10 powerful extensions for new WooCommerce stores

When we ask for feedback about WooCommerce, one of the things we hear praised most is its default set of features. For a free plugin, it’s quite powerful, enabling you to sell virtually anything, anywhere, to anyone.

And if you need to go beyond what’s baked-in, that’s where our extensions come into play. These free or paid add-ons extend the functionality of WooCommerce, giving you the power to sell new product types, enhance your store’s performance, and much (much!) more.

There are quite a lot of extensions that you might want to try when you start using WooCommerce, but narrowing them down to the ones you’ll find truly useful can be tricky. So we’re here to lend a hand.

Here are ten powerful extensions we recommend for your new WooCommerce store.

Improve the core functionality of your store

WooCommerce is fairly flexible out of the box, giving you the ability to sell multiple product types and deliver them many ways. However, the goods you’re selling may require advanced customization, or you might want to ask your customers for more information at checkout.

Here are three extensions that will boost your store’s core performance, affecting the important bits like product pages, checkout, and site search.

Enable upgraded or personalized goods with Product Add-Ons

Personalized, customized, or otherwise upgraded products tend to be a hit with customers. If you want to offer engraving, custom colors, or even individual item gift-wrapping, Product Add-Ons is the extension you need.

This extension allows you to add your choice of checkboxes, drop-down menus, text boxes, and more to individual product pages. Add extra options to the products that need them while not affecting those that don’t.

You can even apply add-ons to all your product pages in one swoop if you wish, saving you time and hassle.

Purchase the Product Add-Ons Extension

Use Checkout Add-Ons to enable free or paid order upgrades

Checkout Add-Ons is another powerful extension that gives you the ability to sell upgrades, and your customers fast way to purchase them. With this extension, customers will be shown one or more options at checkout that they can choose or decline as they wish.

This extension is ideal for adding gift wrapping and messages, shipping and handling upgrades, insurance, file uploads, and any global order add-ons or services.

To clear up any possible confusion, you’ll want to opt for Product Add-Ons if the upgrade applies to an individual product, and this extension if it applies to an entire order. But there’s no reason you can’t use both!

Purchase the Checkout Add-Ons Extension

Improve your store’s search results with Product Search

Although the search function built into WooCommerce works well, your customers might start scratching their heads if you sell a lot of products, or if they search for a vague term like “yellow” or “large.”

WooCommerce Product Search can help you get around these bumps in the search road. This extension improves the speed and relevance of customer-facing search results, and also allows you to “weigh” criteria like titles or tags so that results are more relevant.

If you do want to use this extension, you’ll need to replace the default WooCommerce search with it; instructions on doing so can be found right here.

Purchase the Product Search Extension

Get deeper insights on your sales performance

On the surface, you can tell if your store is successful by seeing how many products you sell. But if you look at more data — like visits, abandoned carts, or revenue — you’ll start to find ways to improve your store, and increase those sales.

Here are three extensions we recommend for tracking, reporting, and all things data.

Track sales, visits, page performance, and more with Google Analytics

If you want to get basic insights on your store’s performance without paying a dime, Google Analytics is a great place to start. And we have just the thing to help you out with that: the free Google Analytics extension for WooCommerce.

With Google Analytics, you can learn what’s driving traffic to your store, find which the products are most attractive to potential customers, see which pages are the most popular in search engines, and more.

If you need detailed insights into items like coupon usage or customer account activity in WooCommerce, we also offer a (paid) Google Analytics Pro extension.

Download the Google Analytics Extension

See who’s abandoned their cart with Cart Reports

Abandoned carts represent lost revenue and potentially unhappy customers. You might not think there’s anything you can do about them, but this reporting extension begs to differ.

WooCommerce Cart Reports allows you to track and review abandoned cart activity on your store, providing data on how many carts were abandoned and when, plus which items were in them.

This extension can help you track down potential problem products, or identify issues causing abandonments during the checkout flow. It’ll also show you any sales, should you start campaigns to get those lost carts reclaimed (always a good call).

Purchase the Cart Reports Extension

Accurately optimize your revenue with Cost of Goods

You might know how much money you’re making, but do you know how much of that is profit? Cost of Goods will give you detailed and accurate profit reporting right from within WooCommerce, showing you net sales, the cost of your products, and finally total profit made.

You’ll need to add the cost of your products into WooCommerce to get this working properly, but once you do, the extension will take care of the rest.

These powerful reports will give you what you need to make smart decisions about product pricing and inventory, making this a must-have if you’re managing your budget.

Purchase the Cost of Goods Extension

Boost your sales through promotions and marketing

Our final selection of extensions are some of the very best for getting the word out about your store. There are plenty of ways you can dive into marketing a new store, but it’s tricky to know what really works when you’re just starting out.

Try one of these add-ons to spread the word, acquire new customers, and keep them coming back for more.

Create promotions, gift cards, product-specific deals and much more with Smart Coupons

When it comes to promotions, Smart Coupons is an extension that can do it all: coupon codes for your entire store or individual products, gift certificates, automatic discounts, in-cart offers, store credit…

If you want to start offering flexible, comprehensive discounts that will entice new customers to make a purchase with you, this is the extension (and perhaps the only extension) you need. It’s customizable, flexible, and incredibly powerful.

Purchase the Smart Coupons Extension

Convince customers to come back again (and again) with Follow Ups

The Follow Ups extension is another powerful little add-on that is worth its weight in gold. Once you’ve changed a shopper into a paying customer, you don’t want to forget about them, and this is how you can keep them coming back for additional purchases… without manual emailing or expensive ad targeting.

Follow Ups gives you the power to create a series of automatically triggered emails that will fire off to customers based on their activity — say, after they’ve made a purchase, signed up to your email list, or even bought a specific item.

You can send as many or as few emails as you wish, either for all customers or just a few. And once you’ve set up your messages, you only have to sit back and wait as the emails are delivered and your customers come back for more… and more… and more.

Purchase the Follow Up Emails Extensions

Create robust, trackable email campaigns with MailChimp

Keeping on that same thread: email marketing is certainly a winning way to boost sales, and MailChimp is our personal platform of choice for doing it. Our MailChimp integration brings together WooCommerce and MailChimp with great success, giving you the power to sign up customers for everything from monthly newsletters to abandoned cart emails.

What you send with MailChimp is entirely up to you. But the WooCommerce integration passes along almost all the data you could ever want an email marketing platform to have. You can send simple monthly updates to a full list, or only email customers who have purchased a specific shirt in the past month.

Everything is trackable from within MailChimp, so you’ll always know which customers opened and read your messages. Say goodbye to guessing and hello to hard data.

Purchase the MailChimp Extension

Use Google Product Feed to make your products visible in shopping searches

Our Google Product Feed extension is the final recommendation, and its power comes not from the extension itself but what it does for your store.

Many shoppers start their buying journey by looking for specific products via search, and so with this tool you can ensure that your goods appear in Google’s shopping results when they are relevant to those searchers.

The extension allows you to choose which WooCommerce fields appear in shopping listings, giving you full control over the appearance of search results, and making it more likely that potential customers will like what they see.

Purchase the Google Product Feed Extension

Make your new store stand out with these powerful extensions

Here you are — the extensions we think are the very best for new WooCommerce stores. It’s hard to pick just ten, but we’ve done our best to narrow down the field for you.

What do you think of these extensions? Have you picked out a new favorite from the list? If you have any questions or comments to share, we’d love to hear from you.

• Top extensions for physical goods stores
• Free, rock-solid WooCommerce extensions for new stores to consider
• Marketing tactics for new stores, plus extensions to make them happen 

  Original article written by Nicole Kohler >

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