WooCommerce empowers thousands of website builders around the world to totally master their eCommerce businesses. Some chose WooCommerce from day one to build their shops, others switched to WooCommerce from another platform to find a better solution to optimize their website to meet the latest trends in the fast growing industry.
I came up with the idea of this roundup of excellent WooCommerce websites to find out how they run their WooCommerce shops, and what extensions and themes they are using for their stores. Also, I’m going to summarize some best practices for running a successful eCommerce store with effective support from WooCommerce.
I hope that these examples from all around the world below can give you some ideas for your own WooCommerce project.
The Feed.com
Products:
Food for athletes, like snacks, chews, hydration and recovery drinks, shakes, …
Starting as advanced WordPress users, The Feed.com came across WooCommerce because of the WooCommerce subscription plugin as they wanted to enhance their subscription management and this plugin served their needs perfectly.
Observations:
The Feed.com website is a great example of focusing on the users’ shopping experience.
Not only providing many high quality nutriments, The Feed.com also helps their customers to find useful advice about the use of healthy food for athletes and sport lovers through articles about each product. Inside each product box, there is a specific description and usage information with personal notes for customers.
The Feed.com also keeps every customer’s shopping history, with details of food allergies, favorite sports, or special training needs, etc. to refer them the most suitable food and drinks.
In addition to running a complex eCommerce website with many functions and specialized customizations, they also want to keep their pages safe and secure as well. So, The Feed.com does not want to integrate 3rd party components when trying to make extensive customizations to the Ship Station integration.
The Feed.com also used WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell subscription products and deliver them to customer every 4 weeks. Both one-time and subscription products can appear in one cart and customers can easily add one-time products to subscriptions and edit them at any time.
Although they already have many great WooCommerce features, they still want to improve other functionality, such as having faster administration, better inventory management and notes, and basic CRM comments integration.
Lessons learnt:
If you’re selling products, try to personalize product categories for customers like the Feed.com does. Keep every detail of your customer’s shopping history and make sure that they can see how you really know their needs in person above selling as many goods as possible.
Selling goods with Subscriptions is one of the best methods for establishing long-term relationships with your customers. This solution is way better than selling for once and hoping they will come back. More importantly, you can maintain their habit of regular shopping on your shop as well as building customer loyalty.
Trendy Resumes
Products:
Resume template service, online resumes and resume design for Microsoft Word simple edit while maintaining the great look of your CV when you use Photoshop.
Observations:
Trendy Resumes decided to go with WooCommerce because of its prompt updates with the latest version of WordPress, the variety of great extensions especially WooCommerce’s digital download feature, which is a perfect fit for their purpose.
Trendy Resumes website design focuses on branding and style, with creative and unique illustrations. They have easily mastered their site’s appearance through a little WooCommerce theme customization, thanks to its easy to configure features.
Trendy Resumes have integrated the WooCommerce Products Add-on extension to adjust some additional options for their product packages; for example, hosting, cover letter and portfolio come with resume templates. The Payment gateways for WooCommerce plugin is also integrated to provide multi payment gateways for customers from over the world to purchase easily.
Trendy Resumes now are using social media as a central part of their marketing strategy. In order to drive genuine traffic to the website as well as maintain a high ranking on Google to drive sales, Trendy Resumes especially focus on white hat SEO.
Lessons learnt:
Building a powerful and neat website takes a lot of time and effort. You also need to create your unique and professional branding from the start. White hat SEO with good content is the most sustainable way to achieve your long-term website development goal.
Besides, for a small or medium size business which provides a personal service like Trendy Resumes, social media works over emails in promoting products and increasing conversion rates without being busted as spam.
Striiipes.com
Products:
iPad accessories, shirts, lunch bags, card holders, clutch bags, belts, etc.
Even you’re not a professional CMS developer; you can still build an online store to sell overseas, all by yourself.
Striiipes.com originally started with a Paypal link on each product page. However, it was not a good solution when there is no shopping cart, shipping fee issues, etc. Arthur Lhermitte – Striiipes.com’s owner said that he found WooCommerce simply via Google search and realized that this plugin could provide what his store needs.
Observations:
Striiipes.com is a typical example of a DIY eCommerce store based on the WordPress platform. Arthur built Striiipes.com in only 48 hours with WooCommerce.
One of the best extensions that Striiipes.com uses is the Bundle Rate Shipping module for WooCommerce, to manage shipping fees. Although Striiipes.com displays in English, they still want some adjustments to their site. So, WooCommerce Product Tabs was integrated to easily add a French product description tab below each product.
Recently, Striiipes.com has taken advantage of WooCommerce’s easy customization to create a big change in its website design to catch up with the ongoing trends in web design. For example, well-crafted product images display in a full-width window, and detailed product descriptions as well as a beautiful homepage draw customer attention.
Lessons learnt:
We’ve learnt from a French man how to run a website in style; you’d better focus on the homepage to impress your customers at first sight. Create a stunning place for your products to totally take the stage along with great copy.
If your strategy is selling overseas with the most affordable price like Striiipes.com, the Bundle products plugin with flexible shipping is a must-try.
Dark Horse
Products:
Accessories for men and women, furniture and architectural projects
This super elegant and modern website entered eCommerce business in June 2011 with huge support from WooCommerce from the beginning.
Observations:
Dark horse supports different currency like Rand, Dollars, Pounds, and Euros. You will be impressed by the responsive and fashionable design of this website. They also highlight their goods with unique and well-taken photos. Creating a full-width window for the products to take the stage is always effective to make the most seamless shopping experience for customers.
Although Dark horse reveals that WooCommerce is such a powerful platform for them to reach both local and international customers, they still expect a better integration with their other systems and improvements to the product editing interface and navigation as well.
Lessons learnt:
With online stores which are selling fashion and architecture stuff like Dark Horse, beautiful photography and great UX is very important. Product images and website design need to be very aesthetic and attractive in harmony. This also helps a lot in boosting website conversions.
Nicsocks.com
Products:
Limited edition socks made of bamboo fibre
Nicsocks.com was founded in South Africa. With a combination of WooCommerce plugin and Obox theme, this exciting eCommerce project immediately gained fantastic success: 800 pairs of socks in only the first 10 days and now 10,000 pairs of socks a month.
Observations:
Nicsocks.com has massive orders, mainly from South Africa, and obviously they all use the Rand for purchasing, not dollars. However, Paypal hasn’t allowed the Rand as a currency yet.
So, Nicsocks.com integrated Peach Payments – an online local payment processor to solve this problem. This functional plugin supports payment gateways in many emerging markets, including Africa, with many new WooCommerce extensions for subscriptions, checkout pages, etc.
A newsletter with good content to show useful tips and updated styles is a really effective way to reach customers in this niche eCommerce market. Nicsocks.com also focuses on Instagram – their main social channel which has the most valuable conversions. They are now still using Instagram to communicate with their target audiences.
Lessons learnt:
For local eCommerce websites which want to optimize WooCommerce as their platform for selling things, the Peach Payments plugin which was developed for Africa and other emerging markets is the best choice to fix the current Paypal shortcoming.
Like other online stores, Nicsocks.com also tries their best to build up their brand. More specifically, they promote their website and products in famous men’s fashion magazines and publications like in GQ, Men’s Health and The Guardian to enhance SEO by driving organic traffic. You can take this lesson for your brand’s reach-out strategy.
A proper choice of the social media channel where the majority of your prospects are can help you reach your target audiences (in this case is Instagram). This contributes a great effect to your entire marketing strategy. Also, remember to focus on customer support via calls, emails, live chat or social media channels too..
Besides enhancing small and medium online businesses successfully, WooCommerce also can handle the massive number of products, orders and the traffic of many huge eCommerce websites from all over the world. Check out some of the best WooCommercce case studies for more insights:
WooThemes
Products:
WooCommerce extensions and themes
Observations:
Of course, WooThemes – the maker of WooCommerce can totally maximize all the powerful features of this function-rich plugin. WooThemes itself is probably one of the most extensive case studies of WooCommerce.
According to Mark Forrester – Co-founder of WooThemes: Although they only have around 350 products, they have nearly 500,000 registered WordPress users, and average 8,500 orders a month. That’s such a fantastic database of order records.
You may be familiar with WooThemes product pages that always have the most intuitive and user-friendly interface along with details of product descriptions, live demos, documentation, etc.
Lessons learnt:
Besides incredible products, great customer service is an important factor that sets WooThemes apart from other rivals in the industry. You can read more to find out how they plan to improve customer support in 2015 via this insightful sharing from Danny Santoro.
Invest time and effort on content-rich and useful blog posts as well as enhancing product quality to provide value to your customers is the best way to get rewards from them.
Alef Books Store
Products:
Over 34,000 books and book accessories
Observations:
At first, Alef Books store used Opentaps – an open source ERP system to host over 34,000 products. However, the server sometimes ran out of memory when they were handling 34,000 products at the same time. Besides, identifying products also required a complex and heavy query to execute.
They switched to another CMS platform WordPress with WooCommerce integration to find a better solution to manage their huge system.
Therefore, a copy of this function was created that omitted these checks and turned off the automatic commit while updating. These last changes reduced the time required to update the quantities for the more than 34,000 products to fewer than 2 minutes.
Lessons learnt:
With the huge amount of physical products selling on large eCommerce sites like Alef Books store, the ability to track and update the many thousands of goods within their inventory needs to be focused.
Integrating Wishlists like Alef Books store did is also a great way to increase sales as it allows your customers to save products in their wishlist so you will know which products have the love from customers. Enabling social media buttons on each product page aslo encourages customers to share your products on social media. This can create an effective spillover to help you reach your potential customers as well.
Wrapping up
WooCommerce and its extensions can empower all sizes of eCommerce stores from small to large, to help them sell goods overseas from clothing, wine, socks to digital products and everything in between. Learning from real WooCommerce stores for best practices and takeaway lessons can give you some hints to master your own online business.
There are also many great examples of eCommerce websites around the world who enjoy running their store with WooCommerce. What about your stories? Feel free to share with us your stories with WooCommerce!
The post How eCommerce Stores Around the World Have Been Doing with WooCommerce? appeared first on WooRockets.