conversion optimization Tag Archives - Page 5 of 7

Why Have More Than One Payment Gateway for WooCommerce?

September 17, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

If you own a WooCommerce store and only have one mode of accepting payments, you might want to consider adding other payment options. Adding more payment gateways should be easy. WooCommerce can integrate easily with many payment gateway providers. In most cases, you’ll just need to configure a plugin and a few settings. But why have more than one payment gatewat for WooCommerce if the one you have is working fine?

Why Have More than One Payment Gateway?

There are several benefits to having more than one payment gateway.

Reduce Checkout Abandonment

One important reason why you should have more than one payment gateway is to reduce checkout abandonment. Not to be confused with cart abandonment, checkout abandonment is when a user reaches checkout and does not complete the checkout process.

There are various reasons your customers can abandon checkout. Common reasons include having too many form fields, hidden fees, and not having the user’s preferred payment option. For example, some users may prefer to pay using Paypal since it comes with buyer protection or they may believe it is more secure. But if you only have credit card payments, then users who want to use Paypal might abandon your checkout.

Backup Payment Gateway

If you only have one payment gateway and you encounter issues with your payment gateway, your customer will have no other options for completing checkout. That means you are out of business until you sort out your payment gateway issue. It’s great if these issues can be fixed in a matter of minutes, but sometimes these issues can go for days. The longer that it takes for you to fix the issue, the more business you lose.

In short, using only one payment gateway is risky. Having two or more modes of payment allows your customers to check out using another payment gateway if their first choice is not available or having problems.

Flexibility

Many payment gateways are not capable of handling different payment methods. If you want to cover all bases, then you should use more than one payment gateway. In addition, some payment gateways might not be able to process foreign currency. This can be a problem if your business caters to a global market.

Customer Preference

Having more choices is better when it comes to payment options. Trust is hard to come by and if you are using a payment gateway that your customers trust, they will hand you their money. The more payment options you offer, it is more likely that you’ll have your customers’ preferred payment option.

Some users may not be comfortable with entering their credit card information on every ecommerce site that they use. These users are more comfortable using services such as Paypal, Apple Pay or Amazon Pay. Still, some people might not have an account for these services and would prefer entering their credit card information. It’s all a matter of preference. Giving your customers the ability to pay with their preferred payment gateway scores you a point.

What are the Common Payment Options?

There are a lot of payment gateway choices to use for WooCommerce. These include Paypal, which can be Paypal Standard, Paypal Express, Paypal Advanced or Paypal Pro. Using Paypal is already akin to having two payment gateways since users can pay via Paypal or through their credits cards without need for a Paypal account. You can check out the Paypal Extension Comparison page to determine which Paypal option is right for your WooCommerce store.

Other popular payment gateway options include Stripe, Authorize.net, Amazon Pay and Apple Pay which is available through Stripe.

Which Payment Option is Right for Me?

How do you know which payment option is right for you? There are several factors to consider such as cost, location and security. Depending on where you do business, you might also want to consider location-specific regulations such as GDPR. There is no single right answer as to which payment gateway is the best, it all depends on your business’ particular needs.

Get to adding that extra payment gateway as soon as possible. If you ever need help setting up your payment gateways for WooCommerce, you can contact the Wooassist team and we’ll help you out. If you have any suggestions or comments, you can post them in the comments section below.

How to Set up Abandoned Cart Emails in WooCommerce

May 15, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

You are losing money and you may not even be aware of it. According to data from the Baymard Institute, over 69% of shopping carts are being abandoned. Also, 57% of online shoppers have abandoned a shopping cart in the last 3 months stating various reasons. It may not always be your fault but you can do something about it.

Reasons for Cart Abandonment

The Baymard Institute has researched shoppers’ reasons for cart abandonment.

Many of the reasons customers cite for leaving carts can be addressed. It can be a simple matter of making it more convenient for your customers to check out or just being transparent about the fees that you collect. Sometimes, you just need to offer more payment options.

How to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Before we move on to how you can recover abandoned carts, it is important to address why carts are being abandoned. After all, it would be better if your customer didn’t abandon their carts in the first place.

Extra Costs Too High

Shipping fees and taxes go hand in hand with ecommerce. There is no way around it. But if your customers complain that your shipping fees are too high, you might have a problem. Have you considered using a different company that can offer more affordable shipping? Have you considered adding a shipping calculator to your WooCommerce store? Have you considered offering free shipping? If you can’t afford free shipping, you can also consider offering free shipping for a minimum order value.

Complicated Checkout Process

You should make it easy for your customers to buy your products. Don’t make them jump hoops. There are a few things that you can do to ease the checkout process. You can enable guest checkout, reduce checkout form fields, and make your checkout mobile-friendly. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try out your checkout process. Better yet, survey some of your customers and ask them for feedback.

Improve Your Trust Rating

One reason that customer’s abandon carts is that your ecommerce store has not shown that it can be trusted. What can you do to improve your WooCommerce’ store’s trust rating?

Show your contact information.
Add testimonials
Install an SSL Certificate
Add security seals
Have a professional looking site
Create a compelling about us page
Increase your site’s security

Once you address these things, you should be able to see improved checkout completion. This doesn’t mean you’ll have zero abandoned carts. For your abandoned carts, you can still recover them through abandoned cart emails.

How to Recover Abandoned Carts in WooCommerce

Abandoned cart emails are easy to set up using a plugin. First thing that you need to do is install the WooCommerce Abandoned Cart plugin.

In your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins > Add New and search for WooCommerce Abandoned Cart.

After installing and activating the plugin, it will automatically bring you to the plugin’s Dashboard page.

To edit the plugin’s settings on your Dashboard, go to WooCommerce > Abandoned Carts.

In the settings page, you can change various plugin settings.

The first thing we need to do is edit the email template that will be sent to customers. To do this, click on the “Email Templates” tab. Here you can see the default email template. Hover on the existing template and click on “Edit”.

This will open a new page where you can edit and personalize the email that you want to send to your visitors that abandon carts.

After editing the template, click on “Update Changes” and click on the activate button.

That’s it. The plugin will now automatically send emails to visitors that abandon their carts which will help you recover these carts and increase your sales.

Additional Tips

If you want further increase your sales, you can also consider doing email marketing for WooCommerce. You can start by configuring WooCommerce to automatically add customer emails to your MailChimp lists. Or if you want more conversion optimization tips, you can also check out our conversion optimization infographic.

If you have any questions about setting up abandoned cart emails in WooCommerce, you can let us know in the comments.

Optimize Images on Your WooCommerce Store Before It’s Too Late

October 27, 2017 By John 2 Comments

A lot of WooCommerce store owners complain about their website loading slowly. While a slow website can be optimized to run faster, sometimes optimization can only on do so much if you don’t have the foundations for a fast website. Site speed optimization is not a one-off process. It should be done from the moment the website is created and implemented on a regular basis.

Optimize All Your Images before Uploading

Before you go and use an image on your website, it is important to have these images optimized. Take note where you will use your image and resize it to the actual size of image placeholder. Your image should be no bigger than the size that the image placeholder permits. Anything more than that is just unnecessary load on your server and a few milliseconds of extra page loading time.

It is also important to use an image editing application like Photoshop to remove image metadata and further optimize the image file size. For more information on optimizing images, you can read our guide on how to optimize images for the web. You can also use this online tool to help you optimize your images.

Also, make sure to use descriptive file names. This will help boost your SEO compared to default image files names containing number strings such as IMG20182708 or Image 1.

What If I Did Not Optimize My Images Before Uploading?

If you did not optimize your images before uploading them on your site, it is not too late. There are certain plugins that can help you. The WP-Smush plugin optimizes images as you upload them on your site. It can also optimize your images in bulk. However, the plugin can only do so much if you uploaded very large images.

If the images you uploaded are too large, it might be best to reupload an optimized version of that image. If you’ve had your site for years, this could mean a lot of work. There are no shortcuts but you can start with the images on the most important pages on your site. These include your home page, other landing pages, and best-selling products. Should you need help optimizing your site’s images, you can contact the Wooassist team to help out.

Optimizing Your Product Images

In optimizing your product images, you will need to strike a balance between file size and image quality. Better images will have a bigger file size. The importance of image quality has especially been highlighted since WooCommerce started to implement the zoom functionality when hovering over product images. You now have to test zooming in on your images if they would still look good when zoomed. You don’t want your customers seeing a pixelated image when they try to zoom in on your product. Not all stores are alike so you will need to test what level of quality will work for your store.

Do Away with the Image Sliders

If you have large image sliders on your home page, you might want to consider removing them. Image sliders are resource-intensive and can really slow down a site. Combine that with unoptimized images, and your site will be a top contender for the slowest site on the web.

Sliders do not help your site convert. In addition, it is bad for your site’s user experience. There is an overwhelming amount of data that back this claim. Just check out these articles below.

What Should I Use in Place of Sliders?

Image sliders can cause banner blindness especially when your sliders look too much like ads. You can replace your image sliders with a single hero image with a large call-to-action. Compared to a slider which overwhelms your visitors with multiple calls-to-action, a single hero image will contain just one call-to-action. This means it will be easier for you to convince your visitors to take the action that you want them to take. When creating the hero image, make sure it does not look too much like an ad. Otherwise your visitors will just ignore it. The Wooassist team can help you set up a hero image on your store.

You can now start optimizing the images on your WooCommerce store. If you have any questions, you can contact us or let us know in the comments below.

How to Set Up MailChimp Opt-In Form in WooCommerce Checkout

January 29, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

If your WooCommerce store is not set up to capture your customer’s emails, then you’re missing out on a lot of potential sales. According to data gathered by Campaign Monitor, transactional emails can help you generate up to 6 times more revenue. Your prospective customers are also five times more likely to see the emails you send out compared to when posting it on your Facebook. With increasing competition in Facebook post reach, email marketing is only becoming more lucrative. In this post, we’ll teach you how to set up MailChimp opt-in form in WooCommerce checkout so you can increase your conversion rates.

What Do You Need to Set Up Email Opt-in Forms in WooCommerce Checkout?

To get started with adding email-opt in forms to your WooCommerce store, you need two things. The first one is a MailChimp account. You can sign up to MailChimp for free and continue to use it until you exceed a thousand subscribers. At this point, you will need to purchase a plan. You can sign up for a MailChimp account here.

Once you’ve set up a MailChimp account, you will need to generate an API key which you will use to connect MailChimp to your WooCommerce store. To get your API key, log in to your MailChimp account and click on your name on the upper right corner and then click on Account; click on Extras and then on API keys. From here, you can copy the existing API key or create a new one. Save your API key for now. We’ll need this later.

The second thing that you need is the MailChimp for WooCommerce plugin which you can download here. You can also install the plugin from the Plugins page of your WordPress Dashboard. Once you install the plugin, make sure you activate it.

How to Set Up MailChimp for WooCommerce Plugin

After activating the plugin, head over to the Plugins page on your WordPress Dashboard and look for MailChimp for WooCommerce and then click on Settings.

On the Connect Tab, you will need to input your API key. If you followed the steps in the previous section, you should have your API key ready. Just input your API key in the API key field and click on “Save all changes”.

When that’s done, click on Store Setting and set your store information and then click on “Save all changes”.

The next step is to set up your subscriber lists. Click on List Settings and choose a list to sync with your WooCommerce store. You can also indicate whether you want to automatically subscribe your existing customers to your list.

If you want to switch to a different list, you will need to remove and reinstall the plugin.

You can also set other setting such as checkbox display options, subscription opt-in message, and the location of the opt-in checkbox form on checkout.

When that’s done, you can sync your list with your MailChimp account.

To view your site details and change other settings, you can log in to your MailChimp account, click on your profile name and click on “Connected Sites”.

Final Notes

Now that your store is set up to sync your customer’s emails to your MailChimp list, you can easily email them special offers and other deals to help boost your sales.

If you have any questions, let us know in the comments.

If you need help setting up the plugin on your WooCommerce store, you can contact us.

Why You Should Do a Plugin Audit on Your WooCommerce Store?

January 14, 2018 By John Leave a Comment

Have you ever wondered if you can make your WooCommerce store load faster? Have you ever looked at your plugins page and thought about removing some of them? If you answered yes to both of these questions, then you are on the right track. That’s a little something we like to call a “plugin audit” and this can help make your website load faster.

What is a Plugin Audit and Why You Need to Do It?

A plugin audit is an analysis of the plugins currently installed on your WooCommerce store to determine which plugins you can remove.

Why Remove your Plugins?

Improve Site Speed

You might be asking yourself right now why you would want to remove some of your plugins. The simple answer to that is having too many plugins can slow down your site. And a slow website can have negative effects on your conversion rate.

Compatibility Issues

Another issue with having too many plugins is that it makes your site more prone to breaking when you update your plugins. Your plugins will need to be able to work seamlessly with each other. Having too many plugins means that the odds of one plugin not being compatible with another is high. After every update, plugins can also break compatibility with plugins they were originally compatible with.

Security Threats

Having too many plugins also exposes your site to security issues. Poor coding can result in hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in some plugins. If you only have a few plugins, then the odds of your website being hacked through plugin vulnerabilities is also reduced.

But How Many Plugins is Too Many?

There is no definitive number that equates to a “right” number of plugins that you need to have on your WooCommerce store. But a good rule of thumb is to just use the plugins that you really need.

Also, don’t install multiple plugins that do the same thing. Avoid using plugins like Jetpack that bundle numerous plugins into a single plugin. Jetpack is not bad per se. Feel free to use it if you use all of its features but chances are you won’t be using everything that Jetpack has to offer. In which case, Jetpack’s unused features needlessly eat up your WooCommerce store’s resources. It would be better to determine which features of Jetpack you use and find a plugin that does only that.

Which Plugins Should You Remove?

Plugins that do the same thing. If you have two or more plugins that do the same thing, you should remove the other plugins and choose the best one for your needs. The duplicate plugins just hog up your resources so there’s no reason for you not to remove them.

Plugins that can be supplemented with custom code. Sometimes you will need to install some kind of code somewhere on your site to remove a feature you don’t want or to add support to a service that you are using. But since you are not a developer, you find a plugin that will insert the code for you. Over time, these plugins could add up. When doing a plugin audit, you can list down all the plugins that can be supplemented by inserting custom code and then you can hire a developer to insert all these codes for you in one go. To an experienced developer, this should be doable in less than an hour but we recommend spending a bit more time for testing.

Plugins that you don’t use. If you have installed some plugins that you are not using, then there’s no sense in keeping them. You keep telling yourself, you might need them in the future. Uninstall them now and just install them again when you actually need them.

Plugins that your customers don’t use. Maybe you installed a Wishlists plugin but then you find that none of your customers have actually used it. Because this plugin does not provide any value to your store, you might as well just remove it.

Plugins that have not been updated in a long time. Outdated plugins can break after some time so it is best to find another plugin that does the same thing and has been updated recently. Also, outdated plugins can be a security concern. Even when installing new plugins, you should check if the plugin you will be installing is being updated regularly.

Final Words

After doing a plugin audit, you will have a site that is faster and less prone to breaking during updates. Should you need help in doing a plugin audit for your WooCommerce store, you can contact us and we can help you out.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, you can let us know in the comments.