Creating a downright online store is not that hard when there are plethora of platforms available including Magento, Shopify to WooCommerce or Zencart. However, considering the fierce competition in the eCommerce segment, starting an online venture is more about building credibility and making things perfect to boost conversions. For online retailers, success is a sure instance only if they know how to fetch new customers consistently and fill all the gaps on the website. At every step, they have to be careful not to fall prey to the costly mistakes that most retailers make and ruin their scope for earnings.

Whether retail merchants wish to launch an eCommerce store or get their existing store optimized, here are the most-obvious mistakes that they should be aware of to offer exhilarating user experience to their visitors.

# 1 Not having a proper plan for targeting

For an eCommerce site, one does not need a formal strategic plan, but still a simple plan on how to proceed and target the specific segments. You do not need a business plan as a roadmap for success but simply be aware of who are your customers, what they like, what you can sell to them and what customers are willing to pay for the products offered by you.

# 2 Not having a definite value proposition

Research identified that most buyers stay for some fraction of seconds on any online site before deciding whether they will purchase or leave for another shopping destination. The only thing that can affirm their decision to stay is a Unique value proposition of your store. Your value proposition will make you different from the rest sellers and exhibits what you have in offer for them. More strictly, the value proposition is a promising prospect from the retailers' end to deliver specific benefits to the customers and telling them why they are the best.

# 3 Hiding product details and information

Most online retailers make the mistake of hiding a lot of details like the complementary items added to the product, rebate or discounts, certain less-important features or the surcharges needed for delivery. They think that customers will love surprises and may get exhilarated after placing the order. But, the truth is customers feel tricked down in the instances where they have to pay more and did not know about it. So, even if you have best intentions of hiding some information, do not go for it as people like you to be straightforward especially about shipping and prices.

# 4 Ignoring after-sales customer treatment

You just can not forget the customers who have bought something or other from your store because they might be the one to return for their next purchases. Thus, make sure you offer them good experience even after the product sale. For this, retailers need to promote some prominent way of interaction with the customers afterwards like email, messages, push notifications, live chat and so forth.

# 5 Not emphasizing on SEO strategy with understanding of the market

SEO for eCommerce or any website predominately involves studying the competitors in the market and what are the keywords or key phrases that they targeting. You must not act silly and consider only keywords relevant to your business but should consider those quality keywords that can elevate your ranking in search engines above your competitors.

It is always better to learn from the mistakes of others than your own. These above illustrations are to make you and every aspiring retailer aware of the pervasive mistakes that might happen in eCommerce development. This will probably let your mind buzz with different ideas on how to avoid these mistakes and improve the scope of revenues for your store.

There is no denying the fact that WordPress provides a ton of features and flexibility. However, it still cannot do “everything” you want it to do. This is where WordPress plugins come to the rescue. There are around 40,000 plugins in the WordPress directory. These are meant to make up for the discrepancies in the core software. So, here is a list of plugins that will help you turn your ordinary website into a baroque masterpiece.

Have a look at the top 7 WordPress plugins that every website developer must know.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Looking for a comprehensive SEO solution for your website? If yes, this is the plugin developed for you. Yoast helps you with your website’s optimization. With this, you can optimize title, descriptions, content, XML sitemaps, and a lot more things easily. It helps streamline the website and boosts organic search traffic along with enhanced brand awareness.

W3 Total Cache

Nobody likes a slow website. That’s why, W3 Total Cache is here to increase the page load speed of website. It will reduce page load times, so that you can improve user’s overall experience and get top rank in Google. It is really easy to install and set up. It supports minification, GZIP compression and content deliver networks.

Canada Post Woocommerce Shipping Plugin

Canada Post Woocommerce Shipping Plugin allows you to provide live shipping rates to your customers in their shopping cart and during checkout. This multilingual is compatible with WPML and ideal if you ship within Canada or worldwide. Your customers can track their order and get an email notification time to time about the package.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is the best contact form plugin for WordPress websites. It allows you to create custom registration forms. This powerful add-on can be used for online survey, user submitted posts or almost anything where you want your users to give their input. Choose your own fields, configure options and build powerful contact forms within a few minutes.

Uber Menu

Uber Menu helps you catch your customer’s attention. It makes it easier for the owner to control menu layout. You can add any HTML, shortcode or widget to your website menu. Apart from this, you can also insert pages, categories, terms or custom taxonomy terms as per requirements. It offers tons of options to make your website menu look beautiful and professional.

Sucuri

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress website? Simply use Sucuri plugin. Any website on the internet may fall victim to hackers or get attacked by malicious codes. So, it is better for the owner to be prepared rather than sorry. Sucuri is a security plugin that keeps your website secure from attacks. It offers malware removal service and acts as a security scanner. It is a must have security plugin for every WordPress powered website.

Envira Gallery

Do you have a photography site? Do you post a lot of images? Then, you would surely love Envira Gallery plugin. This is a responsive gallery plugin that helps you create eye-catching image galleries. This insanely quick plugin showcases all your content quickly. You can also add password, choose cover photos and do a lot more things with Envira Gallery.

Choosing the best plugin for your website is really important to deliver an amazing experience for your users. Don’t just pick any plugin, first think about why you need a plugin. Focus on your needs and then integrate a plugin to your WordPress website. The right plugin will surely take your website to the next level.

Today, most people rely on the internet to purchase things and so there is a considerable boom in the ecommerce business. Setting up your online store is no more a difficult task as we have numerous platforms that are used to develop eCommerce stores. We all know that WordPress had started its journey as a wonderful blogging platform, but today it has evolved into a robust solution that allows business owners to create a feature rich eCommerce website at effective rates. With WordPress and various plugins available, you are now able to create eCommerce sites for your business quite easily.

If you have plans to create an eCommerce site using WordPress, then here are some of the plugins that may fit your best needs. The plugins discussed here are free to use and are simply perfect for building any profitable WordPress e-stores.

WP eCommerce: This is a simple yet powerful WordPress eCommerce plug-in that has been there for the past many years. The plugin allows you to customize HTML and CSS, so that you enjoy full control on the look and feel of the e-store. Whether you are interested in selling physical inventory, memberships or subscriptions or even digital downloads, this amazing plugin helps to sell anything easily. With more than 2.9 million downloads, it is the second most popular plugin used by business owners. Its streamlined checkout process helps to dramatically increase the store’s conversion rate. And moreover the plugin integrates perfectly with many shippers and payment processors and helps to add extra functionalities to your store.

WooCommerce: This plugin is built by developers at WooThemes and is the most popular and widely used free plugin for WordPress website development. It is packed with top of the line features and this highly extendable plugin empowers you to create your site into a million dollar e-store. The best thing about this is that its golden collection for paid and free themes and extensions are best to meet your specific business needs. A WordPress development company can use PayPal Standard integration, multiple shipping options, easy inventory management, flexible couponing and etc.

Easy digital downloads: This is a feature rich and lightweight and simple to use eCommerce solution for selling digital downloads via WordPress at no cost. The plugin offers useful features that can keep selling digital goods and offers a powerful reporting system that allows you to see your earnings and sales through easy to analyze data tables and interactive graphs. It comes with more than 200 extensions and themes that can be easily customized according to your needs.

Jigoshop: This is another reliable and secured WordPress eCommerce plugin from Jigowatt. This plugin is best suited for SMEs and offers an intuitive dashboard through which you can easily set up and manage your e-store in minutes. You will be able to choose from more than 30 customizable themes based on your needs and enjoy over more than one hundred of powerful extensions to take your e-store to the next level. The various reporting features include sortable sales graphs and stock reports that allow you to check how your store is performing.

MarketPress: This plugin is an easily customizable, well designed and feature rich and the prime motive behind its creation is to deliver the users a beautiful and enjoyable online shopping experience without the need for any extensions. It is an effort to put the powers of various plugins together into a single eCommerce solution.

With the influx of internet and eCommerce, business trends have undergone a change. Internet has become one of the most popular platforms for marketing and promotion of products and services. eCommerce is certainly the best way to attract new customers across the globe. However, if you have a WordPress website and want to boost its web presence, wooCommerce development can help you in the best possible way.

What is wooCommerce?

wooCommerce is a powerful open-source eCommerce plug-in that aids in attracting more customers on a WordPress website and boost sales. This effective and efficient plug-in is flexible, extensible and easy to access. Any WordPress user, who wants to make his/her eCommerce website feature rich, can go for wooCommerce. Reputed outsourcing companies provide customized and affordable wooCommerce development services to enhance an eCommerce store with personalized theme designs.

Advantages of wooCommerce development

1.Cross sales and up sales– wooCommerce enables cross-selling as well as up-selling.

2.Payment gateways– The plug-in provides access to multiple payment gateways and cheque payment options along with BACS and cash on delivery.

3.Multi-locations shipping facility– wooCommerce provides shipping at a number of locations, international and regional as well.

4.Tools for data analysis– wooCommerce also provides tools that help in analysis of data. One can use Google Analytics integration to keep a track of the eCommerce store.

5.‘Share’ option– One of the most remarkable feature and benefits of availing wooCommerce development is that it offers components like Share This, Share Daddy and Share Your Cart, which allows customers to share their purchases with acquaintances and avail coupons.

6.Smart dashboard widgets– The plug-in helps one in monitoring the performance of the eCommerce store in an effective and efficient manner by using dashboard widgets and reports.

Why should one outsource wooCommerce development services?

1.Saves time and cost– Outsourcing wooCommerce development services can help an online store owner in saving company’s expenditure required to train employees and maintain state-of-the-art infrastructure.

2.Avail expertise– Reputed outsourcing companies have highly skilled and experienced professionals who have in-depth knowledge of maintaining an eStore. They help in enhancing the online store’s web presence with wooCommerce.

3.Provides a well-developed wooCommerce store– Experts can help one design an innovative wooCommerce store and customize it on a regular basis, as per business needs and requirements.

4.Round-the-clock support– Renowned outsourcing companies offer round-the-clock assistance and provide high quality services within a set time frame.

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin which allows you to get more from your WordPress website. It is a powerful and extendable plugin with more speed, strength, more built-in features, extensions, add-ons and more control, security and flexibility. WooCommerce aids you with all the features that your eCommerce store needs to progress, attract more customers and sell products. Professional WooCommerce developers can help you with more than just plug and play and create customized extensions to enhance your eCommerce functionality. Reputed companies providing WooCommerce development services are well aware of approaches to increase your sales by enhancing the areas that need improvement.

So, who should use WooCommerce?

You should opt for WooCommerce if,

• If you need an extensible, flexible and an accessible plug-in, equipped with specific payment gateways and additional shipping methods.

• If you would like to monitor the performance and other statistics via smart dashboard widgets and reports.

• If you want to personalize your eCommerce store with in-built short codes and widgets or are searching for customized WordPress eCommerce themes designed specifically to be used with WooCommerce.

• If you are looking for an intuitive, strong and efficient eCommerce solution employing the best practices both on the front as well as the back end.

Although, WooCommerce is relatively new, it has become one of the most preferred and used choices of open source code developers.

Salient features and advantages of availing WooCommerce Development Services-

• Widgets for cross sales and up-selling.

• BACS, cash on delivery and cheque payment options for simpler offline gateways.

• Smart eCommerce tracking through Google Analytics integration.

• Various components such as Share Daddy, Share This and Share Your Cart, which allow the customers to share their purchases with their friends and redeem coupons.

• Multi-locations shipping and facility for international as well as regional deliveries.

• PayPal and Mijireh Checkout gateways to add value to your payment modes and applications.

Benefits of outsourcing WooCommerce development and customization requirements-

• Improved scalability and performance of your existing WooCommerce.

• Cost effective WooCommerce development and store design services.

• Expertise to build, maintain and help eCommerce businesses grow.

• Their experts keep up-to-date with eCommerce trends.

• Provision to migrate your online presence to an innovatively designed WooCommerce platform.

• Strict adherence to the committed deadlines.

• WooCommerce customization services, version upgrades and capability to fix bugs.

• Manpower and dedicated Project Manager to provide timely updates and maintain regular communication.

• Module development based on customizations, extensions and integrations based on your specific requirements.

• Cutting-edge WooCommerce storefront customized to your specific needs.

• Round-the-clock support and assistance related to integrated components, frameworks and themes.

Emerged in 2011, WooCommerce is one of the most trending eCommerce plugins used by thousands of businesses worldwide. According to developers, it’s the easiest toolkit that let anyone start selling anything they want online as easily and beautifully as possible. Anyone who is thinking to step into online business with a vibrant store can give a definite try with WooCommerce, because of its ease-of-use and supreme flexibility. There are ample of quality-oriented CMS for eCommerce available now which endeavour to help businesses sell things online innovatively. However, what makes WooCommerce better than them? Here’s a key takeaway on how this acclaimed eCommerce plugin that help in developing revolutionary sites for online merchants.

#1 Offers Friendly environment

It comes first in the minds of the merchants and retailers because of its familiarity and the fact that millions of websites are built on WordPress and a thousand of eCommerce sites are in WooCommerce. Thus, owners can figure out easily that it is a reliable toolkit to use for their online shopping solutions and they are less likely to meet any issues why deploying it.

#2 Provides scope for enormous customisation

WooCommerce is perhaps one of the least rigid platforms that give more room to customise, improve and tweak in the online stores to a distinct level. Owners have the option to pick from among 30+ themes, paid as well as free. To give more customisation power to owners, it allows them to set CSS styles, any coloured theme, play with codes, fine-tune the features after enabling a theme.

#3 Prioritizes a professional look at the site

Despite a free and open-source, WooCommerce does not restrain the look of any online site into a plain one. It lets developers create professional and subtle websites because that is what it’s capable of. Further, an online solution built with it can get tools for detailed order tracking and viewing customer engagement. It helps store owners to have records of the customer orders, update statuses of shipments and delivery, apply discounts and so forth, all that are vital for a professional eCommerce store.

#4 WooCommerce Themes to spark up your store

Probably, the best reason for WooCommerce getting insanely famous among the eCommerce merchants and startups is its comprehensive set of themes. Its WooThemes has gained great attention for a while by creating stellar stores according to the nature of the business or specific requirements of the retailers.

#5 Allow galore of apps integration in sites

The platform has an amazing capacity to aid online merchants with the set up and store operations simply and conventionally. It allows all kinds of extra functionality to integrate into their site for providing improved convenience to customers. From an array of extensions, paid or unpaid, retailers can get application plugins for payment gateways, accounting, analytics, reporting, checking payment options and much more.

To roll up things, WooCommerce is a lucid eCommerce platform that gives away enough room to retailers and merchants to grow their online businesses. It has some promising and out-of-the-box features besides being flexible in terms of nature and extensions. More importantly, a platform with robust specialities and familiarity saves time as well as sorts all commotions in creating an online site whilst reinforcing enough creativity.

• Consider the Navigation of Your WooCommerce Store

We recommend you to flatten the navigation of your website. A flat website architecture shortens the number of clicks a customer will need to perform to reach their desired destination, and it’s a pretty popular model. They will display the links to their most popular pages plus any new or highly relevant content (like sales, or limited-edition products).

With the help of this flattened, condensed menu structure the number of clicks between the homepage and the deepest layer (or customer destination page) is greatly reduced. As a result, a visitor of your online shop will find the needed page easily. The most important of this navigation model is a great way to improve your SEO since it makes your site easier for search engine bots to crawl as well.

• Make your Products visible with Categories and Subcategories

One of the most common mistakes people make when designing a WooCommerce store it that they forget to add categories and subcategories. When a customer visits your store, it is very likely they need to sort items during their search and categories provide a quick way for them to do that. In addition, you can use the subcategories to further narrow results.

The first big reason is for SEO. The more specific pages you have with long tail key words the more likely it is that new customers will discover you in search engines like Google or Bing.

• Add Live Search to WooCommerce

In an effort to make it easy for your customers to find exactly what they want we also recommend using Live Search. These prospects will be able to view out the most popular and relevant search results of your eCommerce site in real time speeding up the online shopping process.

• Create Your Own Unique Product Descriptions

Here content is a king. You need to create a truly unique content without copy-pasting. In the end, duplicate content is another common mistake user do while building their WooCommerce stores.

It’s very easy to just copy and paste content from one product page to another. As tempting as this can be make your best to avoid it. You’ll find your pages will stand a much better chance of snagging a top search ranking if you write your own unique descriptions.

• Improve Content Internal Linking

Internal linking has always been a must thing for any successful online business. The idea is that visitors to your site read one blog article and click the links to other related posts. But today we are talking about WooCommerce sites specifically, and this is another common mistake of eCommerce website owner.

• Speed Up Your WooCommerce Store

Increasing your site speed makes your SEO better. Search engines like Google take page load times into consideration. It’s more likely for a page that loads in a second or two to rank higher than a page that takes thirty. Secondly, today even a 5-seconds delay will make your customers want to leave and it’s a top contributor to an increased bounce rate.

Thinking of starting your own eCommerce venture? Well, in that case, you will need to build a website first. Starting a business involves a huge investment in diverse segments and building an entire eCommerce site is undoubtedly the most crucial part of it.

According to worldwide developers and market analysts, WooCommerce is an excellent choice for devising eCommerce sites for startup businesses. Why? Well, read on to know.

→ WooCommerce is Free

Yes! You read it right. You can get this amazing eCommerce development platform in free of cost. Worrying about the quality? No need to do that. Despite being an open source free platform, it is going to offer you extensive and out of the box features that will not only enhance the functionalities of your online store but will make it more flexible which is befitting for startup businesses.

→ Wide Customisation Options

In an eCommerce business, customisation of the store is very important. It can help you to present your online store the way you want. Suitable customisation makes your store unique and helps you to stand out from market competitors.

Multiple themes are available free of cost. You can choose any of these options that suit your business type the most. More interestingly, depending on the theme you select, you can make necessary changes in the colour style, CSS styles and experiment with the store features.

→ Familiar Friendliness

WordPress platform is pretty much popular as almost 51% of the hugely acknowledged websites are WordPress-built. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin and most of the developers are already well versed with the diverse functionalities and features offered by WordPress.

Now, working with WooCommerce becomes extremely easier for them as they are already kind of familiar with the working environment. Working on a familiar interface definitely helps to avert major complications as well as to save time and bring out the best creativity.

→ Flexibility

When you are new in this eCommerce business and building websites, not having an in-depth technical knowledge is not a sin! The interesting fact about this platform is that it will not let you feel lost in the race. You can easily categorise your products, can add independent attributes, give your desired sale prices and many more.

Moreover, WooCommerce-built stores can sell any type of products including virtual, physical, downloadable and external or affiliate products. This utmost flexibility is one of the main reasons of this platform being very popular with the startups.

→ Easy Analytics

Accurate and precise store analysis helps to understand business owners direction of the business such as how the store is performing. Statistical figures such as total orders and sales, business graph, sales by date, individual statistics of customers etc. will help the store owners to understand whether the business is performing in an expected way or not. In this way, you can set your next strategies to enhance the productivity.

If you opt for WooCommerce platform, it will give you a room for future growth that is very crucial. Suppose you started as a startup and now, your business is expanding. In this platform, making necessary changes will be extremely easier. Additionally, the vast range of available plugins is another reason behind its immense popularity.

So, if you are looking for such a platform that will give a professional look to your business site yet simple in nature, yes, this is the best option for you!

Woocommerce has gained immense recognition in the recent years and its popularity is not hidden from anybody. It is one of the world’s favorite eCommerce systems, loaded with all basic and advanced features. Actually, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, yes it is a plugin which converts WordPress into an online shopping store.

Highly flexible and intuitive, it provides a user-friendly interface with power packed features. To make it easy for the online retailers, Woocommerce took a step forward to let anyone open an e-commerce store within seconds. Let us dig deep into WooCommerce theme development tutorial and avail the benefits of this super plugin for free:

Significance of WooCommerce

Since WordPress is helpful in making all types of portals, Woocommerce can help online retailers to design their webshop with advanced security features. Also, with Woocommerce it is possible to keep a track record of monthly sales, taxes and day to day activities. With the increasing popularity of digital media, people are investing their time in creating unique online stores. And how’s that possible? With Woocommerce, custom theme development is done which even start-ups can avail. Here are the mind blowing features:

1. It is an open source content management system

2. To avail the latest features and options, some amount is required whereas the basic features are free. So to build your own shopping store, WordPress Woocommerce site is a cost-effective business model.

3. The shopping cart is secured to offer an enjoyable experience.

4. Ample of themes are available to choose from which promote easy customization.

5. To enhance the functionality, infinite features and lists can be added accordingly

6. Featured with multi-shipping gateway to deliver the products in various countries.

Also, the multi-payment option allows paying via varied platforms.

What is Woocommerce Theme Development?

Woocommerce is a CMS which is integrated within WordPress to offer an easy shopping platform to the e-retailers. By creating a custom theme in Woocommerce, you get an astounding theme as a result which can then be used to build your own store. With Woocommerce, you really can expect your business to grow by leaps and bounds but only if the theme development is up to the mark, attractive and has all the important features highlighted. The most essential features which every theme has to have are:

Beautiful layout of the website which when the viewers see feel good and spend more time in exploring your product range.

To offer an amazing shopping experience, the website must have categories and subcategories so that people can narrow down the filters.

A gorgeous looking website enhances the chances for conversions and sales.

Integration of Google Analytics for better tracking

Quick loading of pages to decrease the bounce rate.

Woocommerce theme development is not that challenging as you might think. All it needs your time and efforts to kick-start the whole process and the results are awesome when:

• WordPress and Woocommerce both are installed at your desktop
• Basic know-how of Woocommerce themes. If you don’t have, read the tutorials to get some knowledge.
• Proper knowledge of HTML and CSS to modify the coding part.

Steps to Woocommerce Theme Development

Let us now start with creating Woocommerce themes as it will give you complete control over how you want your website to look.

Declaring Woocommerce Support

To begin with creating a WooCommerce theme, it is essential to declare Woocommerce support first. It is to ensure that the users will get a pop up in the WordPress dashboard to say the Woocommerce plugin development doesn’t support the theme. To create or develop a theme, this step holds a crucial importance. If you want to declare the support, add this coding in a functions.php file in the theme:

Now after declaring the support, you should start creating a WooCommerce theme. Since Woocommerce is loaded with handsome features, you can use the default styles to create new styles from them. Once you are done updating the Woocommerce plugin, you will lose all the changes if any modification is done to the original files. I would suggest not editing any file rather create a new file to overrule the existing files in the source theme directory. Two steps are there to create new file:

Create a custom CSS

If the changes are of a small level, then this method works for you.

• Create a new CSS file
• Name it: custom-woocommerce.css
• Save it in the directory wp-content/themes//css
• Now in the foundation.php, include this.css file

Lastly to override the default style, add your CSS to this file.

The second method is to create a WordPress child theme. Basically, child theme has the features and functions of another theme which is called as parent theme. To change default themes, child themes are highly recommended.

Create a WordPress child theme

• Create the child theme directory and add “-child” to avoid compilation errors. Make sure not to leave any space in the name.
• Put it under wp-content/themes
• Create a child theme header
• Now enqueue the child and parent theme stylesheets

It is all ready! You need to activate the child theme now by logging into the site’s admin panel. Navigate to Administration panel>appearance>themes. Here, you will see the child theme ready for activation.

WooCommerce Theme Development Conclusion

Learning how to create a custom theme in Woocommerce is definitely a daunting task for those who are not much aware of the coding. Having to create a theme needs you to possess good coding skills. With this tutorial, you have got an advanced insight to WooCommerce theme development. Now it is easy to make your website look exceptional in terms of layout and features, isn’t it? Enjoy the process!