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The Ultimate WooCommerceGuide 2020

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The Ultimate WooCommerce Guide to Your Ecommerce

During the last several years, ecommerce has grown in popularity. More and more

companies sell online regardless of whether their main activity involves an e-business.

Large enterprises, mid-sized companies, and even small businessmen use WooCommerce

to create online stores and sell via the Internet.

Considering the fact that WordPress is the most popular content management system

in the world – when it comes to building ecommerce shops – WP is the obvious choice.

Businesses powered by the platform are highly developed. Why? Because WooCommerce

offers simplicity and is, at the same time, perfectly adapted to the needs of users.

WooCommerce exists since 2011 and is supported by a strong team of experienced deve-

lopers. Just like WordPress, it’s a fully free and open-source software. This gives endless

possibilities because you can expand your store by adding new functionalities.

Even though WooCommerce is very easy to use and allows practically anyone to create his

own online store, the optimization of the plugin is a neverending story.

In the Ultimate WooCommerce Guide, we’ll tell you what WooCommerce really is and

what benefits it brings. We’ll show you everything you need to know to take full advantage

of WooCommerce – from choosing themes, integrating plugins, full optimization, to

adding new functionalities and implementing communication tools, which will increase

your conversion and sales rates, and improve customer service.

Everything you need is in this guide, so let’s start! Enjoy your reading!

CEO of Cut2Code

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Table of Contents

1. How to Create a Store on WooCommerce in 30 minutes?

2. What to Pay Attention to If You’re Planning to Start an E-business on

WooCommerce?

3. To Woo or Not to Woo - Is WooCommerce the Best Thing for You?

4. How to Create a WooCommerce Template – Best Practices

4. How We Customized WooCommerce with the Help of Plugins – the

Case Study of print4display

5. A Multilingual Ecommerce Store – New Language, New Opportunities

6. Plugins That Will Support the Development of Your Ecommerce

7. How to Move an Online Store to AWS Cloud in 10 Steps

8. How to Implement a Challenging Project Using WooCommerce -

Solisci.pl Case Study

9. Voice Search Optimization – What You Should Take Care

of in Order to Increase the Visibility of Your WooCommerce?

10. Google Analytics for Ecommerce – Get to Know Your Customer

11. 5 Steps to Creating Effective Banner Ads in Ecommerce

12. 6 Tips to Build a Positive Ecommerce Image in the Media

13. How to Automate Sales Processes with the Help of Chatbots

14. Starting a New Business – the Biggest Challenges and How to

Overcome Them

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How to Create a Store on WooCommerce in 30 minutes?Author: Grzegorz Rogoziński

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● What technical requirements do WordPress and WooCommerce have,

● How to install WooCommerce,

● How to set up your WooCommerce,

● How to make advanced configurations on WooCommerce,

● How to add products to your WooCommerce shop,

● How to add discount coupons to WooCommerce,

● Where to view current orders in your WooCommerce store,

● How to develop your WooCommerce store.

From this article, you’ll learn

If you’ve ever wondered how much time and money it would cost you to create a simple

online store, I have good news for you! It will take you less than 30 minutes to implement

a store based on WordPress, WooCommerce, and the standard Storefront ecommerce

theme. What’s more, your costs will include only the price of your domain and server

hosting. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

In this article, I’ll show you how to set up a shop based on WooCommerce – starting with

its installation, basic configuration, adding products and discount codes, to viewing

clients’ orders in the admin panel. To see how your store can look like with the Storefront

theme, go to the official WooCommerce demo, which is available on this address: https://

themes.woocommerce.com/storefront.

What Technical Requirements do WordPress and WooCommerce Have?

Before we move on to the installation of your store on a server, let’s start with the technical

requirements of WordPress and WooCommerce and take a look at the characteristics of

both platforms.

WordPress is one of the world's most popular open-source content management

systems (CMS). According to W3techs, in 2018, WordPress' share in the international CMS

market was 58,55% (that is 75 000 000 websites!), which represents 27% of all websites you

can find on the Internet. That's quite impressive. What makes WordPress so popular are its

simple user interface, flexible sales settings, high website scalability, and availability in over

50 languages.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin developed 8 years after the first version of the CMS

was released. It is an extremely powerful and versatile tool that enables users to enhance

their websites with ecommerce features. Just like WordPress, the plugin is completely free

– only some official WooCommerce add-ons require additional costs.

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WordPress doesn't have demanding server requirements – to function properly,

your host should support PHP version 7.3 or greater and MySQL version 5.6 or greater

(optionally MariaDB version 10.1 or higher). It’s also worth investing in an SSL certificate

for your website. When it comes to WooCommerce, it has quite similar technical

requirements: PHP version 7.2 or greater, MySQL 5.6 or greater (alternatively MariaDB 10.0

or higher). You can also try PHP version 5.6, although the creators of Woo don’t guarantee

that it will function 100% properly.

The ecommerce platform additionally requires you to increase the memory limit of

WordPress to minimum 128 MB. All you have to do is to add this line of code

“define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', ‚128M’);”

to the wp-config.php file (WordPress’ configuration file).

And that’s all. Let’s move on to the next step and install your store on a server.

How to Install WooCommerce?

The following list contains step-by-step guidelines that will help you properly install

WooCommerce on your WordPress website. You should follow them in chronological

order. To install the plugin, WordPress should already be installed on your server.

You'll find detailed guidelines on how to install the CMS on its official website

https://wordpress.org/support/article/how-to-install-wordpress/.

Some control dashboards devoted to server administration, such as cPanel, enable you

to automatically install WordPress by simply clicking on an icon from the panel and

completing a short setup.

1. If WordPress is installed, it's time to go to the admin panel. To enter it, add the letters

"/wp-admin" to your website's URL. After logging in, you should see the following screen.

From the menu on the left, click on "Plugins” (1).

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2. This section will display all the plugins you've installed on your website. As a default,

WordPress has already 2 set up plugins. It also sometimes happens that hosting

providers preinstall additional extensions. But what we're interested in is the button

next to the "Add new” heading (2).

3. The button will lead us to the WP plugin marketplace. In the search bar on the right

write “WooCommerce” and click enter (3). The plugin we want to install should be

at the top of the search results. Click “Install Now” and then “Activate” (4). If there’s a

window asking you to upload files to the FTP server, don’t panic. You can deal with this

by adding the following line of code

“define('FS_METHOD', ‚direct’);”

to your wp-config.php file. Next, refresh the page with your plugins and click on the

installation button once more.

4. Great! You’ve just installed WooCommerce on your website. In the next part, you’ll learn

how to set up your store using WooCommerce Setup Wizard.

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How to Set up Your WooCommerce?

Wizard is a special panel that will help you complete the basic configuration of your

ecommerce and make it ready to start selling. If you don’t know how to answer some

of the questions, don’t worry. You’ll be able to change the parameters later on. Let

me now show you how to set up your store. Just in case – if you want to go back to the

WordPress dashboard, click on “Not right now”. The store setup is divided into 5 steps:

1. Store setup consists of basic questions about the location of your store (5) and the

currency (6) in which you want to sell your products and services. This is also the place

where you should define the type of goods you want to sell (7) – whether they’re

physical or digital products.

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2. Payment – in this section you can choose your payment service provider. By default,

WooCommerce offers an integration with PayPal (you’ll need an account on this

platform). If you want to choose a different payment system, you’ll have to install an

additional plugin. Click on “Offline payments” to set up other payment methods that

are offered by WooCommerce (8). The platform offers, among others, traditional bank

transfer, payment by check or on delivery. Choose the most suitable options and

proceed to the next step.

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3. Shipping – the system makes it possible to set up domestic and international shipping

costs. By default, you can choose between two options: flat rate shipping (a single rate

is charged for shipping a package, regardless of the number of products and other

parameters, like weight and size) or free delivery (9). If you’re not planning to send your

products abroad, just turn this option off by clicking on the appropriate slider (10).

The last question in this section concerns the units of measurement that will be used

to describe your products (if they’re physical, of course) (11). This will also be helpful in

the advanced settings if you’re planning to add shipping costs that will depend on

product weight.

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4. Recommended is a collection of selected WooCommerce plugins that will help you

manage your store and communicate with your clients. The list recommends the

following features:

4.1. Storefront Theme (12) – an online store theme. It’s a must-have if you want to satisfy

your clients with a clean and aesthetic website layout.

4.2. Automated Taxes – if a single tax rate applies to different products from your store,

this automated tax calculation plugin is a perfect solution.

4.3. WooCommerce Admin (13) – an interesting extension that provides you with

detailed reports on the key metrics of your store – from sales reports concerning

specific products or categories, in-store availability, tax, and coupon settlements, to

information about the activity of specific users. A very useful tool, which

I recommend installing.

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4.4. Mailchimp – if you’re planning to run mailing campaigns with Mailchimp (which

requires an additional account), you’ll be able to easily exchange data between

your store and the plugin’s database. Your clients will also gain the possibility to

automatically sign up for newsletters.

4.5. Facebook – advertising is the leverage of trade. If you want to reach a wider

audience by using Facebook, this plugin will definitely make it easy. In several

simple steps, you can connect your store with your Facebook fan page, where you

can publish your product offer. This integration is also very useful in the case of

paid FB campaigns, especially with regard to remarketing ads that display specific

products.

5. Activate – WooCommerce Jetpack is an extension that lets you add new features to

your store. It enables advanced settings of payment methods and provides you with

better security. The choice is yours – you can either activate the plugin by clicking

on “Continue with Jetpack” or choose “Skip this step” (14), which is displayed at the

bottom of the screen.}

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6. Good job! You’ve completed the steps and your first store configuration with Wizard.

You can now sign up to a WooCommerce newsletter, add new products, or import

them from a different store. You can also go back to the main dashboard, change your

settings, or see how your website looks like from a client point of view. We can now

move on to Configuration, where you’ll learn about more advanced options to modify

your store.

How to Make Advanced Configurations on WooCommerce?

You can change your store parameters at any moment by going to the section

WooCommerce > Settings. Let me briefly discuss the key settings you can make on your

website:

1. General – where you define your store's address, choose the country in which you're

going to sell products (15), enable/disable tax rates (16) and discount coupons (17). If

you're planning to offer payments in different currencies (more than one) (18), you'll

definitely need the paid plugin called Currency per Product for WooCommerce Pro. In

a free version, it allows you to add 1 additional currency to your store.

2. Products – every store based on WooCommerce has a subpage with products and the

Products tab lets you choose one (but I don't recommend you to change it if you're

a beginner in Woo) (19). One of the key elements is defining how your store will behave

after users add products to a shopping cart – it can either automatically redirect users

to the cart summary or add items "in the background" (20). This is also the place where

you can decide if you want to give users an option to comment (21) on your products

and rate them with stars (22).

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3. Shipping – I can tell from my experience that this is the most problematic section for

users. But thanks to Shipping Zones, you can define shipping methods for certain

locations (23). You can enter a country or even narrow it down to specific zip codes

and choose how to send your products in the Shipping methods section. You can,

of course, set different parameters for specific shipping methods or use the Product

Shipping Classes option, which is explained below. The Shipping options tab lets you

determine how the cost of delivery should be calculated. It can be worked out based

on the payment details a customer has chosen in the shopping cart or on the basis of

separate shipping details.

Shipping classes can be used for products that require special delivery methods. For

instance, the standard cost of shipment is $10 but you have a fragile product that

needs special protection. In this case, you can set a different cost of delivery just for this

shipping class.

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4. Payments – this screen displays all the available payment methods. To choose one,

just click on a button to activate it (24). Of course, every payment method has its own

configuration options (25), for example, you can choose different external payment

gateways or enable direct bank transfer.

5. Accounts & Privacy – in the era of GDPR, it’s worth investing more time in accounts and

privacy settings. As a store owner, you can decide whether unregistered users can shop

as guests and choose when (at what point of the purchase process) they can create an

account on your website (26).

You can also decide if clients can demand the deletion of their personal data at any

time or set a date after which such data is automatically removed from your store’s

database (27). Another key element you should remember about is choosing the right

place on your website to put your Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions (28).

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6. Emails – the last section allows you to view emails that are sent to the clients of your

store. As an administrator, you can set the subjects, recipients, and even colors of

emails (29).

How to Add Products to Your WooCommerce Shop?

You already know how to set up your store for payment and shipping methods, so let’s see

how to add new products. WooCommerce enables you to create the following types of

products (30)

1. Simple product – the most simple product variant offered in a store, for example,

a green T-shirt in an extra-large size.

2. Grouped products – simply speaking, it’s a "bag" of related products. It’s a convenient

solution if you’re planning to make a landing page to offer a specific set of items.

Grouped products will have their own address, which you can promote online. This

option can be useful if you, for example, sell product bundles or components, e.g.

computer hardware.

3. External/Affiliate product – this option is perfect if you display products to direct

traffic from your website to the original seller’s store. In this case, you obviously don’t

sell anything “physically”, so you don’t have to worry about any payment and shipping

methods.

4. Variable product – if a basic product comes in, for example, different color or size

variants, this option allows your customers to personalize items before they add them

to their shopping cart.

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WooCommerce additionally offers 3 types of Simple products (31):

1. Physical – unique, stand-alone products that will be shipped to customers and don’t

need extra configuration.

2. Virtual – if you choose this option, the system will know that product shipment won’t

be necessary.

3. Downloadable – after paying their order, clients automatically gain access to

downloadable products you’ve defined in the admin panel. You also have the

possibility to limit the number of downloads and make items available for a specific

period of time.

You’ve just learned what types of products you can choose. Let me now briefly discuss the

details you can assign to specific products. It’s worth remembering that they will change

depending on the type of sold items:

1. Short product description (32) – a short text that attracts the interest of customers. As

Irena Zobniów mentioned in her article about voice search optimization, short product

descriptions are also vital for online stores from the perspective of SEO.

2. Product categories (33) – you can add items to an existing product category or create

a new one to match your offer. Each product category has its own page on your

website with a list of specific items.

3. Product image (34) – the main image that shows your product, which will be displayed

on the product card, in a customer’s shopping cart, and cart summary.

4. Product gallery (35) – all other product images, which will be displayed in a gallery

next to a product card.

5. General tab – here’s where you can define the prices of simple products, and assign

SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit – a product ID number) to other items.

6. Shipping – if you sell physical products and want the shipping cost to depend on

product weight or size, don’t forget to add these details.

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7. Linked products – WooCommerce enables up-selling and cross-selling by showing

suggestions of related products. It’s worth looking at this section if you want to

increase your ecommerce cart value.

8. Attributes – this is the place where you can add details to describe your products. In

the case of Variable products, attributes will allow your customers to customize chosen

items.

9. Variations – you can define the main image, SKU, price, product description, and

shipment size for every configuration of product attributes.

10. Advanced – it’s a collection of all other additional options. For instance, you can

change the order of products in a list or define a message that will be displayed after

customers buy something from your store.

You can also manage product tags, categories, and attributes directly from the Products

section by choosing appropriate options from the menu (36).

How to Add Discount Coupons to WooCommerce?

If you’ve managed to add your first product to your WooCommerce store, this is a sign that

you’re ready to sell online!

Some online shops attract clients with special promotions, e.g. discount codes.

WooCommerce also has this feature. Just go to the admin panel and choose

WooCommerce > Coupons > Add coupon. You have several types of discounts you can

configure (37):

1. Fixed cart discount – a fixed total discount for the entire cart.

2. Fixed product discount – a fixed total discount for selected items.

3. Percentage discount – a percentage discount for the entire cart.

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You can also enhance your discount offer with the “Allow free shipping” option. In order

to prevent users from using multiple coupons for a single order, you can set the following

limitations (38):

1. Set the coupon expiry date, how long it will be valid.

2. Define the minimum and maximum subtotal needed to use the coupon.

3. Exclude specific items or product categories if you don’t want your coupon to apply to

them.

Where to View Current Orders in Your WooCommerce Store?

If you’re wondering where to check current order statuses, go to this section:

WooCommerce > Orders. By clicking on a given item from the list, you’ll find information

about purchased products (39), payment method, and shipping details (40). The system, of

course, allows you to edit and cancel orders (41), add notes (42) and change order statuses.

Remember – you can’t edit an order if it’s being processed (unless you manually change

its status to Pending payment, make the necessary changes, and go back to the previous

status).

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How to Develop Your WooCommerce Store?

If you want to enhance your ecommerce with additional features, payment methods, or

integrated shipping solutions, you’ll have to install extra plugins from the WP marketplace.

You can also use extensions developed by external companies, for instance, from

Codecanyon or simply contact specialists, like Cut2Code ;)

Summary

As you can see, you can create a store based on WordPress and WooCommerce in a simple

and quick way, without having to spend loads of money. There are practically no costs – all

you need is a server, database, and products ready for sale. WooCommerce provides an

attractive alternative to commercial solutions available on the market. Its main advantage

is flexibility – with the help of ready-made plugins and additional lines of code, which you

can find on the Internet, you have endless possibilities to customize your store.

Remember to consider WooCommerce if you’re planning to run an online shop. Because

in the long run, developing and managing your store may turn out to be cheaper than

using a commercial platform.

// Grzegorz Rogoziński – CEO of Cut2Code

The CEO of Cut2Code, a company that specializes in web development based on CMS platforms. He is a specialist with over 8 years of experience in digital business, and an expert in Magento and WordPress. He has worked with such agencies as Global4Net, Lemon Sky and JWT Poland.

mail: grzegorz@cut2code.com

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What to Pay Attention to If You’re Planning to Start an E-business on WooCommerce?

Many entrepreneurs, both those who have just started their journey with ecommerce and those who already have some experience in this field, encounter difficulties at a certain point. It’s not easy to choose an appropriate platform for your online store. If this is the dilemma you’re facing and if you’re considering the choice of WooCommerce, I’ll show you what to pay attention to.

Author: Jerzy Kozyra

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From this article, you’ll learn

● why WooCommerce is the most popular choice,

● what you should consider while choosing an ecommerce platform,

● what are the pros and cons of WooCommerce,

● what WooCommerce traps you can fall into.

There are, of course, many factors that may influence your choice of platform. For example:

Ƿ the costs of starting your own business (related to creating your online store – graphic

design, programming),

Ƿ maintenance and development costs (software updates, changes resulting from the

expansion of your product offer),

Ƿ marketing, promotion, and SEO activities, choosing a hosting service, etc.,

Ƿ security,

Ƿ user-friendliness and the ease with which you can introduce modifications,

Ƿ access to support,

Ƿ available functions,

Ƿ the possibility of scaling your store.

And furthermore, don’t forget about very important criteria often neglected during the

initial project stage, which concern:

Ƿ the adjustment of the platform to the type and specific nature of your business – what

kinds of products or services are sold, how wide is the range of products, and how

many variants they have,

Ƿ the resources you have – knowledge, time, qualified workers,

Ƿ the way you run your business – e.g. special requirements connected to checkout,

payments,

Ƿ individual requirements or needs.

Ignoring these aspects may lead to frustration, discontentment, or an unplanned (and in

extreme cases also not entirely controlled) cost increase.

In this article, I will focus on WooCommerce – the currently most popular ecommerce

platform (or plugin, to be more precise).

Why Does the Majority Choose WooCommerce?

There are at least several reasons for this. The most significant are:

Ƿ Statistics. This is currently the most popular platform in the world. High market

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share entails access to the knowledge of experts, experienced developers, and access

to plugins and ready-to-use themes provided by software companies. In other words,

everywhere you look, there is social proof. The enormous WooCommerce ecosystem

gives you a distinct advantage in comparison to other platforms.

Ƿ Low implementation cost. Creating, developing, and maintaining your online store is

possible with objectively little effort. This looks different in the case of Magento – even

though it doesn't cost you anything to start a business, you have to have a generous

budget if you want to further develop or expand your store.

Ƿ Many companies from all over the world use WordPress to run their websites.

Taking this into account, WooCommerce presents itself as a logical choice. It’s a plugin

that is compatible with a platform used on an everyday basis. Thanks to this, starting

a business is easy and almost intuitive. And the fact that WooCommerce is available to

download on WordPress.com makes this solution look very promising in the coming

years.

Ƿ Implementing and running a store on WooCommerce is faster and easier than on,

for example, Magento. You don’t need to have experience in development in order

to set up a fully functioning store. Considering the number of accessible tutorials,

this plugin allows you to quickly start selling. At an affordable price, you can also

commission a company that specializes in WooCommerce to implement your store.

Ƿ WooCommerce is cheap, easy to use, and doesn't require expert knowledge unlike

other, more complicated platforms.

Statistics table:

eCommerce Usage Distribution in the Top 1 Million Sites (by traffic) Distribution for websites using eCommerce technologies (26.09.2019)

Source: trends.builtwith.com/shop

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The number of new websites that installed WooCommerce: plugin downloads during the last 7 days: 219 900 downloads (as of 26 September 2019).

Source: www.en-gb.wordpress.org

Other statistics: www.barn2.co.uk

Pros and Cons of WooCommerceAs every platform, WooCommerce has its strong and weak points.

Ƿ Pros of WooCommerce:

+ Fully professional system.

+ For free. Just like certain available plugins and basic themes.

+ Enables full customization with the help of many available plugins and allows to

adapt the website to your own needs and preferences.

+ Provides many analytical tools which allow you to monitor the parameters of your

store.

+ Very flexible system.

+ Security – thanks to frequent updates, fixing potential errors is easier.

+ Mobile-friendliness.

Ƿ Cons of WooCommerce:

– Frequent updates – the frequency of WordPress updates can sometimes be higher

than of plugins, which may be problematic.

– It may be costly, especially if the plugins or other functionalities that are available

for free don’t meet your needs. In such a case, it may be necessary to buy expensive

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plugins (e.g. Premium versions) or make modifications, which may also entail costs

and spending additional time on work. The more customized you want your store to

be, the more expensive/labor-intensive it is.

– Sometimes, the modifications we need require an in-depth knowledge of WordPress

and WooCommerce. We may not have the skills to effectively use certain plugins.

The pros and cons will vary from the needs of your business. And the problems that may

arise will, in a large part, depend on the quality of implementation and the carefulness

with which you have set up your expectations.

WooCommerce Traps You Should Avoid

Just as with any other popular platform that is used on a large scale, the depths of

WooCommerce can also hide some traps. I want to make you aware of the potential

dangers to help you make the right choices and avoid disappointment while planning

your store.

Ƿ If you decide to scale your store, it may turn out that along with the increase of client

orders, the plugins that you have been using for free will have to be changed to

Premium versions or other solutions requiring additional costs.

Ƿ Using too many plugins that either are unnecessary or that do not meet your needs

(e.g. using only a small part of a complex plugin) can have a disastrous effect on the

performance of your store. Without careful usage of plugins, you won’t be able to

effectively manage your store. Sometimes less is more.

Ƿ Specific needs may lead to far-reaching personalization, adjustments, and changes

that entail higher costs and more work. Deeper customization carried out on your own,

without the help of specialists, may turn out to be impossible.

Ƿ Resigning from expert help during the initial stage of your project, having

non-standard needs and relying entirely on yourself, without a deeper knowledge of

the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem, can require solutions which, in the long

run, can be much more costly or even impossible to fix and properly optimize.

Ƿ If you decide to move your dedicated system to WooCommerce 1:1, you may need to

tamper with the plugin or you’ll spend a considerable amount of time on introducing

necessary modifications. Sometimes completely redundant from the perspective of

your business. You should have contact with a reliable partner who:

– understands the business logic behind the original system,

– has enough experience to propose an alternative WooCommerce solution that will

help you save time and achieve the desired effect in the form of a functioning online

shop.

Ƿ A badly chosen hosting service combined with business expansion can contribute

to losing clients. Even if your service is properly optimized, slow page loading will

discourage customers.

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A Small Plugin on a Large Scale

WooCommerce is considered to be the perfect solution for small ecommerce businesses.

Web traffic is low because of the small number of sold items, product variants, potential

clients, and orders. In other words, all the parameters that, by definition, overload the

system and server infrastructure, are "lighter" in the case of small online shops. However,

a well implemented and optimized WooCommerce store can reach its full potential and

turn out to be a competitive solution if you choose the appropriate hosting.

The success of the mentioned ecommerce stores, their market position, and amount

of products and traffic show that it’s possible to run a large shop on WooCommerce.

This, however, doesn’t mean that it’s easy and that each large-scale business will work

flawlessly and smoothly. So what should you pay attention to?

It all depends on the products you want to sell and on the type of business you want to

run. In order to develop your store, manage a large number of products and their variants,

adapt the system to your individual needs and your type of business, you may want to, set

requirements that reach far beyond the “standard” package.

This leads to the modification of installed plugins and the installation of new ones,

and even far-reaching customization. Each of these elements is a potential threat to

your store’s performance and efficiency. It’s easy to lose yourself in the maze of endless

possibilities, variants, and options. Eventually, you may end up with a hybrid that is a long

way from a user-friendly website – both in terms of customer service and customer

experience. And I suppose it’s not hard to guess what a slowly-functioning and unintuitive

store means.

Expanding your store and adapting it to your business activities poses a further threat. The

difficulty is to choose between plugins that are absolutely necessary and the “just in case”

plugins. Instead of a simple and intuitive selling platform, you can be left with a bunch of

different tools with absolutely no use.

To prove this, here are examples of stores with huge traffic: DailyHunt with 44.8M visitors, WorthPoint with 6.25M, and ClickBank with 4.1M.

The range of products also doesn’t have to be a problem, as evidenced by one of the largest Internet libraries BookRiot (traffic: 2.98M), which offers thousands of products.

Worthpoint, in turn, uses WooCommerce to manage almost 425M items and images.

Data as of January 2019

G PROOF

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So if you’re planning to sell a couple of thousand products in different categories and

variants and if you want to meet special business-related requirements, consider talking

to a professional team that will deal with managing the complex infrastructure and, if

necessary advise, choose, and properly implement the required tools.

“Multiplying” products on your own without proper configuration is asking for trouble. It

impedes the performance and loading speed of your website and, consequently, leads

to losing many potential clients. WooCommerce is not a plugin that is resilient to such

problems. If they do occur, you’ll need proper optimization.

System load depends on the server infrastructure you’re using, so consider additional

expenses on e.g. a dedicated server, whose parameters and configuration will help you run

your store smoothly and effectively.

I dare say that if you have a properly implemented and optimized store based on

WooCommerce, the only thing that limits you is the server. If you choose a reliable hosting

service, high traffic and the number of products and orders won’t have an impact on

website performance, so the plugin definitely won’t let you down.

Summary

What I described above certainly hasn’t exhausted the topic, so you can treat my advice

as a foundation for further discussion. I wanted to place emphasis on those aspects that

frequently get overlooked when we make decisions, even though they are balanced out

by the advantages of WordPress and WooCommerce. Without a thorough analysis of your

business needs and online store requirements, you may end up with wrong choices or

a disappointing implementation. As a businessman functioning in the turbulent world

of Internet sales, you’ll face many business management challenges. Struggling daily

with a system that doesn’t fulfill your needs or that requires unforeseen additional costs

can discourage even the biggest enthusiasts and make their intrinsic motivation and

excitement imperceptibly fade away.

// Jerzy Kozyra – COO of Cut2Code

He started working in the digital industry in 2000, at an interactive agency Adv.pl. He was responsible for running projects for the company's key customers. From 2008, he was the Interactive Department Director, and later, after the company changed its name to Lemon Sky, he became the IT Director. From 2011, he worked as the Production Department Director of LS and then of Lemon Sky JWT after merger with J. Walter Thompson Poland. In the middle of 2017, he started managing the company’s division in Wroclaw as the Head of Lemon Sky. He held this position until May, 2018, shortly after Ogilvy & Mather Poland and J. Walter Thompson Poland have merged.

mail: jerzy@cut2code.com

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To Woo or Not to Woo – Is WooCommerce the Best Thing for You?

Do you want to open up an online store? Maybe you’d like to add an ecommerce platform to your already-existing website? You’re in a right place to start! In this article, we’ll be comparing the most popular ecommerce solutions against the most prominent one – the WooCommerce WordPress plugin. Is it really the best choice for you? Perhaps some of the alternatives would be better? Let’s find out!

Author: Adam Chmielowiec

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From this article, you’ll learn

● why WooCommerce is so popular,

● what are the alternative solutions to WooCommerce,

● what are other ecommerce plugins for WordPress,

● why WooCommerce is the recommended solution for ecommerce.

Why is WooCommerce so Gosh Darn Popular?

It all has to do with WordPress. This CMS (Content Management System, but shorter) is

responsible for powering up around a half of websites handled by a commercially available

CMSes. It also powers up around one third of all websites online now. This is mostly

because it is free, powerful, and easy to work with. A significant portion of these websites

use WooCommerce for all their ecommerce services, as it is by far the most popular

ecommerce plugin the platform has to offer. It’s very customizable, light on the server,

powerful, and easy to use. So why should we consider any alternatives, you might ask. They

are often compared with Woo as the market’s leader, and often try to base their popularity

on competitive advantages over Woo. But are these advantages significant in any way?

Shopify vs. WooCommerce

The main difference between these two is that Shopify isn’t exactly free-to-use. You’ll need

to pay a small percentage of your profits from each and every sale in transaction fees

in order to use its software. They are tiny (up to 2%), but significant, as when your store

scales up, these might amount to quite a lot. In return, you’ll be given a safe and well-

performing hosting with unlimited bandwidth including a free SSL certificate, which

makes Shopify stand out from its competition. There are also 10 great-looking templates to

choose from for free and hundreds more available as separate orders (starting at $140 per

theme). The full Shopify pricing (excluding the themes!) can be seen below:

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Shopify pricing as presented on their website: https://www.shopify.com/pricing

Another great advantage of Shopify is its easy-to-handle drag and drop interface, which

provides simple tools that made theme-editing much easier and less time-consuming.

This doesn’t come without a drawback, though, as there are certain limitations of what

can be easily achieved, and these limitations don't exist in WooCommerce. Shopify's

24/7 responsive customer support is universally praised, very able, and award-

winning: a nice addition that is often not matched by other ecommerce solutions. The

cost, however, is significantly higher than in WooCommerce, not to mention the fact that

Shopify offers much less integrations.

PrestaShop vs. WooCommerce

PrestaShop is a long-standing French ecommerce CMS that’s completely open-source and

free to use, while being very intuitive and easy to learn. In order to use it, the only thing you

need is a compatible hosting service, and preferably a ready-made or customly-prepared

theme, and you’re free to go. This software includes rich functionality available straight

out-of-the-box, but unfortunately, many functionalities aren’t available in the free

version of this CMS.

There are few, yet very important drawbacks when compared to WooCommerce.

From the frontend user’s perspective, the same website will have poorer speed

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performance due to all the things neatly packed in the free version that you still might end

up not using at all. From the backend user’s perspective, you might find yourself in need

of purchasing some crucial functionality you didn’t account for at the start.

What is also immensely important, it might be much more difficult for you to find the help

you need with your website. Not only, is the community much less prominent, there

are also much less sources that you can use to look for help. There aren’t that many

developers in the market that work with this CMS, which means that if your outsourcing

agency fails, it might be difficult for you to find its replacement.

Magento vs. WooCommerce

For a more in-depth analysis, I recommend checking one of my previous articles here.

Magento, similarly to PrestaShop, is an entirely ecommerce-dedicated CMS, and is

currently known as the most flexible solution yet. While being very hard to get a grasp

on, and even more difficult to master, when you pass the steep learning curve you might

become an ecommerce wizard with a website able to accomplish absolutely anything.

This ecommerce platform is, however, much more expensive than WooCommerce.

Magento is targeted at big companies and corporations and there’s a significant number

of things a developer needs to learn in order to become Magento-savvy. Since knowledge

is key, and obtaining this knowledge is really time-expensive and pricely, there’s no

wonder that Magento developers are simply more expensive to hire. What is more, the

plugins for Magento are, in general, more expensive than the WooCommerce ones, as they

are aimed at big and valuable merchants.

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Zen Cart vs. WooCommerce

Zen Cart is another ecommerce - based CMS that is open-source, free-to-use, and popular

throughout the world. What makes it stand out is the openness of its code. With enough

knowledge and time, you, as a PHP developer, can change every single line of code in

the out-the-box software, making sure (by trial and error) that you can achieve

whatever you have aimed at. Additionally, there’s a free and official step-by-step guide

available for you to work with Zen Cart efficiently – something rarely seen in its

competition. We don’t recommend it though – it’s a bit of an outdated technology that

becomes more and more forgotten and is just not up to today’s standards. Just take a look

at their default work-in-progress page:

Brings back memories from the last century, doesn’t it?

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BigCommerce vs. WooCommerce

The main focus of this standalone platform is to manage your products and orders. What

this means is that content management is not important here. There is some freedom in

that regard, but WordPress will be a much better choice for making your content present

on the frontend the way you intend. On the upside, BigCommerce puts a lot of stress on

your website security and offers hosting for at least $29.95 per month. Its full pricing is

available below and, putting aside some of the additional functionalities (as saving the cart

contents in case the user gets disconnected), the pricing is mostly dictated by the amount

of payment money going through your website (respectively, up to $50k, $150k and $400k,

with no limitations set for the Enterprise version).

Other Ecommerce Plugins for WordPress

There is quite a lot to choose from. The honorable mentions for this list include:

Ƿ Easy Digital Downloads (mostly known as EDD) is a good ecommerce alternative for

stores that sell mostly digital stuff (eBooks, PDF files, audio clips, and such). When

a product is bought, the plugin sends the buyer an automatically generated email with

Source: www.bigcommerce.com

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a download link. EDD also supports processing payments and includes a shopping

cart. It comes with a very intuitive panel with only several, necessary functions and

it’s free in its most basic version, but if you want to integrate it with MailChimp (for

instance), this will cost $49 extra.

Ƿ WP eCommerce is one of the most common WooCommerce alternatives, often seen

as its worse and less popular counterpart. It is very similar in terms of the dashboard

it provides and its pricing model, including a free core with limited functionality and

paid add-ons. For instance, product reviews need to be purchased as a separate add-

on, while this functionality comes for free in WooCommerce. What makes the plugin

stand out is its premium support (priced at $49 per month or $499 per year), which

basically allows you to save a lot of time on reading blog posts and other self-research.

Ƿ Jigoshop is an interesting case, as it is the original WordPress ecommerce plugin,

dating as far back as 2011. Even though it’s the inspiring grandfather of all the

software mentioned in this part of the article, don’t think it’s become outdated.

It had been like that for a while, but its developers have revitalised it and updated it

thoroughly. Its interface is more intuitive and simpler than Woo’s, but otherwise – there

have been some mixed reviews from the community.

Ƿ WP EasyCart is a newly introduced plugin with one purpose: to make it as simple and

time-saving as possible to set up a store and manage it. It’s dedicated specifically

to owners that simply don’t have the time to learn a new tool and don’t have too

much of a development background. It comes integrated with MailChimp, TaxCloud,

and ShipStation, which means it can actually become quite powerful really quickly.

Its users can send out invoices, post eBooks, sell video content, or ask for donations.

Its free plan is more advanced than most of its competition – coupons, promotions,

subscriptions, advanced product variants, shipping calculators, unlimited products-

to-be-displayed… this one has a lot of advantages, even though it fades in comparison

with WooCommerce.

Summary

There is really a tremendous amount of software available out there, designed

specifically to add and manage store functionalities to your websites. If your existing

website is set up on WordPress, then WooCommerce is still our number 1 favorite. But

there are, of course, some alternatives that need considering – most prominently the WP

EasyCart if your needs are small and your store isn't expected to grow. For any other case –

we still recommend Woo.

If you are looking for a software to start up your ecommerce from scratch, using other

SaSS solutions or CMSes designed specifically for that purpose has its benefits. But

when thinking about the sheer popularity, ease of use, offered possibilities, extensive

community feedback, and documentation available online, WooCommerce still stands

out from the competition. It might not be as powerful as Magento, but it's much easier to

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// Adam Chmielowiec – Project Manager at Cut2Code

PM with a strong English background. After his philology studies, he worked as a primary school teacher, sharing language passion among young learners. At Cut2Code, he is responsible for the management of many of our projects. Flexible, goal-oriented and communicative, he is always open to customers' expectations. Privately, a music fan, a good listener, and a science enthusiast.

mail: adam@cut2code.com

handle and learn, and also cheaper to work with when we consider employing developers

and web agencies. Shopify is limited and pricy, and dedicating the whole website to that

solution might become limiting further down the line.

This isn’t the case with WooCommerce, as WordPress on which it’s built still remains

the definite winning CMS worldwide. If this isn’t something you are looking for, I still

hope this article will serve you as a good starting point to explore and research other

possibilities.

Ease of Use Pricing Features Support Overall Score

WooCommerce 9/10 10/10 9.5/10 9.5/10 95%

Shopify 9.5/10 8.5/10 9.5/10 10/10 93.75%

PrestaShop 7.5/10 9/10 8/10 8.5/10 82.5%

Magento 5/10 6/10 10/10 7/10 70%

ZenCart 7/10 10/10 7/10 6.5/10 76.25%

BigCommerce 8.5/10 7.5/10 9/10 9/10 85%

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) 8/10 8.5/10 9/10 7/10 81.25%

WP eCommerce 6.5/10 7/10 3.5/10 7/10 60%

Jigoshop 7.5/10 10/10 6/10 7/10 76.25%

WP EasyCart 10/10 9.5/10 3/10 7/10 63.75%

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A well-functioning ecommerce store is a must if you want to build a successful online business. That’s why I would like to give you some tips that will help you create an effective WooCommerce template. This article is mainly addressed to web developers who already have some experience in designing WordPress templates. However, it will provide you with useful and helpful information even if you have no such experience.

Author: Grzegorz Pisarski

How to Create a WooCommerce Template – Best Practices

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Design – the Foundation of each WooCommerce Template

I’d like to say first that I’m not a designer and I won’t tell you how to create an attractive

layout for your website. What I’d like to do is to give you some advice that will help you

create a template based on a graphic design. Thanks to my recommendations, this stage

of the project will be much easier for you, even if you’re not fully involved in the design

process.

The WooCommerce system abides by its own rules but some elements remain the same

as in other ecommerce platforms. To put it simply, the shop consists of a product list,

shopping cart, product and checkout page, and a my account section. Each of these

pages has its own specific elements, so it’s not worth bothering about them during the

design process.

Of course, WooCommerce is a very flexible platform that allows you to code any type of

graphic. Often, unfortunately, budgets are not as flexible. The simplest way to deal

with this problem is to install a demo shop with the Storefront theme and to examine

each subpage and its elements. This will be a starting point both for the developer and the

designer.

It’s worth paying attention to:

Ƿ the presence or lack of form fields (e.g. additional fields on the checkout page),

Ƿ the way website elements are arranged,

Ƿ design consistency (the same font size for headlines and text, button versions, unified

form layout).

If you prevent the designer from making simple changes in the arrangement of website

elements (for example, replacing the “Remove items from cart” button from the left side

to the right), you won’t have to modify these elements in your template file. Thanks to

this, you’ll spend less time on creating templates and making subsequent updates. Be

open to the designer’s ideas because some of them can meet the client’s business needs,

however, apply these ideas carefully.

● the basics principles of creating a good design,

● what to avoid when coding your template,

● what tools will improve your workflow,

● how to create a design that is consistent with your template, secures your website, and makes it fast.

From this article, you’ll learn

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Development – from the Design to the Template

After finishing your design, you can begin coding. WooCommerce is an expanded

WordPress theme, so you’re most probably familiar with its structure of template files

(I won’t focus on them in this article but you can find more information about them here:

developer.wordpress.org).

If you’re creating a website from scratch, you can, of course, start by programming the

blog and the static part of your page. And if your goal is to improve the functionality of

your existing website, the best option would be to create a Child Theme (codex.wordpress.

org).

After designing the basis of your template, you can move on to coding your

WooCommerce template. Before I tell you how to do this, you should know that your

theme will support WooCommerce if you use the following lines of code:

Next, you can make modifications. WooCommerce has over 140 template files but,

fortunately, you don’t have to modify them all. In fact, you can introduce many

changes without having to modify a single WooCommerce file. That’s exactly what

I advise you to do because you’ll make updates much easier. However, it’s possible only

when you have a good design. If you don’t want to waste your time on template file

modifications, use Filters and Actions (codex.wordpress.org) known from WordPress.

They are a mechanism that allows you to introduce your own modifications without

having to make changes in the source files. Observe whether Filters and Actions work. If

you won’t be able to code a given function with their help, you can modify the template

file. But remember not to do this directly in the plugin folder. Each file you want to

modify should be copied from the templates to the woocommerce folder, which is located

in the main folder of the WordPress template.

If you’re not acquainted with Filters and Actions or if you don’t feel confident using them,

you can make all the necessary modifications and even create your own ones.

But remember about these rules:

The more elements you’ll be able to code in CC instead of PHP files, the easier WooCommerce updates will be.

ĭ REMEMBER

1. add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'woocomerce_support' );2. function woocommerce_support() {3. add_theme_support( 'woocommerce' );4. }

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Ƿ do not copy all the files from the plugin folder to the theme folder,

Ƿ modify files only when it’s necessary (sometimes CSS will be enough to make small

changes),

Ƿ do not delete Filters and Actions from the modified files,

Ƿ if you’re creating your own file, upload it with the help of the wc_get_template

function.

WooCommerce offers many functions, methods, and classes, so it’s worth using them

(I advise you to take a look at the documentation of WooCommerce plugins). The

documentation is very helpful but difficult because of its size. Google, however, will

definitely help you find the information you need.

Before you decide to code your own plugin or function, make sure no one has already

done it. Don’t reinvent the wheel. The large WooCommerce community offers ready-made

codes and gives answers to many web development problems, so it’s worth looking there

first, even if you have to pay for the plugin or function you’re looking for.

When you write your code, I advise you not only to adopt solutions provided by the

WooCommerce community but also to look for tools that will improve your workflow. The

groundwork for any coding is an appropriate IDE (integrated development environment).

I don’t want to impose anything on you but make sure that your editor supports:

Ƿ intelligent code completion,

Ƿ the Emmet extension,

Ƿ SCSS compiling,

Ƿ version control,

Ƿ PHP debugging.

This will help you create your template quickly and effectively. I’d also like you to

pay special attention to tools for code debugging. Most probably, you use browser

development tools, since using a PHP debugger isn't so obvious.

Personally, I recommend you to use Xdebug, a tool without which I cannot imagine

creating advanced themes and plugins. Of course, it’s not the one and only PHP

debugger, so if you find a different solution that works better for you, then use it. Anyway,

a PHP debugger will definitely improve your workflow.

Website Maintenance

Usually, before sending the finished project to your client, you save it as a package file or

install it on the client’s server. However, it often happens that you also have to take care

of website maintenance, and this, of course, poses new challenges. Continuous project

40

development entails the risk of a worse performance and, if we’re talking about an

ecommerce, this can lead directly to a revenue decrease.

That’s why it’s so important to monitor the speed of your website and to pay special

attention to your code and database. You have to remember that every time you install

a plugin, you have to do an analysis first. Check if a new plugin is really necessary and

how it affects the performance of your website. Of course, there is no way you can check

this just by analyzing the plugin’s code, so I recommend you to use these tools:

Ƿ website analysis, e.g. Google Analytics, Piwik PRO (they allow you to measure, among

others: the server response time, page loading speed, and other parameters connected

to website speed),

Ƿ Query Monitor plugin – allows you to monitor database queries, for example, you can

check which one is the slowest,

Ƿ PageSpeed Insights – an online tool for measuring the speed of specific website

elements,

Ƿ Pingdom – monitors your website’s performance and availability.

There are many more similar tools available on the market, so if you don’t like the ones

I have mentioned, you can definitely find a better alternative.

Summary

What should you pay attention to during your project? What tools will help you create

a WooCommerce template? These are the main question I focused on in this article.

Remember that to make your project successful, you have to know how to improve your

workflow, template quality, and website maintenance.

à cooperating with a designer is very valuable because a good design leads to a good template, à coding everything by yourself may be something to be proud of but don’t reinvent the wheel –

try adopting ready-made solutions, Ã using different types of code debuggers will help you correct errors quickly and effectively, Ã when possible, instead of modifying WooCommerce template files, use Filters and Actions –

this will make website maintenance and updates much easier, Ã if you’re also in charge of website maintenance, monitor and measure its performance.

ĭ REMEMBER

// Grzegorz Pisarski – WordPress developer and WooCommerce Jedi

WordPress developer and WooCommerce Jedi. Since 2010, he coded more than 150 themes from scratch, and over 100 plugins that have never existed before. Addicted to family and coffee :)

mail: g.pisarski@webgp.pl

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Need help with your WooCommerce platform?

Contact us!

42

How We Customized WooCommerce with the Help of Plugins – the Case Study of print4display

It sometimes happens that when building an online shop, you’re not able to find the perfect theme that meets all your needs – both from the visual and functional perspective. Especially when the options you need go beyond the default possibilities of WooCommerce. So the best thing to do is to choose a theme that comes closest to your ideal page and to install appropriate extensions (plugins), which will enrich your website with custom functions.After all, your web service has to be unique.

Author: Anita Nowak

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From this article, you’ll learn

● how plugins can help you optimize and customize your WooCommerce,

● what plugins were used while customizing print4display,

● how the Woo Custom Product Options (Premium) plugin helped in customizing the service,

● why the Flexible Shipping for WooCommerce plugin was the best choice,

● how the Custom Order Status for WooCommerce plugin was useful.

On the basis of a web service we've created, we’ll show you how to customize

WooCommerce with the help of plugins. Our shop (www.print4display.co.uk) was created

using the WoodMart theme.

The website’s purpose is to sell advertising material, such as banners, stands, etc. In its

case, however, WooCommerce options were insufficient. We needed creative solutions in

the shape of plugins (described below) and sometimes even additional lines of code.

Plugins we used during the web service customization, which extended

default WooCommerce functions:

1. Price calculator of different product variants – Uni Woo Custom Product Options

(Premium)

2. Shipping cost estimation based on the weight of products from the shopping cart –

Flexible Shipping for WooCommerce

3. Creating your own order status – Custom Order Status for WooCommerce.

1. Product Price Calculator

Because our shop offers a wide range of products and numerous possibilities of product

modifications, one of the most important elements of the website is the price calculator

of different product variants.

The basic plugin function allows to increase the number of possible product variants

which sum up into the final price. To come up with the perfect solution, it was also

important to enable clients to convert different units of measurement so that they could

enter them in the most convenient way possible.

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What’s more, the product variants (such as width and height) chosen by the client had to

fit within the measurement limits of a specific product. Therefore, the adopted solution

not only had to have a price calculator but also had to offer the possibility to set

appropriate validation rules.

It was also necessary to customize the size of the main product photo so that it changed

accordingly with the chosen product variant. This seemingly trivial option was the main

cause of why we have rejected most free plugins.

Fig. 2. Validation of specific measurements entered into the form fields.

Fig. 1. Calculation of the product surface area based on different units of measurement (meters, centimeters, feet, and inches).

Fig. 3. Main photo resizing according to the chosen option (in this case FINISH: hemmed+eyelets evety meter).

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Most plugins, however, didn’t have any problems to multiply prices on the basis of a given

variant.

In the case of print4display.co.uk, we used, among others, a price multiplier that changes

depending on the shipping time. The shorter the shipping time is, the higher is the price

multiplier and, consequently, the final product price. After reviewing available extensions

and matching them with our requirements, it turned out that the best solution was the

Woo Custom Product Options (Premium) plugin

Apart from requirements connected to price calculation, our final choice of the plugin was

also influenced by:

Ƿ its compatibility with the newest WooCommerce version,

Ƿ web browser support,

Ƿ no contraindications for using the plugin with the chosen page template,

Ƿ product support offered by the plugin authors in the case of website errors caused by

the extension.

After choosing the plugin, we moved on to the implementation. Unfortunately, in the

case of these types of plugins, installation and basic configuration isn't enough. Apart

from general rules connected to price calculation and the activation of the necessary

plugin options, each product had to have a separate calculator formula that took different

product variants into account.

It was a pleasure to work with this tool, as it opens up many customization possibilities.

At the same time, it was challenging because we had to carefully read the plugin

documentation and learn about the correct ways to use the extension before

implementing calculators on given product pages. As to the option that allows for product

image resizing according to chosen product variants, it was also necessary to have a basic

knowledge of CSS selectors to indicate a specific “Settings” element responsible for

displaying the image.

The plugin has inbuilt CSS styles that give it a default appearance. The last step was to add

our own style sheets that would change the appearance of calculator elements to match

them with the chosen WooCommerce theme.

2. Additional Shipping Cost Estimation Options

Another problem we had to face was connecting shipping costs with the product weight.

The product weight was to be dependent on the options chosen on a given product page,

for example, size or type of stand.

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For this purpose, we also used the earlier discussed Uni Woo Custom Product Options

(Premium) plugin. After setting all the rules connected to product weight, we started

looking for the appropriate extension.

We chose the Flexible Shipping for WooCommerce plugin because it met our needs

perfectly. It was easy to use and it matched the appropriate shipping cost in accordance

with the weight of all products from the shopping cart.

Fig. 4. Settings of the additional shipping cost estimation that depend on product weight.

We chose this plugin not only because of good ratings but also because of ongoing

technical support and regular updates, which can be useful if there later arises a need to

create more advanced shipping methods. The Premium version of the plugin offers more

options, among others:

Ƿ shipping classes support,

Ƿ shipping cost estimated on the basis of product item count and/or cart line item count,

Ƿ additional costs for price, weight, item, cart line item,

Ƿ stopping a rule (if the rule matches, the following rules are not calculated)

Ƿ cancelling a rule (if the rule doesn’t match, the shipping method is turned off),

Ƿ additional ways of estimating costs (sum, lowest and highest cost),

Ƿ maximum shipping cost per shipping method,

Ƿ coupons support for free shipping,

Ƿ CSV export.

3. Custom Order Status

By default, WooCommerce has several order statuses that allow clients to track their

packages, that is:

Ƿ Pending payment,

Ƿ Failed,

Ƿ Processing,

Ƿ Completed,

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Ƿ On-Hold,

Ƿ Cancelled,

Ƿ Refunded.

The additional option that our website lacked was related to custom order statuses that

would match with the order process. Since the shop sells also virtual products, we could

set our own order statuses, like graphic image delivery and client’s acceptance. For this

purpose, we chose Custom Order Status for WooCommerce. The plugin is easy to use and

offers precisely what we needed – without any unnecessary options that would increase

the weight of your website and slow it down.

Fig. 5. Custom order status settings.

SummaryUsing plugins to extend default WooCommerce functions is a great way to save time on

writing codes by yourself. What’s more, plugins usually don’t require advanced technical

knowledge. Remember that using different types of extensions may cause plugin

conflicts, slow your page down, or affect its security. That’s why, when choosing possible

solutions, you should consider:

Ƿ the plugin quality, which is often reflected in user ratings,

Ƿ the amount of time that has passed since the recent plugin update,

Ƿ plugin versions that support WordPress and WooCommerce,

Ƿ the number of installations,

Ƿ if the plugin authors reply to problems reported by its users.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. More problems may arise. It all depends

on the complexity of your project and the customer’s needs. If you have any questions

regarding WooCommerce customization, we’d be happy to answer.

// Anita Nowak – Web Developer at Cut2Code.com

Fueled by curiosity and passion for creating quality products. She started her IT career over 2 years ago. Since then, she’s been working on various projects, gaining wide experience with creating modern websites. Her interest lies in front-end technologies, as well as CMS WordPress and ecommerce solutions. Crazy about constant development, she never stops learning. She diversifies her free time with piano sounds and carefree laughter.

mail: anita@cut2code.com

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A Multilingual Ecommerce Store – New Language, New Opportunities

A vision of a multilingual ecommerce website is tempting. It creates a string of associations, such as global clients, more sales, and better brand recognition. In theory, an extra language entails that you display the same products for audiences from different countries. But getting through to customers who speak a foreign language is just the beginning. When the roadblocks disappear, you reach the unknown. And since only 25.4% of the online traffic relies on English-speaking users, there is still a huge chunk of the Internet to explore.

Author: Tomasz Ludward

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From this article, you’ll learn

● how to start with a multilingual ecommerce store,

● what plugins were used while customizing print4display,

● how to choose the best option for translating your website’s content,

● how to avoid inconsistencies between content on your multilingual ecommerce,

● what you can do to make your multilingual service shine.

Where to Start?

Another language on your website will not twist your world around. It will not force your

visitors to Google foreign terms in fear of losing a hot deal, either. If you own a WordPress

website based on the WooCommerce extension, you can easily go through the entire

process of adding multilingual support yourself. From a technological standpoint, it would

require a dedicated plugin. I recommend using one of the two most popular extensions –

WPML and Polylang.

Polylang works best for microsites and blogs. It is fast and light but requires paid add-ons

to become an integral part of WooCommerce. In contrast to Polylang, WPML is addressed

to tech-savvy users. At the same time, it receives decent support from online communities.

Have a look at the way you add translations to your posts in WPML.

To translate posts and pages, use the icons listed in the column marked red. Behind

every icon there is an action. Once performed, the status of your translation changes. For

example:

Fig. 1. Source: www.wpml.org

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Ƿ The plus icon tells you that content is not translated. Feel free to add a new translation.

Ƿ The pencil icon signals that the content has been already translated.

Ƿ The “sync” icon means that the content has been translated but needs an update.

These two plugins, WPML and Polylang, translate strings of text in two slightly different

fashions.

Picking the Best One

Choosing the best option for translating your content poses a challenge. The old-

fashioned, yet the most reliable way, is to hire a professional. With his translations

diligently done, you can get new product descriptions, portions of WordPress posts,

categories, pages, and themes in whatever language you need.

Alternatively, you can leave it all to the Google machines and hope for good results. This is

a low-profile solution that will save you more time and let you wrap other things up. But

it poses a risk of your website falling behind with what helps it stand out of the crowd:

valuable content. Because only a faithful copy will speak for your product, bring value, and

convey the right message. Unfortunately, Google Translate may fail to reflect the accuracy

of the original texts. It only gets worse if you choose to access a language that Google

libraries have not yet managed to cover. That’s why you should always make sure to

double-check if all the texts have been translated correctly. To find out how Google carries

out its translations nowadays, check this great article from The Atlantic.

Accuracy is the Key

Maintaining the selected language across the entire website is especially important for

online stores. What makes them special is a fixed checkout process that usually consists

of a number of subpages – each getting us closer to the purchase. Whether it’s a product

selection, shipping method, or a payment gate, every such a page should encourage

visitors to make each next step until the successful end. In terms of translations, be sure

that products keep their default names for every new language and that there are no

inconsistencies between the visual elements of your website, such as buttons, sliders, and

menus.

At a certain point, when you decide that the multilingual shift deserves even more

attention, you can take some of your marketing actions offsite. Think about how different

languages may keep your customers up to date with your offer. For example, you can

communicate it via newsletters, banner ads, or chatbots. One great way to go the extra

mile is to issue invoices in a language your clients prefer. This will create an impression

that you aim at the best experience even after the project has been already submitted.

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The same should, in fact, apply to any documentation around your orders. In the end, your

message should say how important your clients are for you and your business.

Make Your Site Shine

Somewhere between all the texts and assets, the Google bots are hidden. No wonder that

in the wake of the change, you might be a little concerned about the visibility of your site.

To be better prepared against the search algorithms, pay your attention to:

Ƿ The WPML plugin, which pairs nicely with the Yoast plugin. This combination will let

you translate breadcrumbs and SEO attributes, such as titles and meta descriptions.

That comes in useful for product and category pages, in particular.

Ƿ As per Google recommendations, use different URLs for different languages and let

Google know that your store uses more than one language, for example, by applying

HTML tags and by using hreflang and sitemaps.

Ƿ Let your visitors easily switch between languages. A set of clickable flags visible in the

navigation bar should be helpful.

Ƿ Optimize WooCommerce and WordPress by translating slugs as they typically contain

search engine friendly keywords.

After you get results and hit high sales numbers, you probably do not bother to think of

how WooCommerce can help you sell even more. That is why a new language can give

grounds for a spectrum of new WooCommerce functionalities that you have not been

aware of so far. For example, go and check out the Stripe extension, which lets your

website access more payments methods. Add WooSubscriptions to accept monthly

payments or take things a step further and build a membership area. There, you will build

customer value and increase brand loyalty. Every such an upgrade unlocks new areas for

successful copy and the strings of additional translations. So do not limit yourself. Instead,

look for something extra.

Go Get it Offering your products in multiple languages has great potential. With WooCommerce

and an array of add-ons, the management of translating becomes a task anyone can

manage. Even though the scenario of reaching a customer we yet know nothing about

poses a risk, the whole process pays off really quickly. Because, in the end, if we believe in

our product, our vision should overtake the challenge.

// Tomasz Ludward – Sales Manager at Cut2Code.com

More than 6 years of experience in working with global and local partners from the web development industry. He combines strong communication and project management skills that help him develop new opportunities and turn them into long-lasting relationships.

mail: tomasz@cut2code.com

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Plugins That Will Support the Development of Your WooCommerce

Just a few years ago, to create an online store, you had to have advanced programming knowledge. Nowadays, you can build a simple ecommerce in just a couple of hours thanks to CMS (Content Management System) platforms, such as Magento, Shopify, PrestaShop, or dedicated tools that can be added to your CMS, like WooCommerce or VirtueMart. What’s more, most of these solutions allow you to expand the functions of your website with special plugins, which, depending on the platform you use, come in free or paid forms. Let’s see what plugins will help you expand an online store built on WordPress and WooCommerce.

Author: Grzegorz Rogoziński

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From this article, you’ll learn

● how plugins can help you expand an online store built on WordPress and WooCommerce,

● why WordPress and WooCommerce are the best solution to build an ecommerce,

● what are the essential plugins from the perspective of business growth,

● what plugins can help you effectively communicate with your clients,

● how to improve the usability of your ecommerce using plugins.

Why WordPress and WooCommerce?

WordPress and WooCommerce are definitely the best option if you need

a simple and intuitive CMS store, and if you don’t want to invest a lot of

money in its development. As wordpress.org states, WooCommerce has

been downloaded over 4 million times. According to the BuiltWith report

from February 2018, it is used by 0,6% of websites from all around the world, and by 3,7% of

the top million web services.

The platform’s success comes from thorough documentation, frequent updates,

and a large community of developers engaged in publishing their own plugins. The

combination of these three factors gives you stability and enables you to create a fully

personalized ecommerce store.

How to Improve your Business Efficiency in a Quick and Simple Way?

Let’s begin with the most essential plugin from the perspective of business growth. I

cannot imagine running an ecommerce without an expansion that allows you to measure

and analyze the customers’ behavior on your site.

With the Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics Plugin for

WooCommerce, you can connect your ecommerce with Google Analytics

in a simple way. Without the need to have any programming knowledge,

the plugin allows you to monitor, among others: the number of subpage

views of given categories and products, the volume of sales, and the status of the clients’

shopping carts. Thanks to this knowledge, you can plan promotion activities in a more

effective way and adjust the product assortment to the needs of your customers.

If you want to develop and expand your online store, you have to consider the following factors: aesthetics, communication with clients, functions available for users, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), page speed, and ease of use. All these elements cannot be omitted because they contribute to the success of your store.

ĭ REMEMBER

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Because of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and Google’s

requirements to have SSL certificates, the Really Simple SSL plugin may

turn out to be very useful. After just one click, it encrypts Internet

connections on your website (on the condition that your hosting enables

such a service). Not without a reason, the plugin has been downloaded over 1 million

times. It quickly deals with the problem of mixed content. So your website address will

never lose its green padlock – the icon that informs users that your page is safe.

Another must-have plugin is Yoast SEO. It expands Wordpress’ basic

function connected to the management of subpage, post, and product

metadata. Thanks to this plugin, you can configure OpenGraph

information that will be displayed after you post a link to your store on

social media channels. This will attract more customers who search for products using

Internet browsers.

For the more advanced options in the area of SEO, an interesting solution

will be All in One SEO Pack, which has over 45 million downloads.

Currently, it is used by over 2 million sites. The incredible advantage of

both solutions is that they automatically notify search engines about new

content on our blog.

When your ecommerce scales into a large website and the number of

external and internal links increases, it may happen that some of the

published links will stop working. Broken Link Checker will automatically

inform you about this situation. It is an ideal solution that will monitor

your website and find inactive links. Let me remind you that broken links weaken the

position of your blog or product card in Google search results, hence it’s worth keeping

this solution in mind.

Don't forget about your website loading speed. W3 Total Cache will make

it load faster. With proper configuration, the plugin will reduce the

number of queries sent to the server and the amount of received data,

which will decrease the content loading time. And this, in turn, will

translate into a better position in search engine results.

Would you like to launch your ecommerce store on WooCommerce?

Let's do it together!

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How to Effectively Communicate with Clients?

A newsletter is an essential channel of communication in ecommerce.

Mailchimp is one of the most popular solutions. The WooCommerce

MailChimp plugin allows users to subscribe to your newsletter through

a customized form. The only condition is that you need to have an active

account on the MailChimp platform. Customers can subscribe to your newsletter during

the purchase or after they have created an account on your store.

Messages about presents or discounts, displayed at a given moment of a

client’s visit, are equally important. On the basis of different sources, this

form of communication increases sales conversion from 7% to even 12%.

Popup Builder – Responsive WordPress Pop up – Subscription &

Newsletter is a great plugin with which you can create your own pop-ups. In this type of

communication, you can give your client a special offer, a discount, or ask him to leave his

personal data for your newsletter. The plugin is also available in a premium version, so

even the most demanding will be satisfied with its expanded features.

Another useful plugin is the WooCommerce Product Slider. It is simple in

use and, at the same time, it is an advanced tool that allows you to create

a slideshow containing your products. You can place it anywhere you want

and personalize its visual style, harmonizing it with the layout of your store

and improving your image in the customers’ eyes.

Remember about Open Graph tags when you publish links to your blog

on social media. The plugin allows you to control how your text will be

displayed, including the title of your article, description snippet, or image

URL.

How to Improve the Usability of Your Ecommerce?

With YITH WooCommerce Social Login, your customer can create an

account and log into your store through one of the most popular social media

channels: Facebook, Twitter or G+. Just one click and the system collects the

buyer’s data, allowing him to save time and improving his satisfaction. This

plugin is a great solution not only because people prefer social logins to registration forms,

but also because it automatically validates who stands behind a given account.

One of the best ways to improve the user’s comfort is to install Advanced

AJAX Product Filters. The plugin allows you to create dynamic search

filters. With its free version, you can set filters for: the price, product

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// Grzegorz Rogoziński – CEO of Cut2Code

The CEO of Cut2Code, a company that specializes in web development based on CMS platforms. He is a specialist with over 8 years of experience in digital business, and an expert in Magento and WordPress. He has worked with such agencies as Global4Net, Lemon Sky and JWT Poland.

mail: grzegorz@cut2code.com

category and its chosen characteristics. A major advantage of this tool is that it generates

results in real time, so the page doesn’t have to reload and the user doesn’t have to waste

his time on waiting.

The basic version of WooCommerce has an already preinstalled coupon

system. If you want to go a step further and encourage your clients to

return to your store, offer them a customer loyalty scheme. SUMO Reward

Points - WooCommerce Reward System provides you with a system,

where users can collect points and exchange them for discounts and products from your

special offer. Points can be collected not only through a standard purchase but also if the

user recommends your store to other people, likes your products, or writes a customer

review. After logging into his account, the user can check the history of the collected and

spent points and generate a referral link he can use to recommend your site.

Another item that has to be on our list is a plugin designed for quick online

payments, a must-have tool for any ecommerce. With WooCommerce

PayPal Gateway, you can easily add PayPal payment options to your

website and receive real time order status updates.

Remember that these suggestions are just the beginning of your adventure with plugins,

with which you can enhance your ecommerce. I hope that this article will inspire you to

create your own website, or if you have one – to implement several additional plugins to

improve the functioning of your store.

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How to Move an Online Store to AWS Cloud in 10 Steps Author: Tomasz Dwornicki

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If you take your ecommerce business seriously, you have to keep in mind that any element

of your infrastructure can fail. The promises of your service provider will always be empty

if you don’t completely secure yourself. Start with duplicating every element of your

shop and keep your website backup in a different location than the original, so that it’s

ready to launch in case of a sudden malfunction. Another question is how to adapt your

infrastructure to the server load, which is different for every shop. Thanks to cloud services,

you can minimize business risks and, at the same time, flexibly optimize your resources on

favorable terms.

You can start with limited resources and, as your business grows (or if you’re ready to

adapt your store to a cloud), add further elements. Thanks to this, your platform will be

flexible, highly scalable, and secure from malfunctions. Let me illustrate this on the basis of

one of the biggest Iaas cloud providers – Amazon Web Services.

A Single AWS Instance – Step 1

An infrastructure is a reflection of one server or VPS (Virtual Private Server). With a single

instance, you can benefit from moving your shop hosting to a cloud. At any moment, you

can expand the resources of your instance, add more CPUs, cores, memory, or increase

● how the cloud shrinks and grows to meet your needs,

● how to build a cloud infrastructure for an ecommerce,

● how your infrastructure can evolve on Amazon Web Services as your business grows,

● how much does it cost to move an online store to a cloud.

From this article, you’ll learn

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your hard drive capacity. Your store won’t be available for users for a couple of minutes, but

you won’t have to migrate, move, or copy anything, and you won’t have to ask anybody for

help. You’ll save time and money because you can make changes any time you want, and

you’ll pay only for the resources you actually use.

A Single AWS Instance and a Database on RDS – Step 2

This is where you can really benefit from the advantages of cloud computing. To your

single instance, add a database, which is available from Amazon RDS (Relational Database

Service). You don’t have to install MySQL, Postgres, or any other database system (like

Amazon Aurora, Oracle, MSSQL, MariaDB). Pay attention to the database storage rate

and data transfer, as RDS allows you to choose appropriate resources and scale them

if necessary. What’s more, you can easily make automatic backups and save them in

a different location of your S3 bucket (a cloud storage for your files and folders). Only you

have access to this bucket, so you don’t have to worry that someone deletes your data.

The single instance acts as a server, connecting to the database via RDS, and together

with a store app (for example, Magento or Prestashop), it provides functionality to your

website.

The database is like the busiest street on your online store, so you’re able not only to divide

the traffic into two places but also to diagnose problems, the server load, etc. Similarly, you

can change your resources – separately for the EC2 instance (a virtual server for running

applications) and for the RDS. So when you expect to have higher traffic in a specific

period of time, you simply buy larger resources. You don’t have to worry about paying for

the infrastructure, even if it doesn’t work for most of the year.

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A Single AWS Instance, RDS, and Static Assets Stored in S3 – Step 3

If you save important data in more locations than a single instance, your store will be

more scalable and you’ll have more room to make changes in the infrastructure. You can

accomplish this by moving your shop files to S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service). This

is the very essence of Amazon Web Services, the first ever service on a cloud, a place for

your files that is easy to maintain and has no size and space limits. Besides its scalability,

S3 is also characterized by exceptional redundancy and security. What’s more, you don’t

have to make any reservations and worry about limits. The only things you pay for are the

amount of data, data transfer, and the number of read/write files. AWS guarantees 99.9%

file accessibility. On S3, you can save such files, as images and photos, while on the RDS

database, you can store data connected to your shop, clients, and their purchase history.

Your instance stores only your shop's code files, which can be uploaded anew at any time.

If you reach the third step, scaling your web service on a cloud stands wide open.

A Single AWS Instance, RDS, Static Assets Stored in S3, and Amazon ElastiCache Sessions – Step 4

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Let me introduce you to a stateless app, where, just like in the above example, data is

stored in the database, files in S3, and user sessions...yeah, what about them? No web

service can function without session data. Saving it on S3 is not necessarily a good choice

if you care about your website performance. The perfect place is Redis (Remote Dictionary

Server). But what if you lose data, change an instance, or reboot it? Well, the sessions

disappear. The answer to this problem is Elasticache – something like an RDS, but with

a Redis. Don’t worry about resources, functionality, and accessibility. There is no server –

you simply save your files on a given address and that’s it!

We have truly reached perfection. Every element works independently within a given

instance, that is, our server. And every element can be scaled and analyzed separately.

A single AWS instance, an RDS, and static assets stored in S3 – it’s like a VPC (Virtual

Private Cloud) integrated with a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Strengthening Security – Step 5

Now it’s time to strengthen security. If we have all the data stored in AWS and only our

instance has access to this data, it would be good if nothing besides the instance would

have a public IP address directly accessible from the Internet. To access data, you have

to connect to your instance. In this case, AWS offers a helpful solution: VPC (Virtual

Private Cloud). It is a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud, where our services work,

including routing, private IP addresses (for example, the famous 192.168.x.x or 10..x.x.x),

and subnetworks. All the services receive a private IP address, so you can access the

infrastructure only through a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Don’t worry, connecting to

a VPN gateway isn’t difficult, so your developer will definitely be able to access your data

and work on developing your online store.

HA – Two Instances, an RDS Database, Files Stored in S3 – Step 6

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Everything is stateless and the VPN is secured. Your store works, sometimes you had to

increase your resources permanently, sometimes only during a shopping frenzy. Now’s

the moment when we can truly appreciate the advantages of Amazon Web Services for

ecommerce cloud hosting.

But it’s also time to create a widely accessible environment and to increase the number

of instances. This is usually the moment when new obstacles emerge. However, thanks to

the stateless app, you can scale any element you want without making changes in the sole

application.

In all its geographic regions, AWS has at least two Availability Zones – data centers that

are located far away from each other, have their own infrastructure and power but are

connected together by a super-high-speed Internet connection. We can divide all Amazon

Web Services between these (two or three) zones. Some services can be located manually,

but some, like for example S3 or ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) are located this way by

default. So, we add a second instance to our web service, and in its foreground, we have

an ELB (or ALB) that handles your application traffic. By the way, we reach a higher level

of security because now your instances don’t have to have public IP addresses, only ELB

has this obligation. Without access to the VPN, you can’t even access an instance. No third

parties pose danger to your business.

HA – Two Instances, RDS Multi A-Z, Files Stored in S3 – Step 7

In the previous version, we gained server redundancy. Let’s take care of the database.

The RDS service is also available in a Multi A-Z deployment, which means that it can have

its own copy in a second availability zone. This will not only save us from malfunctions,

but it will also allow us to change RDS resources without causing our web service to stop

working.

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HA – Two Instances, RDS Multi A-Z, Files Stored in S3, Amazon ElastiCache Sessions with HA – Step 8

We’re reaching the last step before HA (High Availability). The last thing we have to add to

our stateless infrastructure are AWS ElastiCache sessions. This service is also available in

a Multi A-Z version. After we configure the Redis cluster, we can freely scale ElastiCache

without affecting the web service. Server redundancy not only protects you from

malfunctions, but it also allows to update services, make changes in the configuration and

resources without interfering in your ecommerce. From now on, you can sleep soundly.

There is a low chance that your income source, that is, your online store, will stop working

because of hosting problems.

Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront, a Content Delivery Network – Step 9

The infrastructure is very secure. There’s very small chance that something will catch you

off guard. But sometimes, web service failures may happen to appear where noone has

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expected. Your clients will be able to connect to your server only on the condition that your

DNS (Domain Name System) responds to their requests. Unfortunately, you won’t be able

to prevent DNS errors. In order to avoid this problem, I advise you to use Amazon Route

53. Not only can you entirely rely on your DNS, but you can also reduce the DNS server

response time by locating the servers closer to your clients.

CloudFront, the second element, is intended to relieve the web service infrastructure and

to make static assets load faster. The more your clients are scattered around the world, the

more useful this tool will be. CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN), something

like a cache, which stores your active data or files and enables you to access them from its

memory at a higher speed, without having to download the data from servers. Thanks to

CloudFront, you’ll be able to save time and money.

Let’s Launch Autoscaling – Step 10

The server load fluctuates, depending on your website traffic. Normally, we buy hosting

services where servers are “bored” for most of the time. But with your highly scalable

infrastructure, this will never happen. AWS has special mechanisms that, on the basis

of instance load, allow you to take specific actions. For the last 5 minutes, the server

load reached over 65%. Run another server and connect it to a load balancer. That’s not

enough? Run another one. If you know that everyday between 6 and 11 PM the traffic is

higher, add next instances in order to run them during this time period. You’ll pay only for

these 5 hours. If you’re planning a special promotion for the upcoming week, run several

additional instances manually. With a properly built stateless app and infrastructure based

on AWS, the possibilities are endless.

What’s more, you can often completely get rid of server resources and use only AWS. This

allows you to build a serverless architecture.

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How Much Does it Cost to Move an Online Store to a Cloud?

It all depends on the store. Assuming that you have 50GB of data, a 10GB database, and

100GB of data transfer, find out how much it will cost you to be safe from worries. For

a larger infrastructure, I assume that you have 100GB of data, 500GB of data transfer, and

a 25GB database.

Infrastructure variantMonthly costs for

a small shopMonthly costs for a medium shop

A single AWS instance (c5) $63 $152

A single AWS instance and a database on RDS $82 $240

A single AWS instance, RDS, and static assets stored in S3 $88 $242

A single AWS instance, RDS, S3, and Amazon ElastiCache sessions $114 $295

A single instance, RDS, S3 - VPC with a VPN $151 $330

HA - two instances, RDS database, files stored in S3 $225 $365

HA - two instances, RDS Multi A-Z database, files stored in S3 $249 $453

HA - two instances, RDS Multi A-Z, S3, ElastiCache with HA $275 $506

This is only an estimation because you can choose and combine different components.

Sometimes the resources will be smaller, sometimes bigger. There are also plenty of

methods used to reduce the costs of cloud computing (for example, the reservation of

resources – using outside services such as CloudFlare, paid annually). But that’s a topic for

a whole other article.

// Tomasz Dwornicki – CEO of Hostersi Sp. z o.o. (LLC)

A specialist with more than 10 years of experience in the field of web service and ecommerce performance, cloud migrations, and server architecture design. He created the first most popular Social Web websites, among others, fotosik.pl and sms.pl. Currently, he is in charge of Hostersi, a company that belongs to the “Top 15+ Cloud Computing Consultants in Poland” according to an analytics platform The Manifest, an Advanced Consulting Partner of Amazon Web Service.

mail: t.dwornicki@hostersi.pl

Would you like to launch your ecommerce store on WooCommerce?

Get in touch with us!

67

How to Implement a Challenging Project Using WooCommerce – Solisci.pl Case Study

Solisci is a team of passionate travelers who organize tours to the furthest corners of the world. We prepared a new version of their website to meet a range of personalized requirements. The website was supposed to enable the owners to sell tours and, at the same time, manage processes related to travel organization inside their company. Up to now, the web service consisted of an informational page built on WordPress, which displayed travel offers and directed clients to an external form.

Author: Grzegorz Rogoziński

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● what were the expectations of our client,

● what custom functionalities we had to implement,

● what we have used to meet the individual needs of our client.

From this article, you’ll learn

New Website Requirements – The Details

To make it easy for users to buy tours, the new website had to have an ecommerce module

and an option to pay by installments. It also had to provide customer service support to

facilitate back-office work. Another goal was to automate processes that take place after

users buy a tour – the collection of personal data to buy airline tickets, the generation of

participant lists for tour leaders, and customer satisfaction surveys.

After an in-depth analysis of the technical specifications provided by our client, we

decided to use WordPress expanded by the WooCommerce module, as both systems

are very flexible and have ready-to-use components. It's also worth mentioning that the

website graphics were created by a designer with whom our client collaborated.

Website Specifications – Different Types of Offered Products

The web service offers 5 types of products, which, in different ways, influence the purchase

process and the further operations that take place inside the system. On the online store,

you can buy:

Ƿ a trip to an interesting destination;

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Ƿ an airline ticket for the chosen tour – it’s shown together with the tour price, yet,

when your shopping cart is displayed, you can decide not to buy it. The number of

installments and the overall price of the tour depends on whether you decide to

purchase the airline ticket;

Ƿ various gadgets useful during excursions, e.g. sweatshirts, metal cups – standard

products but in different colors, materials, or size variants;

Ƿ activities to enrich your travel, e.g. a diving course or glacier climbing – users can’t buy

them separately because they’re additional options offered during specific tours;

Ƿ a club membership to join other travelers and support various social initiatives

organized by Solisci.pl.

The relations between products are predefined, for example, you can buy a tour only if you

have a club membership, and you can buy an airline ticket and additional activities only

when you buy a tour because they’re sold in a package.

All products are displayed on the website in different ways. This required building

a complex hierarchy of product categories and coding additional templates to present

products in a uniform graphic design.

Fast Payments and The System of Installments

Fast online payments are a standard when it comes to shopping sites, but integrating

a system of fast payments, having regard to payment by installments, is a whole different

story :)

We connected Solisci.pl with a payment processor called tpay. The moment the user’s

payment is accounted, the website automatically informs the transaction system, which

processes the payment and changes the user’s order status. The installments, excluding

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the tour price, depend on the time when the tour was purchased – the closer is the

departure day, the higher is the price users have to pay in advance.

The tour operator offers maximum three payments and minimum one. If users buy in

advance, they pay only for airline tickets and the next terms of payment are calculated

based on the departure date.

Additionally, tour agents can generate links for a surcharge at the request of clients, e.g.

when they want a higher accommodation standard or are planning to take larger

luggage. A few days before the flight, the system verifies whether all the payments have

been made – including basic as well as additional payments. Only after all the payments

have been credited to the account, the order is marked as “paid in full”, and the user can

go on the trip of his lifetime.

Loyalty Program and Shopping Points

Solisci.pl also offers a loyalty program, thanks to which users can collect points for the

tours, gadgets, and activities they purchase. The more users pay, the more points they

gather. During their next shopping, users can exchange points for zlotys and thereby lower

the price they need to pay. What’s more, the website also enables travelers to become club

ambassadors and earn points for their dream trip by using dedicated recommendation

links.

Users can earn extra points for additional activities they carry out on the website, like

filling out post-travel surveys. The time within a person signs up for a tour through

a recommendation link, to the benefit of the person who sent that link, is one week. We

use standard Transients API provided by the WordPress CMS platform to store data about

tour offers and people who sent recommendation links.

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Automatic Email Messages

This was a nonstandard solution. We completely turned off sending email messages

from the website’s server and moved them to an external CRM, which is responsible for

storing user data, analyzing activity on the website, sending marketing campaigns and

customized personal messages.

On the basis of events the website sends through its API, email messages are automatically

generated – they notify users about changes in their order status, when they’re added to

the list of participants, or remind about upcoming payment deadlines. The website “feeds”

the CRM system with the necessary information, which, after conversion, is used in email

templates.

Thanks to this, users can easily find payment links, the tour leader’s surname, or even

information on the amount of cash that will be needed during the trip. The integration also

enables the automatic exchange of data about newly registered website users.

Modular Page Design System

With the help of ACF tools (Advanced Custom Fields, which let you easily create and

manage your meta fields), we built a system that enables the modular design of content

and product web pages. With a rich array of over 20 different components, the website

administrator can create eye-catching subpages without having to stick to predefined

templates.

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Thanks to this, the company gained the possibility to add standard text blocks in various

column variants, photo galleries, carousels with photos of tour leaders, blog posts,

a travel route, a module that suggests other travel destinations, and much more. Another

advantage of this solution is a limited amount of code as well as libraries and assets used

to build subpages, which increases the web service loading speed.

This gives a massive advantage over commonly used page builders that increase system

load and generate deeply nested code.

A Customizable Generator of Contracts

Because of the formal requirements imposed on operators of group tours, we needed to

create an automatic contract generator based on the personal data provided by users and

the details of the tour they chose.

During the purchase process, appropriate documents are generated twice and then sent

to users in an email. Of course, the files are encrypted and secured with a strong password.

What’s interesting is that the data used to generate these documents varies depending

on the purchased tour. We made this possible by using custom meta fields and additional

taxonomies.

Need help with your WooCommerce platform?

Contact us!

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The Solisci team has full control over the content and design of the contract and over the

data that is downloaded from the system. The admin panel has a special section with

a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor, with which it’s possible to modify

content and use dynamic variables that reflect actual data during the generation of pdf.

files.

Integration With a Flight Search Engine – SkyScanner

The people responsible for preparing tour offers and purchasing flight tickets gained

access to a tool that lets them track the price and availability of plane tickets on chosen

flight routes.

Without having to leave the WordPress admin panel, they can set alerts on specific flights,

which will activate the moment they fulfill the price criteria. The current prices of tickets

can be imported to a tour offer with just a single click. Thanks to CRON (which is used

to schedule jobs to run periodically at fixed times) and the integration with SkyScanner

through the website API, Solisci can save a lot of time on everyday travel planning.

Automatic Notifications System – Increased Conversion Just like in the case of other travel and accommodation websites, one of the most

important interface elements that attract customers are all sorts of notifications that pop

on the corner of your screen and tell you how many people are currently viewing an offer

or how many bookings have been made in the past 24 h. Not only do such statistics make

the offer more attractive but also add an element of urgency that effectively encourages

hesitant people to make quicker decisions.

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Users who decide to add a trip to the shopping cart but don’t move on to the payment

system are tagged as “abandoned shopping carts”. In the course of the next few days, the

system will automatically send them an email to encourage them to complete their purchase.

Those who didn’t manage to sign up for a trip before it has reached the maximum

number of available spots, can sign up for a reserve list and receive automatic notifications

whenever someone resigns or when the registration opens again.

Solisci.pl – Successfully Completed Project

To sum up, the new version of Solisci.pl was entirely built based on WordPress and

WooCommerce, with numerous modifications and customized solutions.

We also created a content section to provide articles on interesting travel destinations and

stories from previous travels. The main part of the website is the platform dedicated to

selling tours, additional activities, and gadgets.

Thanks to partial automation, travel management processes are faster and less involving

for tour operators. Our implementation proves that WordPress and WooCommerce are

very flexible tools that allow building complex ecommerce platforms and that the only

limits can be set by the designer’s imagination and the client’s budget.

// Grzegorz Rogoziński – CEO of Cut2Code

The CEO of Cut2Code, a company that specializes in web development based on CMS platforms. He is a specialist with over 8 years of experience in digital business, and an expert in Magento and WordPress. He has worked with such agencies as Global4Net, Lemon Sky and JWT Poland.

mail: grzegorz@cut2code.com

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Voice Search Optimization – What You Should Take Care of in Order to Increase the Visibility of Your WooCommerce?

Every ecommerce should have a well-implemented SEO strategy that will boost its visibility in search engines and drive valuable organic traffic. Without it, your online store won’t generate the sales that you expect. And the biggest challenge here is that SEO is constantly changing and evolving. Search engines release algorithm updates that aim at making search results more accurate for users. This makes it a bit more difficult for SEO but also more fun and interesting. You need to be always up-to-date and know what to focus on or change in your website. That’s why voice search is such a hot topic now. Many people don’t understand it properly or don’t know how to optimize their websites in order to get better results. But voice search optimization is not that difficult. It takes time and a lot of work, but if you do it right, you’ll see that the investment pays off in the end. So let’s dig in!

Author: Irena Zobniów

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● what voice search is,

● why voice search is so important now,

● what is the future of voice search,

● what steps to take to optimize your ecommerce for voice search.

From this article, you’ll learn

What Is Voice Search And How Does It Work?

Nowadays, search engines are making us lazier and lazier. We often prefer to check

everything online rather than to use dictionaries or ask someone in person. More and

more often, we say our questions out loud instead of typing them on our keyboards.

Search engines and voice assistants became our life advisors in a wide range

of aspects, as they understand our queries better and constantly improve their

algorithms. They serve us every day. We can ask for “the best pizza near me”, “the nearest

pharmacy”, “how to get rid of cold”, and even more complicated questions, related to

a serious medical diagnosis. If we need to know something, we just ask Google.

So How Does Voice Search Work?

It uses speech recognition to understand the question a user has asked. Then, it tries to

find out answers online and displays them to a user in the search results. Or, in the case of

a voice assistant – it says the most accurate answers out loud. As you can see, voice search

is very simple and it’s developing really fast!

What Is the Future of Voice Search?

Voice search will be growing rapidly in the nearest future. Voice assistants are becoming

more and more popular already. According to the Canalys research, the global voice

search market increased by 187% in 2018. This trend will continue, especially in China,

from which around 52% of voice queries come. What’s more, business analytics estimate

that by 2024, the entire voice search market will be worth about $30 billion. And that’s not

all! Let’s take a closer look at several interesting statistics about voice search.

Ƿ Within the last year, 58% of consumers used voice search to find information about

local businesses.

Ƿ Moreover, 46% of voice search users look for local companies on a daily basis.

Ƿ 27% of people who conducted a voice search have visited a website of a local business.

Ƿ According to BrightLocal’s study, 76% of smart home assistant users perform local

searches at least once a week – with 53% using smart speakers on a daily basis.

Ƿ By the end of 2020, 30% of Internet searches will be made with voice-controlled

devices that don’t have a screen (home assistant and so on).

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If these numbers haven’t convinced you to invest in voice search optimization, then maybe

Google’s updates will do.

Google’s BERT Update – Focus on Conversational Keywords

In October 2019, Google introduced the BERT update, which stands for Bidirectional

Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a neural network-based technique for

natural language processing (NLP), which is open-sourced. Therefore, it enables everyone

to train their own question answering system. BERT is the result of Google’s research

on transformers, which are models that process words in relation to other words

in a query. That is to say, models are able to consider the full context of any word by

acknowledging other words next to it.

The aim of BERT is to provide more accurate search results for people who use natural

speech and conversational queries. It improves the interpretation of context, especially

for longer queries. So when you use prepositions like “for” and “to”, which have a huge

impact on the meaning of a sentence, Google will understand the context of the words

in your question. That way, users will be able to find the information they actually look

for. To clarify, the BERT update simply changes the way keywords are understood by

search engine algorithms. By laying more focus on conversational key phrases, it forces

SEO experts and ecommerce owners to introduce them into their SEO and marketing

strategies.

Conversational questions are important from the perspective of voice search optimization.

That’s why I’m discussing it in detail. If you want to keep up with the current search

engine algorithm updates, prepare your ecommerce for voice search!

How to Optimize Your Ecommerce for Voice Search?

Take a look at my tips to optimize your website for voice search and drive more organic

traffic to your ecommerce! Of course, this doesn't mean that we don't pay attention to the

basics of SEO, like domain authority or high-quality content. We simply focus on those

aspects that are more important from the perspective of voice search.

Use Plugins – Make Your Work Easier

To take care of SEO, you can work with plugins like Yoast SEO, which I highly

recommend. You can easily install it on your WooCommerce and find out what aspects

of your website should be improved. Yoast helps you optimize your content for

specific keywords, which is very helpful while creating blog posts. It shows you how

many subpages from your website link to specific content. You can also see how many

outbound links a given post includes.

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Yoast SEO provides you with a readability check, which can help you create more

engaging content. Moreover, the plugin makes sure that your technical configuration

gives special treatment to search engines. That's one of the easiest ways to boost the

visibility of your ecommerce in the search results.

Conversational Keywords and Questions

To optimize your website for voice search, you need to take care of the proper key phrases.

Focus on conversational keywords – sentences we naturally use in everyday speech.

For example:

Ƿ Why can’t I lose weight?,

Ƿ Where do I find the best gifts for my boyfriend?,

Ƿ What is the best dog food?,

Ƿ Where is the nearest pharmacy?,

Ƿ Best pizza near me.

So, instead of a regular text, you usually see in blog posts, you can have a natural exchange

of sentences between an expert and an interviewer. To make the most of conversational

keywords, put them in your text headings. Divide specific topics amongst separate

subpages. Thanks to this, every professional tip or piece of information will be easy to find

and understand. Take care of the quality of your data and content because some of it will

be displayed in search engine snippets.

The Page Speed of Your Ecommerce

Your page loading time is one of the most important factors for SEO, especially when it

comes to voice search. If the page speed is low, you won’t get any results for voice

search queries. Moreover, most users won’t wait until your website loads. They’ll leave it

and find another online store. That’s the reason why you need to check your page speed.

Pay special attention to the mobile version of your page, as most voice searches are

performed using mobile devices. There are many online tools that can help you inspect

your website’s loading time, but you can start with the one offered by Google.

Do not neglect any aspects that can affect your page loading time. There are many issues

that can slow it down, for example, the size of your images, which may be too large. Or you

may have uploaded poorly optimized videos on your landing page. So take care of your

page speed so that your website loads fast despite a slow Internet connection.

One of the best solutions that allow you to include conversational key phrases is to create a FAQ section on your website. You can also create blog posts in the style of an interview.

G ADVICE

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How-to Structured Data

As Google explains, "a how-to walks users through a set of steps to successfully complete

a task, and can feature video, images, and text." You can use it to markup how-to content,

like "How to write a letter" or "How to make a pizza". Google has confirmed many times

that structured data is beneficial for your search engine ranks. It allows you to optimize

your content with step-by-step instructions, bullet lists, and images. As a result, you may

see increased organic traffic.

Moreover, Google recently introduced the beta version of speakable schema.org. It allows

you to identify text fragments that can be used by Google Assistant as answers to specific

user questions. By using speakable schema.org, we can increase our chances of

ranking high for voice search queries. For now, this option is only available in the US but

it will be soon released in other countries.

Rich Snippets for a Higher CTR

Optimize rich snippets to make your page stand out from other search results. You can do

so by adding product price, availability, or review ratings, which can help you increase your

ecommerce sales.

Product Card Optimization

It’s often neglected because online stores usually import product descriptions directly

from the database of a given manufacturer or wholesaler. Therefore, it’s not hard to guess

that users will reach the websites of all ecommerce operators that are integrated with a

given supplier. What does this mean for your SEO? Nothing else but duplicate content,

which is considered to be one of the most important SEO errors because it may affect the

position of a given subpage in the search results. So don’t copy item descriptions and

invest in creating unique product cards for your WooCommerce.

What can you do to optimize your product card?

Product Card URL

You can improve the product card URL by including long-tail keywords. This will allow

search robots to better ‘understand’ the content of the link. But if the URL is too long,

it will be cut off in the search engine results (it’s recommended to use around 80

character long addresses). Avoid including categories or subcategories in the address. If

the product is assigned to another category, you’ll have to watch out for link redirections.

Having troubles with your WooCommerce platform?

Get in touch with us!

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Product Title

The product title is usually placed above a photo or product description, and it’s usually

the only content that accompanies an image in the case of category lists. When our online

store offers many similar products, their names are often very similar, if not identical. For

example, there are 10 models of women’s boots that are included in the same category

of our footwear store’s inventory. And so, frequently, each one of these models has the

same title ‘Women’s boots’ because this is how these types of shoes are called. What we're

dealing with here is a duplication of content, which can be eliminated by optimizing the

title with a long-tail phrase.

The same title can be diversified by using new key phrases, which will not only

positively affect the visibility of the store in the search results but also eliminate

content duplication within product titles. In order to have control over the titles of

individual products, it’s advisable to collect them in one document, e.g. XML. Thanks to

this, we’ll be able to easily and quickly check whether the new title we want to add hasn't

already been used.

Product Description

Make sure that the product description is correctly optimized. If the descriptions are

imported from an external database, I advise you to write them from scratch, taking key

phrases into account. Many online store owners, especially those whose product database

can be counted in thousands, can now shout in horror. I do realize that such a task can be

extremely difficult, time-consuming, and costly to perform, but it is an investment that will

certainly pay off. To start with, we should choose 10-20 key products for our sales, e.g. those

that are typically seasonal or those that are the most profitable in business terms.

It’s worth applying selected key phrases using synonyms or by changing the word

order or construction pattern, e.g. ‘Fall boots for women’, ‘boots for ladies’. It’s also a

good idea to use question keywords, which can be successfully used in an additional

subheading. The use of questions will also be beneficial for voice search, which is gaining

in popularity. I usually suggest preparing 2,500-3,000 character long descriptions. Yet

making them longer is not a problem. From the user’s point of view, a better solution

would be to divide the text into smaller blocks and place them on the entire product page.

"If you are having trouble with keywords selection, use keyword research tools like Ubersuggest or KWFinder. They can help you generate the most relevant key phrases, including the long-tailed ones.

G ADVICE

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Metadata

The metadata section also needs optimization if you want your product to look more

attractive in the search results. Check if your title and description have the right length

and how they appear in the search results. The title should offer precise and concise

information about the product. It’s worth including a key phrase within it, preferably at the

beginning. Meanwhile, the description itself should be a type of advertisement meant to

encourage potential customers to click on the link.

Product Image

Product image optimization is crucial for building website visibility in graphic search

results. The ‘alt’ attribute should be added to each photo of a given product. However, this

is not the only graphic element worth optimizing. My experience shows that the graphic

file name also affects how the image is displayed in the search results. If we include a

key phrase in the name of the product, we’ll have a better chance to achieve higher image

positions in the results. You should also remember that words should be separated from

each other by dashes, not by underscores. If there are several photos of a given product,

we can differentiate them by adding a sequential number at the end of the name.

Voice Search Is the Future – Voice Commerce Is Coming

As you can see, voice search optimization requires a lot of time and work. But this is an

investment you have to make if you want your ecommerce to thrive. With the growing

number of voice search queries and voice assistants, the trend is rising. All of this heads

into the direction of voice commerce, which will sooner than later become a reality for all

of us – both users and businesses.

// Irena Zobniów – Co-Founder of Insightland.org

SEO expert with over 10 years of experience. She specializes in SEO for e-commerce, Financial Technology and local SEO. She worked with and for Volkswagen Bank, Tesco, Pernod Ricard, Nestle, Liberty Direct.

mail: irena.zobniów@insightland.org

Include a CTA within your Metadata description, e.g. order online, check out our special deals, buy at a special price, etc. That way you can attract user’s attention and encourage them to click.

ĭ REMEMBER

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Google Analytics for Ecommerce – Get to Know Your Customer

During the last week, my website was visited by 17 thousand people, generating 20 thousand sessions and 92 thousand pageviews. The average session duration was 3 minutes… But what does that mean? Keeping statistics is essential for running an online business, however, the key to success is how you use this information to generate profit. This is where Google Analytics comes into play. But do you really know how to use this tool to grow your ecommerce business? We’ll show you what you should pay attention to when it comes to customer statistics and obtaining valuable information for your company.

Author: Hexe Data

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Google responds to the expectations of the ecommerce industry. It provides you with

Enhanced Ecommerce tools that allow you to learn about your customers. To make full

use of Google Analytics, you have to know how to implement it. With WooCommerce,

the implementation is much easier than in the case of other platforms. Basically, all you

need to do is to install a dedicated WooCommerce plugin and activate the “Enhanced

Ecommerce” option.

Behavior Analysis – How do Clients Behave on My Website?

Where does the treasure trove of information hide? Go to the Google Analytics Dashboard,

click on “Conversions”, then “Ecommerce”, and finally, go to “Shopping Behaviour

Analysis”. Google will show you, in a simple graphic form, how your customers behave on

your website during different stages of the transaction process and, most importantly,

how often they abandon your page.

“Shopping Behaviour Analysis”. Source: Google Analytics, Google Merchandise Store (Public Data Set), Nov. 27, 2018.

From this article, you’ll learn

● how to implement Enhanced Ecommerce and why you should do it,

● how you can conduct a Shopping Behaviour Analysis for your service,

● what to pay attention to while analyzing product performance,

● how multi-channel funnels can help you determine what ad campaigns contributed to your sales and conversions.

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Pay attention to the number of clients you lose during specific transaction stages and find

out what causes page abandonment. Consider answering the following questions:

Ƿ Why did ¾ of your clients’ sessions end without product views? Maybe it’s because

of low-quality photos or unconvincing product descriptions. It may also be the fault

of improper ad campaign configuration, since the traffic you have generated is of low

quality, meaning that your clients have no purchase intention.

Ƿ Why did only 4% of Check-Out sessions end with a purchase? Maybe there are

errors or the Check-Out process doesn’t follow the basic UX principles? Also, find out if

the payment methods, delivery options, etc. are convenient for your clients.

If your checkout process consists of different stages, use “Checkout Behaviour Analysis”

and, in line with the example above, find out why customers behave the way they do.

“Checkout Behaviour Analysis” Source: Google Analytics, Google Merchandise Store (Public Data Set), Nov. 27, 2018.

Remember that you define specific checkout stages by yourself. This allows you to personalize the Google Analytics report and adjust it to the structure of your website. Also, I advise you to segment your clients because you’ll be able to compare different customer groups and their behavior.

G ADVICE

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Remember that you define specific checkout stages by yourself. This allows you to

personalize the Google Analytics report and adjust it to the structure of your website. Also,

I advise you to segment your clients because you’ll be able to compare different customer

groups and their behavior.

Product Performance – Does My Product Generate Profits?

You already know how clients behave during different stages of the purchase path. Thanks

to this, you’re able to find out how to improve the structure of your online store.

However, the foundation of your business is not the store itself, but the products you offer.

With the help of advanced ecommerce analytics, you can monitor what products are

popular, sold the most, and which ones don’t generate profits.

Product Performance is a valuable tool because it shows how much income a specific

product generates and, most importantly, how popular it is amongst site visitors.

Remember that the profit is estimated by multiplying the average product price by the

number of sold products. It’s important that you pay special attention to these statistics:

Ƿ Cart to detail rate – how many times clients see a given product and add it to a cart,

Ƿ Buy to detail rate – how many times clients see a given product and buy it.

Again, the numbers themselves won’t give you much information. Just as in the case of

“Shopping Behaviour Analysis”, look at those numbers that don’t satisfy you. Find the

causes of poor product performance and improve your offer. A low Basket to detail rate

can tell you, for example, that the product price is too high or that you offer too little

product colors or sizes.

“Product Performance” Source: Google Analytics, Google Merchandise Store (Public Data Set), Nov. 27, 2018.

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You can not only analyze the performance of specific products but also different product

categories. Thanks to this, you can check summary statistics and find how they correlate

with the current market trends, year season, or specific marketing campaign.

Multi-Channel Funnels – What Ad Campaigns Contribute to My Sales?

Running an online store usually requires being active on social media and managing

email campaigns. Therefore, your client may visit your store by clicking on a Facebook link,

email link, or he may also go to your website directly. When did he make a purchase? Let’s

assume that during his third visit, that is, by clicking on an email link. Did just your email

campaign lead to the client’s purchase? The answer is no. The client had looked at your

products before.

Thanks to Multi-Channel Funnels, you’re able to determine what ad campaigns have

contributed to your sales and conversions. You can see what channels initiated (in our

example, this would be Facebook), assisted (direct visit), and completed conversions

(clicking on the email link). Look closely at the channels that raise customer brand

awareness because they lead to sales. This knowledge will help you optimize your ad

campaigns and focus on channels that have true potential.

“Assisted Conversions” Source: Google Analytics, Google Merchandise Store (Public Data Set), Nov. 27, 2018.

You’ll also find valuable information in “Top Paths” that show you what paths (e.g. organic

search, paid search, social media, email newsletters) lead clients to the goal conversion.

This is an amazing tool when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of marketing

activities. For example, you can see at what point of the conversion path your client clicked

on a display ad. Thanks to this, you’ll learn how many times a given banner ad is displayed

but doesn’t generate clicks and lead to conversion. Does the ad play an important role in

encouraging your client to buy your product? If no, then maybe you should focus on other

channels that have the potential of generating more profits?

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Multi-Channel Funnels “Time Lag Reports” tell you how many days it took a site visitor to

convert, while “Path Length” reports on how many times a user interacted with a given

channel prior to completing a transaction (converting). This will help you measure not

only the effectiveness of your online campaigns but also how fast they lead to conversions.

If your store is new and your goal is to raise brand awareness, then the amount of time

it takes for a customer to make a purchase will naturally be longer. Notice that there is

a positive correlation between “Time Lag Reports” and “Path Length”, which means that

the quicker it takes a client from an initial interaction to conversion, the shorter is the

conversion path.

Always Strive for More

Implementing the Extended Ecommerce module is, in the case of most platforms, quite

complicated. Fortunately, it’s not so difficult when you use WordPress together with

WooCommerce – installing appropriate plugins allows you to integrate Google Analytics

with the ecommerce module. The combination of these tools takes analytics to a whole

new level. If you configure them properly, they will help you understand your customers

and find the weaknesses of your store. Spend some time on analyzing Google Analytics

reports and you’ll notice recurring statistical patterns. This, in turn, will allow you to

optimize your marketing strategy and, consequently, increase revenue. Who knows,

maybe this will turn out to be your most profitable investment?

Remember that you’re not alone – in the case of any doubts or problems, you can contact

companies that specialize in data analytics. They will not only ensure comprehensive

implementation but also teach you how to unlock the full potential of Google Analytics.

You’ll save time, avoid mistakes, and frustrating situations. Of course, it’s always

worth using Google Analytics on your own but if you don’t have time to do that, ask

a professional agency for help. This may turn out to be the right decision, especially if you

want to attract more clients and grow your business.

// Hexe Data

Hexe Data exists to help you push your business forward and improve its performance. We implement analytical solutions and provide reliable data analysis and data visualizations. Our mission is to show you how to extract real value from your data. We believe that knowledge based on real-time and easily understandable data is the basis for making strategic decisions. We point the way and enhance development, so that you could see solutions through the prism of data.

mail: hello@hexedata.com

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5 Steps to Creating Effective Banner Ads in Ecommerce

Display ads are one of the most popular selling tools in ecommerce. If you want them to be effective, knowing basic design rules won’t be enough. How to create web banners that not only get a lot of clicks but also generate profits?

Author: Anna Świątkowska

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Meet the Market Demands

Even though the past year was challenging for traditional banner ads, the expenditure on

display advertising is not going down [AG1]. On the one hand, marketing specialists are

looking for a safe environment for their brands.

On the other hand, the Coalition for Better Ads (an international coalition between

companies and trade associations involved in online advertising, including such a big

name as Google, the owner of the Chrome Web Browser) has introduced a list of banned

display formats. The list includes the so-called “intrusive forms”, that is, prestitial (covering

the whole website screen) countdown ads as well as some mobile ads.

The formed coalition, or rather a “fear” that the Chrome browser will start blocking the

banned formats, forced publishers to make changes in their offers. From February 2018, no

longer can they use display formats from the blacklist.

● how does the display advertising market look like,

● how to make an effective banner ad step-by-step,

● what is the F-Shaped Reading Pattern,

● why it’s worth using a heatmap.

From this article, you’ll learn

Figure 1. Slack B2B banners Source: slack.com

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The goal of these changes is to improve adblocking and the customers’ experience with

online advertising. Thanks to the introduction of new display standards, marketers also

have new issues to discuss. For example, the new payment method called viewabilling

(paying for seeing a displayed ad, that is, it’s viewability). Specialists talk a lot about this

measurement method, listing the best places (placements) to make your ad stand out.

However, this begs the question if you can achieve results and increase your conversion

rate just by booking an ad space? The answer is not clear.

The time users spend to absorb information from the Internet constantly changes. Not

so long ago, marketers had 8 seconds to catch the recipients’ attention. But now, in the

case of mobile users, it’s only 2 seconds. The situation gets more serious when we also

consider the phenomenon of banner blindness. That’s why we advise you to design

a communication strategy that will grab the users’ attention, make them interested in

your offer and, consequently, prompt their response.

What Should You Remember About?

1. Work Out the Details of Your Project

Decide on the maximum file size, preferably before you even start your design. Check the

technical specifications and file size limits of different publishers.

It’s also worth deciding on the format of your image – whether it will be static (.jpg, .png)

or dynamic (html). The first version of your design will be displayed in one unanimated

version. But if we’re talking about html, there is room for more possibilities because your

image automatically changes. Of course, if you choose such a format, don’t exaggerate

with animation effects and create maximum two different display versions of your

dynamic banner.

2. Pay Attention to Composition

Thanks to the creation of a master banner, mastering composition is a piece of cake.

A master banner is an output format that offers a wide variety of elements used in sales

communication: a graphic or photo, your message, slogan, and call to action (Figure 2.).

It serves as the basis for other banner resizes. The most commonly used master banner

comes in a horizontal layout and the size of 750×200 pixels.

Google Display Network allows to upload even 150 Kb files, however, most web services don’t accept such large sizes. Always make sure to check the file size parameters at the beginning of your work. Otherwise, after compressing your image to the proper size, you risk that your design will lose it’s pixel-perfect quality and won’t meet the publisher’s technical specifications.

G ADVICE

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When you work on your composition, that is, the way texts and images are arranged on

your banner, it’s worth implementing the F-Shaped Pattern of Reading (Figure 3.). This

rule states that the user’s eyes move in an F-shaped pattern when they scan the content

of your banner. If you arrange your layout according to this shape, you’ll follow the user’s

natural scanning rhythm and be able to focus his attention on the key elements (e.g.

headline) of your banner.

Figure 2. Master banner anatomy – the model banner ad design Source: DOTPartners.pl

Figure 3. The F-Shaped Pattern on PayU’s banner Source: DOTpartners.pl

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Use heatmaps to check if your banner is effective. They provide detailed information on how

users behave on a given page and scan the content of your banner. For the best results, run

heatmap tests before you publish your ads.

Heatmap tests are based on eye tracking – an eye movement measurement technique,

which shows the user’s points of gaze. Heatmaps allow you to check if the key elements

of your graphic design (statistics, photo model who directs the user’s eyes to your main

message, brand logo, CTA) focus the user’s attention the way they should.

3. Call to Action Is the Icing on the Cake

This seemingly trivial design element is actually very important. Phrases, such as “Buy

now”, “Try free trial” are prompts that evoke a response leading to sales. A well designed

CTA button complements your marketing communication.

But, most importantly, it informs the user about his next step and makes him

click through to the page with your product. An effective CTA should be clear and

straightforward, which means that if it says “Buy now”, your client expects to be directed to

your product, not the home page. Similarly, if a customer decides to “Fill out the form”, he

hopes to be directed to a page where he can leave his personal data.

Figure 4. Heatmap test on PayU’s banner Source: payu.com

Today, consumers are well-aware of different marketing tricks and cannot be so easily fooled. They will automatically recognize your message as an advertisement and notice when you use stock photos. The same is with the quality of your graphic design. It has to be of high-resolution, preferably 300 DPI.

ĭ REMEMBER

Use directional cues, like shape and color. UX studies show that an effective CTA has to be 20% larger than your brand logo. This rule can be also applied to the whole banner design. The brand logo is an important design element, but in the case of performance marketing, it’s role is to make your message sound credible.

G ADVICE

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The CTA button should contrast with the rest of your design and stand out from other

elements. Many brands use very colorful CTAs, including intense red, which, from

the perspective of the psychology of color, is actually supposed to be associated with

prohibition. But this assumption is wrong. Try experimenting with different colors to

choose the one that fits best.

Another important element of your CTA is the copy. It works well when it’s simple and

straightforward (e.g. “Download the demo”). It’s also worth emphasizing the benefits your

client will have after clicking on the CTA, for example, “Sign up for free” or “Pay less”.

4. Less Is More

Focus on communicating one message that is consistent with your campaign strategy.

Don’t distract customers with announcements of, for example, upcoming product

promotions. This is a mistake you should avoid making. Your sales communication will

be effective if it concentrates on advertising a specific product or service, emphasizes

benefits (maximum three), and doesn’t use any “distractors”. It should be honest and

direct. Best if it’s able to answer the customer when he asks “What’s in it for me?”, offers

him benefits, and directs him to your product with the help of a CTA button.

5. Test, Test, Test

Carry out A/B tests to find out which design works best in practice. Otherwise, you

defeat the purpose of your display campaign. Testing will help you determine if the

communication you have designed is effective. Experiment with different banner versions

in remarketing to increase brand awareness and remind customers to make a purchase.

Don’t be afraid to ask publishers to let you change your designs. Usually, they don’t have

anything against it because this entails better sales statistics and more clients. What’s

more, they look favorably upon running sales performance tests and even encourage

you to do them when you pay according to the P4P model (Pay-for-Performance). The

payment model is profitable both for publishers and advertisers because the better

performance banner ads deliver, the higher income they earn.

There is no “perfect” place where you can put the CTA. Most often, it’s placed on the right side of a banner. When you design dynamic banner ads, don’t forget to put your CTA on each display version. If you’re designing for mobile screens, remember about the design for fat fingers rule, which simply states that the button should be easy to press with a finger.

ĭ REMEMBER

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Effectiveness Is The Key

Each and every display banner, whose goal is to make your business more profitable,

should be effective. If you follow the rules described above, you’ll stand out from your

competitors and increase the chance that customers notice your ads. And this, of course,

translates to better performance and higher profits.

1. Technical Specifications à determine the maximum file size, à choose the best format (static or dynamic).

2. Layout

à start with a master banner – the basis for other banner formats, à use the F-Shaped Reading Pattern rule when you design the layout, à make sure that the images and photos related to your company are credible and authentic.

3. Call to Action

à pay attention to shape and color, à use contrasts, à don’t ignore the copy.

4. Less is More

à stick to minimalism, à offer specific benefits (maximum three), à don’t use “distractors”, à remember that quality is over quantity.

5. Test Your Designs

à experiment with different designs, à leave only those that have the best results.

G HOW TO CREATE AN EFFECTIVE BANNER AD STEP-BY-STEP?

// Anna Świątkowska – founder of DOT Partners

The company that specializes in effective sales communication that is based on an original Performance Web Design method; she has been working in online marketing for 10 years and has over 7 years of experience in working for the advertising department of Onet.pl; she has worked for such brands, as ITAKA, Ceneo, Travelplanet.pl, Fotojoker, or Santander Consumer Bank.

mail: anna@dotpartners.pl

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96

6 Tips to Build a Positive Ecommerce Image in the Media

Ecommerce stubbornly fights to get noticed in the media. That’s how it has been, is, and always will be. And nothing will change in this matter. Why? Because being present in the media improves the visibility of e-brands and, most importantly, builds their long-term credibility, allowing brand managers to sleep calmly at night. It may all sound pretty obvious. However, in reality, public relations needs major improvement.

Author: Andrzej Gruszka

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PR and media relations have dramatically changed. 10 years ago, you could contact

a journalist via an email (containing a given press release), a phone call, or meet him face

to face.

Today, we have an abundance of communication channels. The number of Internet

users is constantly growing, leading to an enormous amount of content. That’s why it’s

becoming increasingly difficult for brands to break through the communication noise.

There is too much content with no quality and, to make matters worse, fake news is still

popular. The conclusion is obvious: relevant and valuable information is now at a premium.

That’s why I advise you to implement the rules shown below. They will help you build

a positive brand image in the media.

1. Avoid Mass Mailing

Do not, I repeat, do not establish relations with the media by sending mass emails.

I’ve witnessed this myself when, some time ago, I have worked as editor in chief of an

e-magazine devoted to marketing communication. I used to receive a lot of emails,

which, from the perspective of my position at work and the subjects I wrote about, were

completely irrelevant. I had to answer all of these emails, asking politely to remove my

name from mailing lists.

Up to this day, I sometimes think about the recurring industry news about collaborations

between company X and Y, or a promotion at work of Mr. Z. This is not the type of content

we would publish in our online magazine. Of course, some editors would be interested in

publishing such news, but their number is scarce.

Unfortunately, mass mailing is a common practice. If you choose this method, you won’t

establish good relations with the media, but create temporary contacts. A further issue is

whether the information you send is attractive to the recipient, but more about that anon.

What about follow-ups? I don’t have anything against them. But if you contact a journalist

● how to build a good relationship with the media,

● how to draw the attention of journalists to your brand,

● how to write a good press release that will stand the chance of being published,

● what are the characteristics of a perfect press release,

● what you should write about to make your brand stand out.

From this article, you’ll learn

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with a given topic, I presume that it is a “very specific matter”, not e.g. information about

a product quality certificate that you have sent in mass emails.

2. Focus on the Recipients’ Needs

If you decide to avoid mass mailing, you’re heading in the right direction. I cannot deny

that it will consume a lot of your time but you’ll make your communication much more

precise. Quality requires time and in-depth research.

PR specialists still rarely contact publishers to learn about their and the readers’ needs.

They ignore the fact that it’s the basic requirement for creating a positive brand image.

Unfortunately, they use catchy headlines and leads that are frequently used by brands to

sell worthless content.

3. Provide Valuable Content

Implementing this rule is usually the most difficult. Because how can you explain to

your client or boss that the information you have found will be positively received by the

media?

4. Write Honestly

Treat press releases with respect because they are still primary communication tools.

Without a reliable press release, you won’t stand a chance to be successful in the media.

Don’t stretch the truth because you will be seen as untrustworthy. You can find out what

characteristics a perfect news release should have from Figure 2.

Do not write general, low-quality news releases and carelessly send them to journalists. You’ll make matters even worse if you’ll call to make sure the recipients have received your text. Don’t be surprised that they will treat you as a spammer and put you on the top of their pet peeve list. This is not the way to create a positive image of your brand in the media. Working in PR just like at an assembly line, with no established information strategy, is a huge mistake.

ĭ REMEMBER

Find out what journalists from your contact list need and what they write about. But don’t take the easy way out, writing emails like “I have noticed that you wrote about this and I thought that…” This doesn’t work anymore. Conduct a research on the journalist or editor just as if you were to interview them. Find out what they may be interested in, what communication channels they use, what they pay attention to when they write news, and so on.

G TIP

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Although it may seem that there are few rules to follow, remember that honesty pays off

and, in the long run, comes back to you. So, be ready to reply to comments and answer

journalists’ questions about your articles.

5. Build Relationships!

This is one of the most important elements of your job. Establishing relationships,

especially long-term ones, is a serious matter. Whenever it’s possible, meet journalists

in person. I’m surprised by how my younger colleagues ask me where they can meet

media representatives. Well, the answer is during events, conferences, trade fairs, or

face-to-face. It’s that simple. However, not so obvious as it may seem. Nowadays, you can

“meet” a journalist faster in the digital world than in real life. You can save your time by

commenting, sharing, or talking via an Internet communicator. This is a good direction,

1. Find out what the journalists you want to contact need and what kind of topics they’re interested in. Knowing this will increase the chance that your text will be published.

2. Carry out an in-depth research on the media channel you want to collaborate with. Try answering such questions as what are the most frequent topics, how often the texts are published, and in what form? This will help you create content that will suit the needs of a given publisher.

3. Find out what type of content gets popular at a given time and keep up with the industry trends. On the basis of this, you can plan a publication schedule and organize the content you want to sell.

4. Write only about things that are important from the perspective of the reader and media channel, not only from the company you work for. Remember that the proper places to publish information about rewards and promotions at work are your own media channels.

1. Honest. Don’t base your press release on half-truths and understatements. Gather information carefully and check all the facts. Start with a draft. Plan the structure and content of your article. This step is frequently ignored, however, it will allow you to estimate your text’s potential.

2. Interesting. Don’t make the readers sleep. Journalists don’t like dull texts. The secret lies in your choice of words.

3. Well-written. Get rid of passive voice, modal verbs, and nominalization. Instead, use verbs that illustrate action, emphasize emotions, highlight benefits, or introduce changes.

G HOW TO CREATE CONTENT THAT IS VALUABLE TO TARGET READERS?

G CHARACTERISTICS OF A PERFECT PRESS RELEASE

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however, from my experience, I know that each Internet contact becomes more valuable

when you meet the person directly. And this is extremely important if you want to

establish long-term relationships.

6. Earn Links

Media relations is a perfect tool to earn links. They are one of the main search engine

ranking factors. When you publish a text online, you hope that it will attract many readers.

But if you have valuable links, you won’t have to wait long for organic traffic.

Today, a valuable link is like a currency. Dofollow links are especially helpful because they

tell the Internet bots to visit a given website and, at the same time, make it more credible.

In the case of Internet publications, dofollow links are great because they allow you to

measure the effectiveness of your PR activities and, consequently, monitor brand loyalty.

No Matter How As Long As They Talk?

Don’t ignore the “how”. If you follow the guidelines mentioned above, your relations with

the media will be more successful. My guidelines will also help you build a positive image

of your personal brand. I advise you to consider my tips. Unless you want to lose the trust

of journalists or, even worse, spoil your reputation. The choice belongs to you.

// Andrzej Gruszka – Head of Communication at Hexe Capital

He has more than 10 years of experience in marketing communication but specializes in brand awareness activities like Public Relations, content marketing, and social media. His current position at Hexe Capital is centered around public relations and brand awareness activities.

mail: andrzej.gruszka@hexecapital.com

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How to Automate Sales Processes with the Help of Chatbots

Clients like when brands put emphasis on relationships, offer personalized products and experiences. Company owners pay attention to savings and the number of sold products, in brief – results. How to meet such extremely different needs? It’s simple: automate sales processes with the help of chatbots. You’ll achieve impressive results, avoid making mistakes, and make machines come to life.

Author: Mariusz Pełechaty

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The year 2016 witnessed a new and fully automated marketing communication channel.

In 2017, Facebook had a Messenger platform with 100 thousand chatbots, whose number

rose to 300 thousand in the following year. By the end of April, during the F8 conference,

Facebook announced that augmented reality was available in its chatbots. The business

giant also stated that it will implement more advanced Artificial Intelligence – not only

with respect to data processing but also human-machine conversation. Since chatbots

effectively meet customers’ needs, this shows enormous potential in the context of

sales and marketing.

Engage Customers to Build Relationships

Back in the old days, marketing specialists said that you can’t be successful without

building and maintaining customer relationships. The same applies to the digital age.

Remarketing neither does surprise nor impress an average buyer. Emails or text messages

your clients receive some time after abandoning their shopping cart often irritate and

● what kinds of selling processes can be automated thanks to chatbots,

● how chatbots can help you gather information about customers and how to apply this knowledge to sales and marketing,

● what mistakes to avoid in client-chatbot communication,

● what are the characteristics of a perfect chatbot.

From this article, you’ll learn

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have a negative impact on your conversion rate. To improve it, you decide to send more

emails but, simultaneously, increase your expenses.

This is where chatbots come with help. One-sided push communication is not the only

thing bots were designed for. They offer users much more and have many features

that will improve your relationships with customers. They allow you to gather a lot

of qualitative data, segregate leads, and broaden knowledge about your clients.

Chatbots are the online “eyes” and “ears” of your brand.

Ecommerce Processes You Can Automate with the Help of a Chatbot

Sales chatbots inform the user about his order status, track his packages,

tell him if the product he wants to buy is available; the website

displays a shopping cart preview and on the basis of this, chatbots

send push communications reminding the user to, for example,

complete his transaction

Customer service

FAQ: opening hours, shop location; additional services, such as

payment by installments, delivery terms, etc.

User testing you can test the introduction of new products to your assortment

on a small number of people (your chatbot will store all the

information about their behavior in its knowledge base); quick

customer satisfaction surveys; collection of feedback

Customer segmentation

the Messenger chatbot allows you to follow your client’s behavior

when he logs into his account on your website. When he enters

his personal data, you can assign him to a specific ID on your

online shop. Thanks to this, you’ll gather detailed information on

his shopping habits as well as qualitative data connected to, for

example, his expectations towards the quality of your products

The Customer Chat Plugin is a great example of using Messenger chatbots because it

allows you to integrate the chatbot Messenger platform directly with your website. This

gives you such benefits, as:

Ƿ catching the user’s attention and engaging him in a conversation,

Ƿ segregating leads on the basis of a couple of simple questions and storing qualitative

data about your customer in a knowledge base,

Ƿ improving the conversion rate and reducing the costs of customer service. You can

provide service to many clients at the same time, without having to hire consultants,

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Ƿ thanks to the information the Messenger chatbot gathers from a conversation with

your client, you can upsell complementary products.

Installing the Customer Chat Plugin on your website may require the help of

a programmer. However, it’s not very difficult. You can follow Facebook’s detailed

installation guidelines from this page.

Avoid Making Mistakes

Many brands with chatbots create marketing messages that put too much emphasis

on selling. They believe that adding a call-to-action to the chatbot’s scenario will be

enough. However, as you may know from personal experience, Messenger is also a great

communication channel where customers can voice their complaints. The package hasn’t

arrived, the Internet connection failed, the chicken was spoiled...

Looking form the perspective of my experience as a customer – to get a deeper

understanding of target clients and uncover valuable insights – I have to admit that

nothing puts me off more than when a company sends me an advertisement as a reply to

my complaint. When disappointed with a product or service, the last thing I expect is that

a seller recommends another purchase offer.

But you can design your chatbot to be an unobtrusive seller, a pleasant companion

who tells jokes, apologizes for his mistakes, collects useful data, and, if properly guided –

personalizes communication like no other marketing expert. This is the secret to success

in conversational commerce. A great example is the InPost chatbot; it does make mistakes

but apologizes for them with a smile, and that’s why I like coming back to it.

Fig. 1. The example of Customer Chat Plugin. Source: messengerdevelopers.com

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What else Should You Avoid in Your Chatbot Communication?

Intrusive marketing

not only email marketing is notorious for spamming, so don’t

exaggerate with push notifications in your chatbot. Otherwise, the

annoyed user will turn your chatbot off or completely delete it.

Chatbot that pretends to be human

there is no greater disappointment when you realize that you

haven’t been talking to a person, but a machine. US customer

studies (eMarketer) show that the most valued chatbot

communication is a simple conversation with a virtual assistant.

Don’t stop the conversation

make the chatbot conversation sound natural, and make sure that

your chatbot is able to react to any message or question from your

client. Otherwise, he won’t know what to do and assume that your

chatbot is useless.

Lack of a clear goal

we always wonder what website elements to highlight and what

will the user’s journey look like on our page. The same is with

chatbots. If you don’t have a specific idea on how to automate

selling processes with your bot, just stick to making your customer

service excellent. Clients will definitely appreciate this.

Segment Your Customers

You have to know what a client needs in order to sell him your product. Well, that’s easier

said than done. If a pregnant woman enters a sports shop, the shop assistant won’t

greet her by telling about the current crossover bike sale. Rather, she’ll be directed to the

sections with comfy shoes, maternity gym wear, or recreational sports equipment.

How to avoid sending unattractive offers?

You can use your chatbot’s native functions, such as:

Ƿ quizzes – „What is your skin type” is used by a Polish brand tołpa. After completing

the quiz, users are rewarded with recommendations of beauty products suitable for

their type of skin. All this information is stored in the database, so you can use this

knowledge in the future to offer more personalized products.

Ƿ surveys – instead of making a survey (e.g. about customer service, product quality) on

your website, you do it in your chatbot. But the main difference is that your respondent

is a concrete person, not an anonymous user.

Ƿ contests – with your product as the main prize. Thanks to this, you’ll learn what types

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of clients would be interested in a given category of your products. Also, you’ll gather

qualitative data about their buying motives.

Ƿ offer forms and lead forms – to help you segregate leads or product recommendations,

the user answers 1-5 closed questions about his budget, buying motive, expectations

towards your product, etc.

All this helps you ask customers about their preferences. This information, in turn,

allows you to distinguish variables, with which you can define specific groups from

your client base. Tags like “favorite sport: running” open a wide range of product, service,

event recommendations, or other marketing possibilities. Quizzes can be used to obtain

tags. For example, the user may give the following answers: “favorite brand: Adidas”,

“running style: half marathons”, etc. His answers are then assigned to his ID in your

database (if that’s how the chatbot developer configures it) and on the basis of these tags

(which are assigned accordingly to your online store tags), you can automatically send

your clients personalized offers.

The Beauty Player Case Study

Beauty Player is a cosmetic start-up from Taiwan, popular for its face masks. The brand’s

main problem was that it wasn’t able to quickly answer to the growing number of

customer questions, even though this was the key to educating clients about the

advantages of Beauty Player’s innovative product. So, the brand decided to use a chatbot

to take control over this situation, respond to the customers, and distribute coupons for

face masks. Those who used the coupons and bought the product were distinguished and

described with tags.

The brand then used these tags for its Messenger campaign to segment customers using

Facebook Ads Manager (lookalike audience). This strategy allowed the brand to lower its

CPC from $8,30 to $4.06 and get a 10 times higher ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend).

Fig. 2. The Beauty Player chatbot

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In May 2018, the chatbot generated a $250 000 income (that was 40% of revenue from all

communication channels). What’s more, thanks to raising customer brand awareness, the

chatbot increased AOV (Average Order Value) by 10%.

Make Your Chatbot HumanChatbots, just like real customer assistants, should have a personality, for example, they

can formulate interesting responses that are based on a concrete persona. Your bot can

give users unusual DIY tips like Adam Slodowy or acquire traits characteristic of a different

person, for instance, it can hold conversations in the manner of a witty actress that is

interested in fashion. It all depends on your target customers. Your chatbot mustn't talk

in an emotionless way that is void of any expression – give it a personality and it will make

clients come back to your brand.

You’re able to define your chatbot’s character, teach him to use its database to send

personalized messages, address specific promotional offers to given clients, and even

establish business cooperation with other companies. But your chatbot really gains in

value when it offers useful content. It can tell your client his foot size in different units of

measurement, suggest the best wine for a specific type of meat, or a tire size that fits the

client’s car model. Providing useful information is one of the most desirable features of

a virtual assistant chatbot.

The American Eagle Outfitters Case Study American Eagle Outfitters is an American clothing brand whose goal was to deepen

its relationships with the current customers and to gain new ones. To do so, it used two

chatbots: AE and Aerie.

Fig. 3. The American Eagle Outfitters chatbot

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Why two? Because the brand wanted to communicate to different customer segments.

So, the bots offered personalized content and behaved differently toward specific

clients. American Eagle used its API (Application Programming Interface) to send

product catalogs through chatbots. To better engage customers in the new channel of

communication, the brand also played video ads on Facebook and Messenger, which

showed how chatbots work and how they interact. The Aerie bot gained a lot of new

clients, 75% of which were completely new leads for the brand.

Invest in Cross-selling and UpsellingAfter you have established a relationship with your client and learned about his

buying habits, you can integrate your product base with the client’s order history.

Thanks to this, you’ll open up new possibilities to make a sale. By automating

notifications together with a product catalog, you can remind your customer that he, for

example, is running out of razor blades, his bike needs to be tuned up for spring, or that

he’ll need some outdoor equipment for his planned trip. Every time a chatbot sends such

personalized offers, it gets an opportunity to collect feedback from the user. So, if you

place simple buttons (like “I’m interested”, “I’m not interested”) under your product offer,

you’ll allow your chatbot to dynamically optimize product recommendations and learn

more about its potential lead.

Let Chatbots Help YouUsing chatbots in ecommerce can bring huge profits. However, you have to invest your

time to formulate a perfect concept, set goals, and organize the implementation of

your bot. A virtual assistant can significantly raise the quality of brand communication.

However, if you don’t come up with optimal solutions and if developers commit technical

errors, your chatbot can actually hinder effective communication with clients. There’s one

more thing you should remember about – create chatbots with human-like qualities,

but prevent them from making human mistakes. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

// Mariusz Pełechaty – CEO of KODA Bots

E-marketing & conversational commerce expert. A public speaker with 10+ years of experience in digital marketing. Over 25 presentations at conferences related to brand communication in social media. Co-author of the book „Emarketing in action” (2008). Trainer and academic teacher, an associate of the University of Wroclaw, SWPS University, WSB Schools of Banking, Jagiellonian University Polish Research Centre in London, and many training companies. Since 2016, the co-owner of Hexe Capital - a group of companies focused on e-marketing solutions for business.

mail: mariusz@kodabots.com

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Starting a New Business – the Biggest Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Before I started my own business, I had worked at a full-service marketing agency, which has a holistic approach towards strategic, technological, and creative services. At that time I had an opportunity to work with the biggest, greatest, and world-renowned brands and companies. At one point in my professional career, I also worked as a client and had the opportunity to see how SEO agencies, like the one I run now, presented their offers.

All the experience and gained knowledge convinced me about what I want to do in my life, what kind of company I want to create, and what principles I should follow when building my team. Moreover, I always felt that leadership and transferring knowledge is what I want to do and feel good about. I learned many management methods, including those I consider crucial and those that aren’t effective. That’s why I think that sharing my experience can help young business leaders, as learning from others’ mistakes doesn’t cost you anything and allows you to develop your company faster.

Author: Katarzyna Iwanich

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● what aspects you need to pay attention to while starting a new business,

● why team management is the key to your company’s success,

● how you can optimize your work time efficiency,

● why diversity can help you develop your business,

● what is the groundwork for the growth of your company.

From this article, you’ll learn

Starting and Managing a Successful Business

Cash-flow and Cost-efficiency

The first serious challenge you’ll meet at the beginning of your business career is money.

In my case, when I started from scratch, I had to make sure that my revenues would cover

all the generated costs. The situation became even more challenging when I started to

expand my team. The most important advice I have is to carefully control both the project

costs and profitability. Keep an eye on this so that you can react quickly when the costs

start to increase too much. Thanks to this, the balance sheet will contain funds for the

future investments and development of the company.

This is a tip based on my experience from working at a marketing agency. It may seem

strange to you, but businesses highly skilled in project management rely on it. Measure

and verify the time spent on each project. This knowledge, whether you spend 10 or

3 hours on a given project, will not only allow you to better manage your time but also

make sure that your project brings profits. What you have to do is to measure the time

each of your team members spends on preparing reports, meetings, client calls, or

operating activities. Regardless of the project, each employee has the obligation to report

the time they spent on completing a given task. In this way, as a leader, I’ll know how

occupied my coworkers are and how profitable our project is from the perspective of time

management. Thanks to this, I’ll also know if there are any tasks that require automation

and if my team needs a new member (when a given person has too much work).

Team Management and Communication

Good leaders can verify if they’ve been understood well by asking their recipients, e.g. an

employee, to paraphrase a given message. In this way, they can be confident that they

communicate effectively and that the tasks they assign are understandable.

The ability to paraphrase is also a feature that a good leader should have because it allows

you to tailor the message to the recipient. Some comments and feedback must

be adapted to the sensitivity and position of your employee.

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Every employee should receive feedback systematically or after completing certain

tasks. If we don't tell them what they're doing wrong, they'll duplicate errors. And if we

don't approve of the work they've done, they won't feel appreciated. Remember that

appreciating employees and complimenting their work is just as important as pointing

out areas for improvement.

Moreover, a good leader should not only hear but also listen, because it often happens that

team members aren't able to directly communicate their problem, concern, or request.

Their intentions are visible when you create the right atmosphere for conversation and

free speech.

During everyday work, avoid asking general questions – instead, ask your team members

about specific project details. The more detailed and specific questions you ask as

a leader, the more substantive the answer you'll receive. Besides, this will also let your team

know that you're aware of what they're doing and that you understand the difficulties and

challenges of their work.

Work Time Efficiency

When it comes to running and managing a company, both ours and our coworkers'

productivity is the key to success.

Effective meetings improve not only yours but also the entire team's workflow. After

productive meetings, everyone manages their work time better and performs their tasks

more effectively. In addition, we’re able to schedule meetings and task deadlines with

more precision. And this, of course, entails substantial savings.

To make meetings more effective, it’s worth adopting the practices of large corporations,

e.g. send invitations to all the participants, present the topic and agenda of the meeting.

It’s also a good idea to make notes during the meeting and to send a summary of it to all

the participants after it ends.

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Your messages should not be complicated. The more easily you forward a given message or information, the greater is the chance that you'll be better understood.

ĭ REMEMBER

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Make sure that such meetings never last longer than an hour, because after that time

people begin to be simply tired and less focused. When choosing meeting participants,

we should limit ourselves only to those who are actually involved in the project – the fewer

people in the meeting, the more effectively it can be carried out. From my experience, it’s

also good to regularly ask questions during the meeting. Thanks to this, people forget less,

as they don’t have to look through their memory for things they want to clarify or explain.

Also, the meeting won’t be prolonged by asking unnecessary questions.

When it comes to meetings with my own team, some time ago, I had introduced a 10

minutes daily status. Because such meetings are regular and short, we can focus on

the most current and important aspects of our work. Day-to-day coaching allows team

members to understand what they do. And because everyone knows their tasks, people

feel more motivated and responsible to keep up with the deadlines.

We Stand Out From Our Competitors

As a female company in the SEO industry, which is mainly masculinized, we have it

twice as hard. When talking to clients, they sometimes accuse us of lacking the required

competencies. This is due to the fact that most men deal with the technical aspects of

SEO, and there’s a popular stereotype that we, women, lack competencies in this field.

We have over 10 years of experience in the industry and we have worked with various

clients on very demanding projects. However, because of this prejudiced belief, sometimes

we start to undermine our skills. In such moments, it’s good to have someone who

can stop you from questioning your professional value because of such negative

stereotypes.

In addition, I’d like to draw attention to a greater understanding of women. Because of our

empathy, we’re more flexible in difficult situations, we manage time better, and we always

give 100%. This is often seen in women with young children who return to work, but have

to take sick leave because their child is often ill. Despite the fact that they’re absent from

work, they usually catch up more quickly and efficiently after their return.

That’s why I highly recommend you to overcome your imposter syndrome and always

value your team for their competencies, experience, and points of view. Diversity adds a lot

to your company’s value and things like gender should not matter anymore.

The Groundwork for Growth

Based on my experience in creating and developing my company, as well as in gaining

new clients, I have to say that it’s not marketing or acquaintances with high-ranking

people that grow your brand and increase sales, but it’s...the quality of your services

and products.

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Even if you’re just starting your career as an entrepreneur and trying to get your first

contract, the most important element of what you say, present, and promise is quality.

In your offer, remember to emphasize quality-related attributes, and keep in mind that

everything you do should bring true value to your clients. At the end of the day, your

actions speak louder than words.

Guided by this principle, my team and I managed to acquire 5 clients from the European

market and 2 clients from internationally renowned brands.

Of course, to gain customers, you have to take care of some important elements that every

online business should have:

Ƿ Easy to comprehend, mobile and user-friendly website – no matter what you offer,

everyone checks your website before they start to cooperate with you. Make sure it’s

well-developed and designed so that it grabs the attention of your potential clients

and makes it easy to contact you.

Ƿ Take care of your SEO – nowadays it’s a must, so don’t neglect it. It takes time, and

effects won’t be visible right away, but it’s an investment that will eventually pay off in

the end.

Ƿ Besides SEO, take care of your online visibility – set up social media profiles, ask

your clients to leave you reviews, so that you could be more credible to any potential

customer who seeks for a business like the one you have.

A New Business Is Not Born Overnight

To sum up, remember that starting a business is not an easy thing to do. It requires a lot of

your time, work, and money. So don’t give up when you see the first bump on the road. By

the end of the day, it’s worth it. You’ll be able to see how your “child” grows and develops,

which will bring you immense satisfaction.

// Katarzyna Iwanich – Co-Founder of Insightland.org, an SEO agency.

Expert in business relations with over 10 years of experience. She worked for and with JWT, Tesco, Allegro (Naspers Group), Liberty Direct.

mail: katarzyna.iwanich@insightland.org

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