Cheaper “Per Month” Plans, Costly Website Repairs

The WooCommerce “plugin” for WordPress is free, meaning the only costs come from paying for website hosting, your domain name, and security certificates. Furthermore, WooCommerce sites are much more flexible, allowing you to add features and connect outside services (e.g. – Etsy stores, Mailchimp), with no problem.

… That is, if you are familiar with coding!

The downside to WooCommerce’s cheap base plan and customizable features are that many storeowners will complain of the hours they themselves spent trying to fix “bad code” on their site, or the hundreds of dollars they had to pay a developer to come in and do the fixes for them. 

Many owners who are not tech-savvy have huge problems with speed load times, which we’ve talked about as being one of the most important features of your e-commerce site.  WooCommerce owners may be saddling their site with plugins that are unnecessary.  However, if you are not a coding-savvy storeowner, it can become incredibly frustrating to hire a web developer every time you want to update your product line.

A Website Audit Identifies the Solutions to Your WooCommerce Store

If you already have a WooCommerce store, and have experienced any of the issues above, Ad360 is the solution to your website promotion and repair!  We offer a free website audit, can identify any issues with site speed, and make sure your store is ready to succeed online 😊

Booster Plus

BoosterPlus is an “all-in-one” plugin that comes highly recommended from many WooCommerce storeowners.  It adds “buy buttons,” price labels, product listings, product images, pdf invoices, and dozens more features depending on the bundle you pick up.  There is a free tier, but it may be worth looking at paid tiers because of the “all-in-one” nature of the plugin.  Great for upgrading your WooCommerce store and boosting sales!

OptinMonster

We here at Ad360 have offered a 3-part series explaining the importance of email marketing to increasing e-commerce sales (link to part I, II, and III).  OptinMonster is well-known for generating leads and converting “abandoned cart” sales at excellent rates. 

OptinMonster could be a strong pairing with Ad360’s services.  Ad360 is the e-commerce leader in retargeting, effective (and automated) ad placements, and professional ad banner design.  Pairing that with OptinMonster’s focus on email marketing could be a potent combination to increase sales on WooCommerce.

Advanced Shipment Tracking for WooCommerce

Once your sales begin picking up, customers will demand a high level of organizational efficiency for shipping.  In order to keep up with the competition, the advanced shipment tracking plugin for WooCommerce empowers storeowners to automate their fulfillment workflow. 

Customers get tracking numbers to follow on the front end, while your business can easily keep track of which packages are marked as “completed,” and which ones are marked as “shipped.”  Very helpful when you begin fulfilling hundreds of orders a day 😊

Honorable Mentions

The plugins below are ones we did not see as “universally” applicable to all stores, but check them out to get your WooCommerce strategy.  You’ll likely start having ideas about what your store really needs just by reading the descriptions of each. 

1. Dropship Me
2. Judge.me Product Reviews
3. Redirection
4. WooCommerce Cart
5. WooCommerce Paypal Checkout Gateway
6. WooCommerce Shipping Estimates

Research Plugins for site optimization

WooCommerce is unique from Shopify in its ability to customize the site.  There are dozens of “plugins” that add helpful features to your store – ranging from “push notification” tech to product sliders (essential for browsing items through mobile) to allowing customers to zoom in on your products!  Check a helpful list of WooCommerce plugins here to get your marketing research started!

Offer Discounted “Upsells” on the Checkout Page

Whether it’s for a seasonal special or to promote a new line of products, adding an “upsell” plugin to your store is an excellent way to increase sales on WooCommerce.  I’ll give a personal example here – while shopping for CBD products on my favorite site, I was leaving the checkout page when they offered a discounted tincture that sported a new flavor – it was excellent!  I bought several more times after that. 

This personal anecdote speaks to the stats – upselling at checkout can increase sales on WooCommerce by 10-30% on average.

Learn the Basics of Coding

You don’t need to become a software master, but learning the fundamentals of the coding languages underlaying WooCommerce (e.g. – PHP, Javascript, CSS, HTML), would enhance your ability to customize a standout WooCommerce site. 

Furthermore, a coding base would mean you would better understand what plugins would be most effective for your store, and which ones you can do without.  A better, smoother store experience would translates to increased sales on WooCommerce – learning the basics of coding would empower you to do just that!

If you want, you can check out helpful plugins that other code-savvy WooCommerce storeowners have left here on Github!  There are also helpful courses for the same idea here at UDemy

Google Reviews are an essential way to get more visibility online. These are the reviews left by people on your Google My Business profile, with a rating out of 5 stars, and a comment. Users can add photos too to their reviews (and you should encourage them to do so if you’re selling products!).

These reviews are super important for many reasons!

First of all, they show other people that your business is well respected and liked!

Secondly, more and more people are using these reviews to get more insights about a company and their products & services before making a purchase decision.

Thirdly, they are increasingly taken into account by Google’s search algorithms to determine your rank on Search Engine Response Pages (SERP).

These reviews appear on the right hand side of the search results when users type your business name, or find you from a keyword if you’re sufficiently highly ranked. They are also prominently featured on Google Maps, which can be a great channel to acquire new customers!

That’s why you should definitely ask your customers to leave reviews whenever possible!

This is what we do at Ad360, and we’re super proud and thankful to our customers that they left us our 10th 5-star reviews this week.

https://youtube.com/shorts/clo1_GgJQxI

Shopify just announced that they will be shutting down the Oberlo app on June 15th, 2022. This is the end of an era, as Oberlo has been one of the key pillars of the Dropshipping movement for the most part of the last decade.

For a long time, Oberlo was simply a must-have app for any newly created Dropshipping store. It popularized Dropshipping to vast cohorts of young business owners who enjoyed its simplicity. With a few clicks, you’d be able to add products from marketplaces like AliExpress to your Shopify store. Dropshipping is still very popular, as it allows you to start an e-commerce business with very little capital, without ordering and managing stock, and with limited working capital needs.

Oberlo, which was acquired by Shopify in 2017 for $15 million, is still used by 100 000 active stores, making it a super popular app.

However, Shopify has delisted the Oberlo app from its App Store on May 12th, 2022. It can no longer be installed, including from any other 3rd party source.

More critically, if you already have it installed, the App will be automatically uninstalled on June 15th, 2022. It will then be completely unaccessible.

This is a serious move by Shopify, which could be linked to recent issues with many Dropshipping stores’ shipping delays. The global supply chain disruptions have created many issues for websites that relied on shipping overseas products from China.
This may also be linked to the recent news by Shopify about the Delivery acquisition and its ambitions to creating a more integration shipping experience within the Shopify app.

Right now, there isn’t an official communication from Shopify or Oberlo really explaining the reasons behind this decision.
In this video, we discuss in more detail this piece of news and try to understand its repercussions on Dropshipping.