Over the last few years e-commerce started to grow strongly across the world and it’s in a continuous ascent, as now powers more than 60 percentage of the entire web. It is obvious that most of the customers use the internet to make a purchase. Every year the number is increasing, who love to buy products using internet and, today, there are around $1.92 trillion e-commerce sales worldwide. So it is obvious that e-commerce will dominate the world of business in near future.
Exploiting the internet properly for selling and promoting you products is a hard nut to crack. But the flexible platform of WordPress has the potentiality of wining these hindrances. The platform has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years in this regard and has emerged as an extremely viable e-commerce platform in its own right.
I will describe every part of the fields you need to know for using your WordPress website for online store.
Preparation of creating WordPress E-commerce website
You need to incorporate some effective tools as solution of your E-commerce business. The are two significant elements you have to introduce:
Product Page:
You will have a product pages on your site will attractive presentations of your products and services that are offering by your company. WordPress’ native page functionality gets you off to a good start here and is at the core of most e-commerce solutions for the platform.
Shopping cart:
Visitors are browsing your site and checking what you have for them but they have no idea about the purchase procedure then you will earn nothing. You need to have a procedure to let them select and complete transaction automatically. Shopping carts take good care of these processes.
You have the largest world of plugin for your WordPress theme to make your life easy with your online business.
WooCommerce is a popular E-commerce plugin which could the ultimate solution for all the needs of your online business. You will able to add product pages, shopping cart, and check out process. It is the leading E-commerce solution. WooCommece is a leading WP theme with wide range of extensions and specialization which allows you to handle every possible requirement of your online shop. It allows slide show of your offered products with animated eye-catching transitions.
For implementing all the needs of your online store you have another active plugin namely WP eCommerce. It also covers your needs of product review, presentations, shopping cart, and check out functions. This plugin includes all the reputed payment process.
It works for your online shop in a different way. It provides you the opportunity of managing your store remotely. Other interesting thing is that sign up and use is free up to ten products. Ecwid supports more than 35 international payment methods and real time shipping cost calculations.
Literally, the above mentioned plugins let your products ready for display. But there are lots of paramount issues which you should take under consideration.
Accepting Payments
You have to engage the service for your payment gateway to receive money from your clients. Payment gateway basically covers the transitional services. It receives the information of customers’ credit methods and makes the transaction complete. If you find complexity of handling all of these you have to put your trust on a reliable service provider. You must need a service with extraordinary truck record. Paypal is the simple method that most of the shop owner uses. If you use PayPal as your gateway, you customers need to submit credit information through company website. You customers have to pay transaction fees on each purchase. Some factors are associated with the payment gateways like monthly fees, transaction fees, recurring billing options and card types. All of these should compare to identify the best one for your business.
You may also want to learn your business plugin works with which gateway. WooCommerce supports all the common service and compatible with many customizations.
Inventory and Shipping
To operate your business successfully you need to deliver the purchased product in time. Timely supply of goods ensures repeated purchase. Delay in delivery result in headache for both buyer and seller.
You have to follow some strict rules for maintaining your inventory. Store your merchandise in a secured place and keep record with specific number to make sure you have all the current information. You can manage inventory through your website using different tools. Most of the e-commerece plug in comes with built in inventory features. TradeGecko is a cloud based solution can be easily used as extension of WooCommerce. It helps real time tracking of your stock.
Shipping is another area of online business which should take under consideration. A good approach is to offer three basic shipping tiers: Standard (cheapest), Priority (middle-priced), and Express (most expensive). WooCommerce has an extension called ShippingEasy includes shipping option for major carriers. It integrates shipping via USPS, FedEX, or UPS with inventory system as well as produce labels.
Activities need to boost your sale
The main aim behind all of this procedure is to maximize your sell using your WordPress eCommerce site running. For attracting your buyers you have to initiate some marketing strategy and keeping them up to date over the time.
Relevant Image with good Resolution
Great photos of your products add more values to you customers. Be sure that your photos are of good resolution and relevant to your product.
Use Video for Promotion
Video of your offered product provides more details to your potential clients. You will have a good showcase of your products with more extended features which leads to boost sale. Especially if you are offering a service for sale then video footage add real value to it.
Proper description of products
The main features of products like weight, size and quantity must be added with the cover. The production materials and present quality should be included with the cover. Description of products in right way is a nice way to pull customers.
Immediate response
Responding to pre-sale questions in a fast manner present you as a premium trader to your buyers . It may be a huge task to handle all the customers alone. You can assign a dedicated team for helping your customers with their issues. Provide a FAQ page on your site with the answers of the commonly asked questions. The query about shipping service must be included to it.
In fine
The lion’s share of the business is now covering by eCommerec solutions. WordPress comes with the recants advancements of business plugins to handle the commercial purposes of online business. I have introduced some of the add-ons which are really doing well for boosting sales recently. What do you think about these plugins and tools? Share your experience or left a query if want to know more about this topic.