How to increase sales on your WooCommerce online store

WooCommerce is a powerful and versatile tool to transform your WordPress website into a fully functional ecommerce platform. But if you’re a WooCommerce store owner, you know that there’s more to creating a successful online store than making sales—you need to garner a large, loyal customer base, and make profitable sales consistently.

This chapter dives into actionable ways to improve the pages on your ecommerce site to get more sales. Implement these WooCommerce best practices, and you’ll witness a substantial increase in revenue in no time. 

6 ways to increase sales on your WooCommerce store

WooCommerce is a dream come true for ecommerce business owners. With over 400 official plugins and all sorts of sales-oriented features—like booking plugins, subscription-based services, and enabling product add-ons—the platform has become one of the most customizable shopping cart solutions in the industry.

Once you’ve set up your website on the ecommerce platform, you can focus on increasing product sales on WooCommerce by making your store user-friendly, clean, and easy to navigate.

By optimizing your WooCommerce store for visitors, you can:

• Better engage with customers at all stages of the purchase cycle

• Benefit from a reduced cart abandonment rate

• Increase sales and achieve greater revenue

• Reduce your ecommerce bounce rate

• Improve customer service

It’s time to start strategizing and implementing plans that set you apart from the competition. Let’s get started!

1. Optimize your WooCommerce store’s user experience

The most important feature that will determine sales growth on your WooCommerce store is the user experience—i.e. your site's usability and the experience it provides to your existing and potential customers. 

To put it simply, the more convenient and user-friendly your ecommerce website is, the more you will retain your customers and increase online sales on WooCommerce. But if visitors have difficulties during their experience with your website, they will immediately lose interest. 

For maximum impact, focus on these three strategies to optimize your WooCommerce user experience (UX).

Design a website that actually sells your products

There’s no doubt that website design is important—especially if you're working with ecommerce. However, while your store’s design must be visually appealing for visitors, it must also be functional and usable.  

A practical and user-oriented design will increase your site's usage by customers, converting them into a loyal and regular consumer base, which will gradually increase the sales of your WooCommerce store.

Website visitors expect a clean and seamless shopping experience with fast page load speeds and a straightforward user interface. Here are a few ways to ensure your WooCommerce website covers the basics:

Make your products easy to find and purchase

If visitors have to scour your website to reach the product page, you’ll probably lose a few sales along the way. Try to approach your store’s design from the customer’s perspective—see if you can find products, get the information you need, and make a purchase in as few clicks as possible.

A plugin like the YITH WooCommerce Essentials kit is a good choice. It comes with added features for ajax search, product comparison, product filters, product image zoom, quick view, wish list, shop infinite scroll, product add-ons, and catalog mode.

Besides easily finding products, it should be easy for people to actually buy them. Your WooCommerce theme probably comes with its own features, but you can streamline the process even more by using plugins like Checkout X and WooCommerce Direct Checkout. These plugins optimize your store’s checkout experience, making it quick and easy for customers to purchase your products.

Test for usability

Your WooCommerce store’s usability defines how well customers—potential and existing—view and use your site. In usability testing—a method of testing the functionality of a website, app, or other digital product by observing real users as they attempt to complete tasks—the goal is to reveal areas of confusion and uncover opportunities to improve UX.

By testing your store’s usability, you’ll gain invaluable information on:

• How visitors navigate and interact with your website

• How easy it is for them to locate particular products or categories

• Key areas users like or dislike

• Their main reasons for shopping cart abandonment

With this information, you can build an effective, efficient, and enjoyable experience for your customers.

2. Offer discounts and coupons to incentivize sales

Customers are always eager to get the best deal possible. A straightforward method to increase sales for WooCommerce stores is to offer some form of special offer. Here are a few tips on how to provide a great deal and increase your WooCommerce revenue at the same time:

Incorporate coupon plugins or a coupon code system

Coupons are a great way to spread the word about your WooCommerce store. Giving existing customers discounts will also keep loyal traffic on your site and generate repeat business. By using a WooCommerce plugin like Smart Coupons, you can leverage the data from your past promotions to come up with an offer, target specific segments to attract new customers or reactivate currently passive customers, and control the impact (specific products vs. entire inventory) and duration of validity.

Offer discounts at relevant times

Who doesn’t like a discount? On the one hand, you get more customers, sales, and profit by incentivizing visitors with special prices. On the other hand, happy customers buy discounted products and spread the word about your brand in the marketplace—it’s a win-win situation for both shoppers and store owners.

There are various WooCommerce discount plugins, like Discount Rules for WooCommerce and WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing, that will help you configure exciting discounts for your customers.

Organize flash sales

Flash sales create a sense of urgency to increase sales and bring in even more traffic to your store. Visitors can see the number of available stock going down, along with a countdown, encouraging them to grab the deal before time runs out. Make sure you promote flash sales through social media to increase traffic on your product pages. For a WooCommerce online store, use a plugin like Boost Sales to manage flash sales.

3. Highlight your product’s customer-centric benefits

Don’t limit your product descriptions to features and specs—highlight the benefits your product and service adds to your customers' lives.

By including the advantages that the product itself provides to the customer, and how it solves user needs, you encourage them to act on their purchase more than you would by just describing product characteristics alone.

When writing your product descriptions, think about the person who's buying the product. What questions will they ask about the product? What type of information do they need before they make a purchase? Try to think like your target customer.

To answer these questions and keep your product benefits customer-centric, ask your visitors for feedback on what they appreciate about or how they use your products. This will yield valuable voice-of-the-customer (VoC) insights about user needs, which you can then use to create better, more relevant products and services and provide a better customer experience. 

4. Optimize your checkout process

To increase WooCommerce sales, make sure customers can easily move through the sales funnel—from a landing page to a successful purchase—in as few clicks as possible. Here are a few ways to optimize your checkout process to increase sales:

Create a single-page checkout

If your checkout process consists of page after page, you’ll end up with fewer conversions and a high shopping cart abandonment rate. The ultimate goal is to keep it as simple as possible. Use the WooCommerce One Page Checkout plugin to create a single-page checkout.

Remove forced logins or registrations

In 2022, 24% of customers abandoned a purchase because it would require them to create an account. To prevent this from happening to you, only ask the information you really need. You’ll collect information like name, address, email address, and postal address through the checkout process anyway, so asking for it again can deter visitors from making a purchase.

Offer multiple payment methods

Cart abandonments statistics show that 9% of customers abandon a purchase when there aren't enough payment methods available. If you want to appeal to as many visitors as possible, offer different payment methods—like credit card, PayPal, and even Bitcoin—to boost the sales that come through your website. 

Offer customizable shipping options

You can influence the rate at which visitors shop by offering them customizable shipping options. Tools like Flat and Table Rate Shipping plugins allow you to include a flat, predetermined shipping rate for your WooCommerce customers. You can also customize and decide advanced shipping prices depending on different product categories, item quantities, and weight.

Use the ‘thank you’ page to cross-sell

Don’t let that ‘thank you’ page real estate go to waste. Once a customer is done with checkout, use cross-selling to encourage them to purchase additional services, items, and products related to the selected item. To boost your sales, you can also upsell similar—and more expensive—products or add-ons.

Implement A/B tests at checkout

Once you make changes to your checkout process, you need to make sure they have an impact on your ecommerce CRO. One way to do this is A/B testing—some visitors will see and interact with version A (the original checkout process), while others will interact with version B (your updated design). That way, you can make a direct comparison between your two shopping carts, and get more customer insights along the way.

5. Use SEO best practices to your advantage

One of the best things about using WooCommerce for your online shop is that the platform retains WordPress’s innate SEO-friendliness. This means you can simply run a search engine optimization (SEO) plugin like Yoast to ensure your store reaches the top spots on your potential customers’ search results pages. 

Here are a few key aspects to keep in mind when optimizing your WooCommerce site for SEO to increase sales:

Competitor and keyword research

Competitor research is a great place to start refining your keyword list and understanding what keywords you need to target to increase WooCommerce sales. 

Use the Moz browser extension to find out what specific keywords your competitors are ranking for on their homepage and key product pages. You can also use a specialized SEO tool like SEMrush to identify the keywords your competitors use.

Keywords in product descriptions

Next, include your most relevant keywords in compelling, unique, and informative product content. What keywords will your customers type into Google? Try to include synonyms and related phrases in your descriptions.

Don’t over-optimize your site with keywords—keyword stuffing can have a detrimental impact on your rankings. Pages or descriptions that are too heavily optimized can be penalized by Google. Make your pages read naturally, and write with the visitor in mind, rather than just trying to rank for a particular keyword or phrase.

If you have an extensive product offering, it can be tempting to use the product descriptions provided by the manufacturer, or to create a ‘one description fits all’ concept for many products. This can also lead to a penalization from Google and other search engines for duplicate copy. 

Product images

Optimizing image SEO can help your site rank higher on Google Images, which accounts for 22.6% of all searches. It can also help users understand and engage with your written content, and help break up otherwise large blocks of text on your WooCommerce product pages.

Rather than using product images with nonsensical file names, name your images strategically and add relevant alt text descriptions to tell Google what the images show. This helps Google better understand the context of each image to determine how to rank the page.

6. Address cart abandonment before it happens

Cart abandonment is a common issue you'll face while running your WooCommerce store. But, with proper strategy, you can prevent cart abandonment and increase sales at the same time.

• Optimize speed of purchasing to address a major reason behind abandoned carts. Customers shopping online expect sites to load quickly; they don’t want to spend more than a few minutes waiting for the checkout process to finish or fill out a lengthy order form.

• Send cart recovery emails to your customers and remind them that they’ve left items in the shopping bag. This is a cost-effective email marketing strategy to re-engage clients who have abandoned their carts.

• Keep pricing, shipping, and returns policies transparent to encourage conversions. Incomplete and ambiguous information about shipping and returns can discourage people from going through with their purchase. Providing additional costs at the checkout stage can also deter customers from continuing, so be open about all of the costs on the product page.

• Include trust signals and security policies to put customers at ease. Online shoppers are cautious about parting with their personal information, particularly when it comes to card details. Offer reassurance through adequate security and policies on your site, so they know their details are safe.

Next steps to increasing WooCommerce sales

Your work doesn't end after you have your WooCommerce store up and running with these sales optimization strategies. In fact, optimizing your ecommerce website is an ongoing process that requires you to continuously monitor performance, address any issues, and apply improvements to your user experience.

Continue to track, analyze, and optimize your ecommerce store using product experience (PX) insights and behavior analytics tools like Hotjar to develop a user-friendly site and keep up with your customers' ever-changing needs.