How To Manage A WooCommerce Store
Tags: khaledmusarraf
Published: 2021-05-10 20:14:16

 WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It allows you to convert your WordPress website into a web store and helps you manage it also . Opening a web store is fairly easy with the assistance of WooCommerce, but when it involves long-term management, you’ll need expert guidance and extensions to extend functionality and performance.
Managing a WooCommerce store can sound overwhelming at the start . Especially as WooCommerce offers many extension and add-on plugins to feature further tools on your website. Luckily, WooCommerce is provided with thousands of extensions like payment and shipping gateways, shopping carts, marketing, SEO tools, and far more to assist you manage your store with ease.
Keeping track of every plugin, its speed, performance, and compatibility with other plugins may be a full-time job. Thus, we are here to inform you ways to attenuate the plugins but still create the foremost user-friendly site that’s easy to manage and upgrade.
The Perfect Strategy to Manage a WooCommerce Store
There is tons more to managing a WooCommerce store than simply adding plugins and updating them. Identifying the necessity for your website and selecting the proper tool for it’s surprisingly very difficult once you need to undergo thousands of options.
To create the right website for your store, you would like to possess all the essential features available. This includes finding the simplest hosting providers, fixing payment gateways, providing your customers with multiple shipping options, and optimizing your store with add-ons. Once your website is made , you would like to update and maintain it routinely to urge optimum speed and performance.
I wish we could say we’ve all the answers right here, but there’s tons more to read ahead so as to make the right strategy and work thereon . By optimizing the subsequent sections on your WooCommerce store, you’ll manage it easily without heaping your site with unnecessary features.
1. Managed WordPress Hosting
If you’re not conversant in WordPress or WooCommerce workings, then likelihood is that you would like a managed hosting provider to require care of the management of your online store. A hosting provider helps you found out , organize, and manage your site easily. It optimizes your site’s performance and elevates your customers’ shopping experience.
If a customer experiences functionality issues, speed problems, and security concerns on your website, then the probability of sales decreases by tons . Thus, so as to stay your website in excellent condition, you need an honest hosting provider at your back.
There are many features provided by a hosting service. for instance , Hosting services monitor your site regularly and inform just in case of any troubleshoot or error. It also prevents malicious attacks from hackers and viruses and provides grade-A security to guard your business data and customers’ tip . 24/7 customer support is additionally an important factor that you simply got to search for during a hosting provider.
There are many hosting services available but the simplest among them is WPEngine and Kinsta. WPEngine consists of three different pricing plans, which you’ll choose consistent with the dimensions of your business. It provides a substantial amount of storage and bandwidth per plan and focuses on performance, integration, and seamless workflows. Kinsta is another powerful hosting platform and provides a high-security network, developer-friendly infrastructure, and high-quality WordPress and customer support, and far more.
2. Bullet-Proof Security
Security may be a major concern for all online stores. WooCommerce stores are susceptible to malicious attacks from hackers, viruses, etc. thanks to its popularity. Thus, managing store security is additionally vital for customer satisfaction and optimizing your store.
If you employ managed hosting services, then you don’t got to worry about security. Hosting providers apart from performance control, specialise in security the foremost . they supply your website with high-quality security measures like SSL certificates, PCI compliance, protection from brute force attacks, and far more. They monitor your site 24/7 to stop attacks and cover-up blind-spots. Once your security is taken care of, you’ll focus all of your energy on managing your WooCommerce store.
Although, there are certain measures you’ll absorb order to further solidify your website’s security. This includes enabling 2-Factor Authentication, limiting login attempts, choosing a robust password, customizing URLs, and changing default admin login. Almost 80% of hacker attacks are thanks to a weak password and using the default login settings, thus such small and necessary measures can make an enormous difference.
To add security measures to your website it’s recommended to use one among the simplest WordPress security plugins. These all have core features to assist improve your overall web security. But some like Cerber Security offer added features specifically for WooCommerce stores. These include full compatibility with WooCommerce and added reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce forms.
3. Good Customer Service
In today’s eCommerce community, making your brand stand out may be a difficult job. there’s tons at stake and you would like to supply a user-friendly frontend to win customer’s approval. the rationale why retail stores are slightly easier to manage than online stores is because you’ll directly interact together with your customers and obtain to understand their concerns and queries.
To enable customer engagement in your online store, you’ll want to think about a live chat or helpdesk plugin for customer support. the higher the support, the more your customers are likely to open up to you. The advantage of engaging together with your customers on a private level helps in building confidence and trust. a number of the simplest customer support plugins available for WordPress also work great with WooCommerce. for instance , the free Awesome Support helpdesk and LiveChat for WooCommerce plugins are both great options.
A customer is more likely to recollect the service provided instead of the merchandise . Thus, making a positive first impression together with your helpful customer support is differently to elevate the shopping experience and manage your store directly through customer reviews.
4. Products and Inventory
One of the foremost tiresome tasks of getting a web store is keeping track of inventory, especially if you are doing not have an automatic system to assist you out. Large-sized businesses affect unlimited products and multiple shopping carts, and thus it’s quite difficult for them to update inventory at each store.
If your products aren’t properly listed, don’t have relevant information provided, or are mislabeled available , this reflects poor management on your part and affects customer satisfaction. Thus, it’s necessary to update products and inventory regularly.
WooCommerce offers basic inventory management options built into the core plugin. Located under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory these include options to feature available items, enable low stock notifications to an admin, add out of stock notices and a couple of other simple options within the most WooCommerce settings. For more advanced inventory options a number of the foremost popular and effective product management plugins for WooCommerce include TradeGecko, WooCommerce Stock Manager and Smart Manager.
5. Shipping and Payment Methods
When you sell physical products, shipping is another burden. The further workload involves setting shipping charges, providing multiple shipping methods, and enabling multiple locations where your product can reach. it’s a frightening task and hard to manage if you sell internationally. a quick and reliant shipping procedure will help in increasing recurrent purchasing and build reliability also .
With the assistance of WooCommerce plugins and extensions, you’ll manage shipping products easily. WooCommerce shipping plugins typically provide multiple shipping rate methods, logistic assistance , and enable order tracking. Some commonly used shipping plugins are ELEX USPS, Aftership, WooCommerce Advanced shipping, etc.
Another feature that’s a requirement for a web store may be a payment gateway. they assist in optimizing income and enable options for patrons to pay through cash, credit, bank transfer, or debit cards. Many of the main payment processors like Stripe, Square, and PayPal are all available via WooCommerce payment gateway plugins. When choosing the simplest option for your website take into consideration your audience , simple use and security.
6. Plugins and Extensions
To further simplify the management of your online WooCommerce store, you’ll choose between many WooCommerce addons and extensions. But, we also got to minimize and control our use of unnecessary extensions to optimize performance and management. Unnecessarily filling your site with plugins can potentially affect speed or maybe cause conflicts with other essential plugins. Luckily, as WooCommerce is an open-source platform, it allows you to feature functions consistent with your requirement.
The extensions offered for WooCommerce are divided into many categories, a number of these are; handcart , social proof, form builder, subscription and membership, coupons and discounts, email marketing, product management, etc. there’s an addon plugin available for almost any functionality imaginable. Just take care to assess your needs and cross-plugin compatibility before adding new WooCommerce extensions to your site.
7. Regular Updates
As we’ve mentioned a number of the essential tools required to manage your WooCommerce store, it’s necessary to state the very fact that these tools themselves require maintenance so as to work correctly.
You need to form sure that each one plugins, extensions, themes, and security measures are updated routinely to avoid compatibility issues, performance lag, and speed defects. Managed hosting providers lookout of those jobs, but if you’re self-hosting your website, then you would like to require a while out for this regularly.
One of the items that go hand in hand with updates is backup. Imagine losing all data during an update or glitch? It’s possible and it’s disastrous. a web store consists of confidential customer and business information, which if lost, could lead on to months or years of diligence within the drain. Thus, it’s important to always backup your data routinely to organize for the worst possible scenario. Read our WooCommerce backup guide to assist you within the process.
8. Analysis and Reports
Now that we’ve found out and managed most of the required features for our WooCommerce store, it’s time to manage the statistical a part of our sales and revenue. ensuring the plugins, features, and therefore the marketing techniques you employed are beneficial for your business may be a crucial step.
For general reports you’ll use the built-in WooCommerce Analytics to guage the success of your online store. From here you’ll view sales, revenue, refunds, average order value, discounts, shipping and more. Intuitive charts with filters and date ranges make it easy to ascertain your store performance at a look .
There also are many third party plugins and services available for this purpose, but the foremost popular among them is Google Analytics. It gives you extensive reports on real-time visitors, time spent by a visitor, best-selling products, frequently-visited pages, etc. And integration is straightforward because of the free WooCommerce Google Analytics addon. With an entire overview of your website and store performance you’ll devise future e-commerce strategies that are bound to succeed.
Managing a WooCommerce store can seem daunting, but with the assistance of the proper plugins and extensions, it becomes tons easier. WooCommerce may be a scalable platform that permits the user to make a tremendous website consistent with their preference. But an excessive amount of of anything is undesirable. Thus, it’s up to you to form sure all necessary plugins and extensions are compatible with one another , regularly updated, and don’t affect the performance of your website.
By choosing smartly, you’ll use many of those plugins for management and specialise in the expansion of your business
Developer Khaled Musarraf