Boost Your WooCommerce Sales Today: Proven, Budget-Friendly Strategies for Immediate Results

You have the products. You have the WooCommerce site. But your sales just aren’t where you want them to be. These strategies will instantly start to increase your WooCommerce sales!

Every solution recommended in this checklist is based on 3 main principles:

• Affordability
• Cost-effectiveness
• Simplicity

This list won’t cover the obvious “tips” that you may find in other guides. Ideas like improving product descriptions or adding high-quality images are a must.

If you haven’t done those already, start there.

What you really need are solutions that you can implement in minutes for just a few dollars.

Every strategy in this checklist includes helpful information based on our experience using, reviewing, and testing dozens of WooCommerce extensions from trusted developers, including:

• A recommended solution (WooCommerce extension)
• Cost and time required to implement
• Break-even point (based on a $25 product)
• Skill-level required

We’re not taking into consideration profit margins on products since they can vary drastically across stores. All calculations are based on a $25 product with a 100% profit margin for the sake of simplicity, but they will give you a clear idea of the potential.

Let’s get started and increase your WooCommerce sales today!

1. Recommend Related Products

Related products, sometimes displayed as “You may also like…”, are a great way to sell more of what you already have by simply recommending other products from your store. Essentially, it’s all about cross-selling, up-selling, and order bumps.

A basic version of this feature is built into WooCommerce’s free plugin. Go to a product’s settings page and find the Linked Products section. From there, you can add related products, up-sells, and cross-sells. They can be added on each product page or even at checkout. But it is a bit limited.

There are premium solutions that add more options when setting up related products. For example, the Growanizer plugin adds conditional rules, giving you more control over which products are recommended across your store.

If you’re after something like Amazon-style product suggestions, there’s also the Recommendation Engine plugin with which you can introduce related products by purchase history or even a “Products purchased together” section.

We personally really like the Sales Booster solution from Iconic. It enables you to use proven techniques such as “frequently bought together” and “order bumps” with just a few clicks.

2. Sell Product Bundles

The likelihood is that you’ve experienced this tactic while buying something online yourself in the past. Product bundles offer an incredibly effective way of increasing your sales numbers and average order value (AOV).

Combine two or more of your existing products that are frequently bought together (tactic 1 above can help you figure out which combinations to create), offer a small discount if they are bought as part of your amazing new bundle, and watch that total cart value go up instantly.

Considering how simple it is to implement something like this and the impact it can have on your store, the return on investment will be instantaneous. If you need to sell two products to cover the cost of the plugin recommended below, a single bundle sale will put you in the green!

Bundles are an effective way to sell more, but they’re also convenient for your customers since you’re showing them exactly what they need in one place. Give it a go and see what impact it has on day 1.

3. Simplify Your Checkout Process

From your store to their cart, to checkout. That’s the customer’s journey once they’re on your website. Your job is to make that process as seamless as possible with as few required clicks as you can.

You can try to make your cart look better and the checkout page a bit cleaner, but it will be far more effective if you can combine the two and make it one seamless process! That’s where a WooCommerce shopping cart plugin comes into play.

A side cart or popup cart that includes the WooCommerce checkout process is ideal since your customers won’t have to leave the page they’re on. They can go from “Buy now” to “Pay” in seconds.

By taking away as much of the friction a customer comes into contact with as possible, you will have fewer abandoned carts, and your customers will be much happier with their experience, making it more likely that they will come back and recommend you to their family and friends.

4. Make Searching More Convenient

There are two key ways you can help customers find and buy more products from your store. To start off, we’re looking at product search.

The default WooCommerce and WordPress search functionality is limited, so opting for a search plugin that integrates perfectly with WooCommerce will solve this problem with ease. We have a few recommendations for you in our WooCommerce search plugins comparison.

A more robust product search solution can instantly increase your WooCommerce sales. For example, it can add search suggestions as your customers type a product name, offers spelling correction, includes a live search preview as the customer types, and so much more.

Below is our recommended solution for improving the search field in your store, but there’s also another search you can improve – product filtering. Using a solution such as WooCommerce Product Filters can significantly improve customer experience by allowing them to filter through your product archive by price, category, attribute, color, stock, taxonomy, and much more.

5. Simplify Your Shop Pages

The second way you can make it even simpler for customers to find and buy products is by converting your shop pages into an order form using a product table or product catalog.

This may sound too simple to be true, but it works wonders for eCommerce stores. By changing the layout of your shop page or even offering it as an alternative view, you could increase sales and average order value with just a few minutes of work.

Most stores show a standard grid layout with big pictures and not much product data, assuming that the customer is happy to access each individual product page to learn more, choose their options, and add the item to their cart.

What you’re not considering is that this format is not appropriate for a big proportion of products. Many types of items sell better when presented as a quick one-page order form.

Customers are able to see all the product data up-front, choose variations and quantities, then add multiple products to their cart in one go without ever leaving that one shop page.

Using this alongside tactic number 4 – a floating cart – will work wonders for you.

6. Inspire Customers with Instagram

Social proof has so much power nowadays. If you see others raving about a product, you’re far more likely to look for and buy that product yourself. Your customers are no different.

Give them what they’re looking for by posting your products on Instagram, asking customers to tag your brand on their Instagram posts, and then sharing both directly on your website, auto-magically.

There are two ways you can do this. The first is to simply embed an automatically-refreshed Instagram gallery that showcases your Instagram posts and possibly those that your customers post.

The second, and even more effective, is to create a shoppable Instagram gallery so each post link to the product that it features. That way, when a customer clicks on the photo that they like in the gallery, they’ll be taken directly to the product that caught their eye.

Just like that, you can boost your WooCommerce sales by posting product photos to Instagram.

7. Introduce Urgency with Promotions

Sales, sales, sales. Some love them, and some love to hate them. The truth is that when it comes to eCommerce, they work. 

By creating enticing promotions at the right time of the year, such as holiday periods like the 4th of July, Black Friday or Christmas, you can generate a ton of revenue in a very short period of time.

Combine some of the tactics listed here to make even more of an impact. For example, tactic 5 combined with tactic 11 below can result in a huge increase in website traffic from engaged customers that are looking to save a few dollars during a sale period or while they do their holiday shopping.

Make promotions seasonal. Don’t offer discounts all year round, or you’ll start to devalue your brand. It might work for a few businesses, as we see with online stores such as ASOS, but in the majority of cases, you’re better off sticking to seasonal sales.

8. Recover Lost Customers

Losing customers is a given in eCommerce, but not all lost customers are gone forever. Some can be brought back and recovered with some very simple automations.

Cart recovery is one of the simplest ways to bring in more revenue. The person who visited your store, added something to their cart, and then left; is ready and primed to buy. You just need to bring them back one more time, perhaps with a small discount to entice them further. 

We’ve reviewed a few plugins that can handle cart abandonment in different ways, such as Retainful, Abandoned Cart Pro, and Cartboss. For our own software products, we use Recapture, which has also been quite effective.

As you can see, there are plenty of solutions available for cart recovery. We can recommend any of them, but the truth is that if you invest a little more, you can get a far more robust solution called Autonami which we’ve been really impressed by.

We have written about Autonami on a couple of occasions before – when discussing CRMs and marketing automation, and in our Clickfunnels vs WooFunnels comparion. Our WooCommerce audience loves this tool. It’s well worth the investment considering how much revenue you can recover on a weekly basis.

9. Create a “Best Sellers” List

How many times have you been on a website like Amazon and looked through the “Best Sellers” or “Recommended Products” sections? We don’t know how truthful those recommendations are, but the fact of the matter is that they convert very well.

Showing your customers what other people are buying will encourage them to look through and add a sense of approval to that product. We all want to be included, and if that means owning something that many others like us also own, we’re likely to go for it.

Creating a “Best Sellers” list on your website or even tagging products as “Best Seller” on the shop page (or using the product filters we mentioned above) is as simple as clicking a few buttons.

Whether you believe in this idea or not, it’s worth a try considering how simple it is to set up (plus, it’s free). The free blocks that are included with WooCommerce include a “Best Selling Products” block that can be added to any page and instantly display your best sellers according to WooCommerce data.

10. Add New Payment Options

You might like using PayPal to buy stuff online, while your friend prefers to use a credit card. Either way, you’re both going to want to use your preferred payment method when the time comes, so why are your customers any different?

They’re not, which is why offering multiple payment methods and options makes the likelihood of converting a customer that much higher.

There isn’t just one recommendation we can make here. It depends entirely on the most popular payment gateways used by your target audience. If you sell locally, look at what friends and family use most. 

If you sell internationally, your best bet is to offer all popular gateways and listen for feedback from customers for any additional payment options they may prefer. This is where your customer support team’s skills will come into full effect.

11. Build Your Email List

Last but not least, the one thing we recommend that all stores do is set up an email marketing strategy. Despite what you might think, email is still the best way to communicate with your customers and get a huge return on investment.

There are many email marketing integrations and platforms, such as Sendinblue, to consider, so you have to find the one that works best for you. Being able to use these tools to communicate with your customers about sales, cart recovery, and so on can be great for your business.

If you don’t have a list yet, set one up and start collecting email addresses. One way to do this that is very effective is offering first-time visitors a 10% discount if they sign up for your email list. It’s effective since you’re offering people something of monetary value in return for access to their inbox.

Since we mentioned Autonami above, I have to mention it again here. As one of their customers explains:

“Like many people we have used Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, you name it, we have tried them all at one point or another, and NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, compares to Autonami. You can now control everything and tie all your marketing in with your WordPress website. Autonami is WONDERFUL and their support is top notch!”

Ready? Get Started Today

Investing in every strategy listed above will cost you the following:

• $650 to $1,000 to buy the plugins
• 9 to 13 hours to implement the solutions

Not every strategy will apply to your store, so pick and choose the ones that apply best. Whether you start small or go all out, the important part is to just get started.

With today’s constantly evolving eCommerce landscape, ensuring that your WooCommerce store remains competitive and appealing to customers is critical to your survival.

The strategies outlined above are proven to not only enhance the user experience but also to drive sales and boost revenue.

Just look at your own online shopping experiences, and I’m sure you’ll come across most or all of these strategies in action on major eCommerce stores.

Whether it’s by harnessing the power of visual storytelling through Instagram, simplifying the shopping journey from product discovery to checkout, or leveraging the appeal of urgency and exclusivity, each tactic serves a unique purpose in enticing more customers.

Plus, the idea of reintroducing lost customers and continuously updating payment methods speaks volumes about the necessity of adapting and keeping up with customer needs and preferences.

As with any business venture, consistency is key. The implementation of these strategies requires commitment, regular review, and fine-tuning based on how your market shifts over time.

But when executed effectively, these tactics can transform your WooCommerce store from a mere online storefront to a thriving digital marketplace.

Do you want more eCommerce advice? Check out the rest of our WooCommerce tutorials.

Have you tried another strategy that worked well for you? Share it below, and we’ll include it in the list so other store owners can reap the benefits!