommerce stores might have had the ability to establish in an afternoon, but didn’t.
Not Using Analytics to Understand What Is Actually Happening
To owners who run their WooCommerce store mainly based on intuition, it’s like making decisions without all the facts and in a place where all the facts are very accessible.
You’ll know what products customers are viewing without purchasing, what pages are dropping customers out of the checkout process, where traffic is coming from, and how each type of traffic is doing in terms of conversion, as well as which marketing efforts are leading to sales and which are leading to visits that don’t convert.
If we don’t know this, we can’t really optimize anything. Through it, they are pointed towards the issue that’s really costing the store sales and not the issues that sound most important.
WooCommerce best practices for analytics involve having a correctly set up analytics configuration from the start of the store, checking the analytics on a regular basis, and using the data to guide decisions. Along with conversion optimization, SEO link building services can help improve the store’s online visibility and attract relevant organic traffic.
Final Thoughts
The biggest WooCommerce errors that cost online sales the most are not always the big ones that are obvious as they happen. These are the small decisions, one at a time with a few conversions, which when combined can be a lot of missed conversions between where the store is at, and where it could be.
Fortunately, many of these omissions can be rectified without having to start the store again. They need a realistic evaluation of how the customer experience breaks down, and prioritization of the improvements they can make that will have the greatest impact; and discipline to view optimization as an iterative process and not a one-time project.
If it is a store that is focused on this constant approach, it will surpass another store with a better product selection, better pricing and better traffic if it doesn’t do it.
