Having an online presence makes it easier for your target audience to find you. Nowadays, people are quick to turn to online searches when looking for a product or service. Moreover, now more than ever, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, people are spending their money on online purchases.

WordPress is a particularly excellent platform for building an eCommerce platform. It owes that to the various premade themes that are well suited for an online storefront. WordPress also has plugins that provide eCommerce features like product display, checkout features, among others. So if you have a WordPress eCommerce site and you wish you make the most of it, leading to more conversions, we have got you covered. Here are seven tips for a successful WordPress eCommerce.

1. Quality Images

Many online shoppers rely on product photos to get an idea of what the product looks like. People want to have a better understanding of what they are buying through the photos. You, therefore, need to ensure that your products’ images are of high quality and that they are taken from multiple angles. You can get a high-quality DSLR camera to take photos of your products. The cameras cost a fortune, but they offer a significant ROI.

Having zoom buttons on your images will help shoppers to get a closer view of the products. The better the pictures, the more engagement and sales you are likely to realize from your eCommerce site. Thankfully, WordPress has multiple methods to display high-quality images. From images sliders, Product Quick view to lightboxes, among others. These are features that may be available in your eCommerce theme.

High-quality photos tend to take up significant storage space. To ensure that your site is optimized for faster loading, you could use plugins like WP Smush Image Compression to reduce the file sizes, thereby improving your website speed.

2. Product Videos

Well, if product photos are the silver of a successful WordPress eCommerce, product videos are gold! Going the extra mile and taking videos of your products will give shoppers a better idea of their purchasing. Videos do an incredible job of showing customers how exactly it feels to use the product.

Ensure that the videos are high quality and that they showcase better angels of your product. ECommerce businesses may not allow customers to hold and feel the products as would be the case in a brick-and-mortar store, but videos are as close as it gets.

3. Product Titles and Descriptions

For a successful WordPress eCommerce, the product descriptions should be engaging, concise, and informative. Don’t be lazy and use a dull copy of the description from the products’ manufacturer. Instead, spice up the description and highlight all the essential features of the product. It is good to give as many details as possible, but do not get too carried away and write a whole essay in the name of a product description.

WordPress has extensions like WooCommerce Quick View that are useful for displaying product information. With the titles of your products, you should try to SEO Optimize the titles. Use keywords that most people would use to search for the product. Focussing on keywords helps to improve ranking with search engines.

That brings more traffic to your site that eventually leads to sales and profitability for your eCommerce business. WordPress has plugins like Yoast that great for SEO optimization. Yoast SEO is a great marketing tool that indicates aspects of your pages and blog posts that you could tweak to get more traffic.

4. Security

WordPress is very popular with websites, ranging from tiny blogs to large corporations. With its popularity, it is a hot target for cybercriminals. Most malicious cybercriminals are always on the hunt for vulnerabilities that they can exploit to hack a site and steal credentials and user data.

Online sites are usually at the risk of various attacks like man-in-the-middle attacks, spammers, phishing attacks, content injection, DDoS, malicious redirects, among others. Websites must use SSL certificates to load successfully over HTTPS and ensure encryption of the in-transit data.

If you need to secure multiple subdomains under a primary domain, we strongly recommend going for a wildcard SSL certificate. You can go for the inexpensive yet premium AlphaSSL wildcard or comodo positivessl wildcard certificate to secure your site. Other good practices are using strong passwords and usernames and enabling web application firewalls. It would be best if you did all you can to keep the bad guys away from your site, as that is bound to instill trust in your customers.

5. Clear Policies

Have transparent policies about returns, defects, undelivered items, etc. Clear policies give shoppers assurance when they are doing business with you. Your potential customers should not have to feel like they are in the dark when purchasing from your eCommerce site. Declare any additional charges that may be required of the customers transparently. Failure to have clear policies could paint your business in a bad light, and you could end up losing trust with your customers.

6. Simple Registration and Checkout Processes

Registration needs to be voluntary and quick. Coercing people to register to your email listing may scare potential customers away. Instead, you could offer incentives like discounts every time someone registers.
The purchasing, as well as the checkout processes, need to be seamless. Keep it short and easy. Only ask for the bare minimum details lest your customers abandon products in the shopping carts.

Ensure that your site optimizes a buyer’s experience right from the shop page to the checkout page. Also, it helps to have multiple payment methods since different customers have different preferences. For example, with WooCommerce available on WordPress, you can use Stripe, PayPal, cash, or bank transfers.

Furthermore, ensure your website is secure by installing an SSL certificate so that users can feel comfortable adding their card details. For ecommerce owners, we suggest buying a cheap ssl wildcard certificate to secure the website’s primary domain in addition to unlimited first-level subdomains under it.

7. Email List

Creating an email list is one of the sure ways of increasing engagement, both with existing customers and potential ones. It is crucial to have a newsletter sign up on your eCommerce site. You can utilize the email newsletters to inform your customers of sales, new releases. Incentivizing the process of signing to an email list with things like coupons and free eBooks will encourage more people to sign up. You can use plugins like OptinMonster or use email add-ons from iThemes.

Wrapping Up

The bottom line for any business is usually making profits. With that, there is a need to know the best ways to make the most profits from your business. As with anything, you do not know what will work for you until you try. Experimenting with different things will help you identify the best strategies and practices for your business.