 This is the WooCommerce talk about promoting and increasing conversions with WooCommerce core functionality. So let's begin. So real quick, my name is Tim Howe. I work for our Hall Internet Marketing. We're a Woo expert agency. I'm a web developer by trade, and that is my Twitter handle. I tweeted out these slides earlier, so if anyone wants to grab a copy or follow along, just check that out. What we're going to be talking about in this is really quick go over some core features that are in WooCommerce that I think are sometimes overlooked or underutilized. And we're going to just cover these topics of real quick product types, related products, upsells, cross-sells, ways to promote on your site, and then kind of the sales coupon deal, all the fun stuff. Just a quick note, this is all going to be stuff that is available in WooCommerce core, but it is very helpful to also have a theme that is WooCommerce compatible to make sure all these items work. Real quick, we're just going to start with product types. A lot of times, it's important to make sure you're using the correct product type for its intended need. Real quickly, the primary ones, just about 90% of sites we'll use, are going to be simple and variable products. Really quickly, simple products are essentially, I have a beanie hat. One size fits most. It comes in one color. There are no options, so it's a simple product. Variable products are something more like a shirt. I sell this shirt. It comes in different sizes, small, medium, and large, so we allow the customer options on selecting in that product. Essentially, that product is, in that scenario, there are three options. It's similar to having three separate products, but then displayed and promoted on a single page. Additional opportunities, which we'll be covering later, are grouped products. These are one of the items that is often underutilized. It can allow you an additional page for getting more traffic, something else for people to land on, but it's more for products that you have in your catalog that may be sold as a group together. So I sell a full outfit of shirt, pants, and hat. All of those can be sold separately on my site, but then I can also create them as a grouped product. So it alleviates a couple steps for my customers. They can then just purchase this one group product, get all three items sent right to them, and additionally, I then have another landing page where I can write unique content and copy to drive more traffic to my site. And last, external or affiliate products. We aren't really going to cover these, but they are a nice little feature in there if you do any affiliate selling. So this is especially helpful if you want to do drop shipping or something. Don't want to deal with actual inventory warehousing or actually shipping. You can create a product page, promote that product, and hopefully you'll have an affiliate link, and then it'll actually send them to another site where they make that purchase. The idea being you're providing the service of marketing for that other company. And they're handling all the actual logistics of running the e-commerce site for you. So there's also virtual and downloadable products we aren't going to really cover, in case your product is virtual or downloadable. So no actual stock on hand. So related products, upsells, and cross-sells. This is one of the bread and butter of e-commerce. It helps you organize and kind of catalog and set up your site to essentially allow customers to find exactly what they want and potentially something they didn't know you had. It's important to make sure you're categorizing and tagging products properly. Categories would be more general things for throughout your entire store. I like to think of again going to the apparel, like selling apparel or outfits. You may have a kids or men's, women's, kids categories as well as shirts, pants, all that. So tags are a little bit more loose, so you could use tags to maybe denote like colors, but then it also offers you another option to help customers find what they're looking for. Those taxonomies are what really drive related products. So related products are basically anything kind of related to the current product they're looking at. It's helpful, and we'll go through a couple of examples of kind of link building and showing off what you have in the store. Upsells are also usually displayed along with related products on the product page. These are helpful to allow you to kind of push people to buy higher margin products, so things that'll get you more revenue. And then cross sells are usually displayed within the checkout or cart area. It's just another opportunity to kind of get people to hopefully buy more. So we'll start looking at a couple examples of that. So here's a real simple, this is just using the storefront theme with stock WooCommerce and the WooCommerce sample data. I set up a store related products, so these are all kind of related because they are under the accessory category. So I'm selling a hat. Hey, you might want to buy some slick shades to go with a new hat, so I want to make sure you know I have that and potentially you'll buy a $80 pair of sunglasses as opposed to an $18 hat, or hopefully both. The benefit to this too is it's going to get you link building throughout your site, so as crawlers come here or even users, they're going to come to this one page and then notice you have a lot more accessories to offer. The one item that might prevent you from wanting to put related products on your product page is if they are on a very high margin product for you, you may want to not include them just to try to help push them through making that decision for the higher margin product. So we'll now look at a couple other examples. Upsells, I find these are almost rarely used, but they're extremely helpful. So in this scenario, I have the beanie with just a logo. Knowing that you're looking at the beanie with the logo, I could try to upsell you to why not get the whole set. So this is a grouped product. It offers more to my customer. It's just higher value, higher revenue and hopefully efficiency. So they go from buying one beanie to buying three products from my store. Here's an upsell example of kind of like an alternative option. So in this scenario, I'm selling this beanie. They're both the same price, so it's not necessarily more revenue, but this beanie might be cheaper to manufacture. So I'm not printing a logo on it. It's $18 for both, but I may be only spending $5 to produce that beanie and $6 to produce the one with the logo. So it's a nice upsell to be like, if maybe this is another alternative for you, it's gonna be a higher margin for me. And then lastly, similar product, but kind of the reverse. They may have the same margin, but obviously this one being $20 versus $18. If they're still kind of, I'm paying six bucks to produce both, I'm gonna get a higher margin out of getting them to spend more on my site. So those are upsells. They're generally shown on the product page. And again, too, they have the benefits of the related products, but hopefully you're gonna be getting more money out of these items. And last but not least, cross sells. So these are kind of a little interesting. They're usually wanna be products that are complimentary to the item they're getting. So again, these are kind of accessories along with the accessory you're currently buying. The hope being that you've come here and you've committed to buying the beanie, maybe I can convince you to get the sunglasses too. You might, too, run into a scenario where it might not be in your benefit to include cross sells on the checkout process. If they've already put the beanie in their cart, you might wanna distract them with something else and try to push them to that proceed to checkout to get them through the conversion process faster. But it's definitely a tool in the toolbox to keep in mind when building the site. Next promotions. I find a lot of times these are the most underutilized are almost not known about items. So low stock notification, in the WooCommerce settings, you can set stock notifications. This will basically appear and let people know how many you have on hand and you can kind of create some urgency. And this is right in core. So it's not like a third plugin you have to add in and it's just a handy tool. Additionally, store notice. If you do a fresh install of WooCommerce, a lot of times the store notice is automatically turned on and it says like this is a demo store. So things aren't actually being sold. A lot of times I think people look at that store notice and say, okay, I see the point of this is like kind of to alert people this site's in development or under instruction. What they don't realize is they can change that messaging. So it's a handy tool. It usually displays at the, well in the store front theme at the very bottom and we'll take a look at that example. And it's a nice unobtrusive way to kind of have almost like a pop up or a notice on all your pages about just about anything you need. And then again, grouped products. We've kind of touched on this. We'll look at a more concrete example. It's really just a nice way to create more pages that aren't necessarily just copies of an existing product. So if we look at, so here's the low stock notification example. I basically just said I'm managing stock on this product. I've only got 12 left. I've set the notice too to kind of use that phrasing of I only have 12 left to kind of create that urgency. And I hate to use this term, but the fear of missing out. A lot of times that will just push the customer over the edge to make that commitment to start going through the conversion process. And then again, it just informs the customer. So whether that's necessarily true or not, you know, you can fudge it a little bit, but a lot of times if you're willing to do inventory management as part of kind of like the workflow, this can be a helpful tool. Here's the store notice. So you can see down below you can just access this in the customizer, turn it on and even schedule it. So I set up a coupon that's gonna go live at midnight tonight. And then I can also set the store notification to go live at midnight tonight. And I just informed my customers, hey, you saved 25% this week on t-shirts only. And that'll automatically add. It's nice and unobtrusive on like kind of a third party plug-in where you might use a pop-up. In fact, Google kind of likes using these low bar, like at the bottom of the page displays, as opposed to pop-ups, because yeah, they will ding you, especially on mobile, taking over somebody's screen with a full pop-up will kind of hurt the mobile experience and could potentially hurt your SERP score. And this is right in core and unobtrusive follows those guidelines. And you can really have it say anything and paired with a couple other extensions. If you get any ones from like the WooCommerce marketplace, it's an extremely powerful tool. And then store, or dang it, I made a typo. Grouped products. So it's more products, more revenue, an additional landing page. So all of these products have their own landing page, essentially their own product page. I'm getting SERP traffic to those. Additionally, I can, with some minor content tweaks, promote those products as a group item. So now I have another landing page that I'll hopefully appear in SERPs. If somebody searches for my smiley face beanie, the smiley face beanie will come up first and then this group product will come up second. So you're just getting more spaces in those search results and hopefully streamlining the process for customers to buy more from you. And these ones are a bit more utilized and understood, but I think they're not always used to their full potential is sales coupons and free shipping. So sale prices can be set on the product level and it's just a simple sale of it was this price, it's now this price and you can schedule them both to start and stop. It's an extremely handy tool. Coupons, coupons can get pretty complicated and be kind of daunting, but out of the box, WooCommerce offers a lot of simple coupon interactions and these can be used just to nudge people to kind of get through and do those conversions. And then last but not least, free shipping. Generally you set this free shipping as an option either with a coupon and a minimum spend or a coupon or just a minimum spend. I find using it, offering it with just a minimum spend is astronomical and helping you push people to buy more and hit that like mark for the free shipping. So we'll look at a couple of quick examples of that. So these products are on sale. As you can see they're tagged with the little sale tag next to it and then you have the visual of like it was this price, now it's this price. This can help people think, well I'm getting a great deal, I better pounce on it now. If you tie this into with the store notice, so you're saying like sale on all t-shirts, you don't even need a coupon, just go to the t-shirt category and you'll see everything's on sale this week only. So you've then created kind of that fear of missing out. And just you've kind of presented it out of a lower price point, so they better hop on the deal. Additionally too, there are like short code aspects to this. So like in this example, I've created a page, I've used the sale short code. So basically this page will show everything on my site that is on sale. And that is a great tool to set up and then you can just be like, I'll run a PPC campaign, just drive all my traffic to my sale product and get rid of all my overstocked items. Coupons, so again, everyone loves a deal. You can set these again kind of in tandem with the store notification, I think they help create kind of that fear of missing out, the opportunity for a deal and can get you just to push people to make that commitment in purchasing the product. They can also help you kind of, if you have overstocked items, kind of similar to sales, just to plead those items. The added benefit to these over sales is there is a lot of tracking demographics to it too as you're asking kind of users to do that other step and allows you to kind of track, okay, I gave them this extra task, they're willing to do it for it and then you can kind of see kind of that penetration of all the promotion for that coupon and how effective it was. And then last but not least, free shipping. Using it with the coupon is a good option. I think though using it with just the minimum spend is the way to go. If you can swing it and you probably could depending on where you set the free shipping threshold, you just eat that shipping cost, but you know if you can push somebody to spend $100 on your site, they should more than make up for it. Should be going to use, it's really just kind of moral logistical question if you can swing it or not, but it's an extremely helpful tool to get people to spend more. My client, sorry, company, but that works really well. I have a little sugaring business in Syrup is they just up their prices by dollar and they realize that they're just, they're not costing anybody and so they do a hard dollar minimum and all the orders come in over a hundred. They get a bulk of it instead of that $26 or whatever. Yeah, it's perfect. Especially too if you can do that nice pricing math of to get over a hundred, you're actually 105. But it's again, an extremely helpful tool and everyone loves the deal. And also with the culture of kind of Amazon Prime, it's almost like you need to offer it at this point. So it might not be two day, but everyone wants free shipping, so. So yeah, just some quick final thoughts to kind of wrap up everything. All these items were just in new commerce core. So if you have no other plugins installed, you can go and have a new commerce site set up. You can go home today and start enacting all these changes. Additionally, WooCommerce documentation is excellent. They have a lot on store managing, using all these core features, kind of use case examples, just about everything you need. So in these slides too, anything that's been underlined is a link to the documentation for that item as well. And I would just say, explore your own site settings and themes. There's a lot in there, it's a lot to take in, but you know, just go through everything. Understanding kind of like the settings and the status reports will just help you improve your business more and more. And that's kind of like a bonus thing. I know a lot of people like to use third party plugins. I would strongly suggest checking out the WooCommerce marketplace, those ones. So like if it's in the .org repository, it has gone through a vetting process. If it's in the WooCommerce extension marketplace, it's gone through a more extensive vetting process. Additionally, it does cost money, but it's kind of a scenario you get what you pay for. So if you're getting a free third party plugin, I would just be weary of, you know, how much they're gonna support it. And if it's gonna actually do what you want. Again, they'll try it out if it works perfect, great, go with it. But I would definitely check out the WooCommerce extensions cause a couple of those combined with these core features and you can really get your site humming. So thank you very much. And if there are any questions. They just discovered that their site system does not allow them to do any inventory. So they need to literally open a hall up with that. And so they're starting over. The reason I'm here is I'm wondering if we could help them. I'm super well versed in the loop. I'm not sure as far as how specific you can get with options as far as different sizes, different features, all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of an interesting question. So you can do a lot with variable products. I will say there is an issue with them. As you add more options, it gets exponentially more complicated. So like with the shirt example, if I offer it a shirt in small, medium, large, that's three sub-products under that. If I also offer it in red, green, or blue, that's now six. And then you're gonna just keep multiplying and multiplying. There is a theoretical limit to how many sub-variations you can have. So some things to look at, I would say outside of core, you can look in the WooCommerce marketplace. And depending on how customizable the items are, you could look at a couple of, I would Google like WooCommerce grouped or clustered products. They have a couple extensions like chain products, mix and match products, and component products. Additionally to, there is a, I don't know if you work with Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is a paid form. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a paid form plug-in, but I think it's worth its weight. That can actually be attached with a WooCommerce plug-in. So you can, essentially it's usually used for products. So like if I was selling a ring, I can have a Gravity Form added to the product page to say, what would you like engraved on it? And then I then have a text field and that text field then gets added to kind of the order meta. So as the order goes through, I then know on the ring, I need to print like love forever and ever or something. So those are a couple resources I would check out. Additionally to, I would just mess around with the different attributes and see if you can just get it as a straight variable product. Any other questions? Yeah. I mentioned the low stock option. Do you find that it drives more traffic, just as sort of that urgency thing? Because one of my customers has basically almost not run out of money in the jewelry. But we did like use a coupon to push something, or we made something go on sale for something that she wanted to get rid of. But I was wondering if the low stock option was also a variable, is it? I mean, you said it, you just got a variable price. Yeah, I mean, so if you have like super high stock levels that are not gonna run out, you can kind of synthetically, so just say like I only have 100 left and display I only have 100 left. The one issue with that, and there is a setting for this too, is I would set up low stock notifications. There's another notification setting to basically say when this product is getting low and it hits this threshold, email me. So that way, you kind of synthetically said you have a low stock, so you say I only have 100 of these left. As it starts draining, it'll kind of create more of that buzz and that fear of missing out. And then realistically, I still have 200 in back. So once it hits that threshold, I then bump it back up. And you know, it's kind of a standard business practice because it's like you just got more in, so. I wanna hear marketplace products. Would DPS typically plug in? Yep. My customer purchased it and maybe this is something I can ask you afterwards, but one of them installed a VDAL or that I went and installed it and the settings won't tie with their off-rack DPS standard rates. So maybe something I just configured incorrectly? Possibly, I mean the biggest, I find the biggest pain points with running an e-commerce site is taxes and shipping. Because it's just. Well, the answer, we have no taxes, so that's fine, but. Yeah, so I would think it might just be kind of a deep dive into kind of the UPS documentation and reviewing the settings. Any other question? Cool, I think we finished in just the right amount of time. Bayside for some beers.