7 Tips for Running a Successful E-Commerce Store with WordPress

Once you’ve undertaken the hard work of setting up your WordPress-powered e-commerce store, you could be forgiven for thinking that all that’s left to do is sit back and wait for the sales to start rolling in.

Unfortunately it’s not quite that easy, and despite what you might have read, once your store goes live, the real work is only just beginning.

With online shoppers in the US alone projected to spend over 327 billion dollars at their favorite stores in 2016, now has never been a better time to launch an e-commerce website. However, in order to ensure that you achieve the success you’ve been hoping for, there are some things you need to be doing on your online shop.

Here are some tips for running a successful e-commerce store with WordPress:

1.  Quality Photos

Photos are often the main feature of a product listing, so make sure you use them to create a positive first impression on your visitors. Using high resolution images optimized for the web is a great place to start.

Taking pictures of products from multiple angles for the best viewing angles possible can really enhance your product listing pages. Where possible try to include a zoom option.

It’s important that you really convey to the customer exactly what’s on offer, since they can’t see the product in person.

2.  SEO Friendly Content

It’s often the case that online shoppers search for products by name. Therefore, doing all you can do make your product titles, descriptions, and tags as SEO friendly as possible is vital. This will then hopefully improve the rank of your listings in the search engine results pages, delivering more shoppers to your store.

Consider using the free WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, to help optimize your content. Make your product descriptions simple, clear, and engaging. You want the customer excited and able to get a good understanding of what the product can do for them.

3.  Simplified Checkout Process

A simplified process for making a purchase can have a huge impact on the success of your online store.

Implementing features such as auto-fill to limit the amount of information a customer must enter can remove friction from the checkout process. Only asking for the information you really need to complete the transaction can also help streamline this process. Another option is to consider enabling a one page checkout to really help simplify the checkout process.

4.  Mulitple Payment Options

Once you have a customer at the payment stage, your main goal is not to lose them. Demonstrating that you are you providing a secure checkout environment can help allay some of the fears that shoppers associate with paying online.

While your free e-commerce plugin might offer basic payment gateway integration, investing in a more streamlined and integrated solution, can really improve the perceived trustworthiness of your online shop.

5.  Site Safety

E-commerce data breaches are a serious thing.  Being PCI compliant and having SSL certificates are important at the payment stage, but there are other places your site can be breached.

Choosing a secure WordPress e-commerce platform, not storing sensitive data online, requiring strong passwords, setting up security system alerts, and running frequent scans are just some of the ways to make your site safer from unwanted guests.

6.  Be Transparent

A good sign of an ecommerce site is that it will have clear and easy to read policies. These policies need not be hidden deep down there, but the policy page should be clearly visible for everyone. You should have clear policies for defects, returns, packages that never arrive, money back policy and such. Focus on the language, as it should be really easy to be understood and don’t use complex sentences. And yes, refrain from using legal language, as you are writing for your customer and you don’t want to scare them away.

For example, look at this return policy page at IKEA which heartily welcomes you, and has links for different policies. This page also has links to FAQs, buying guides, contact page, warranty information, etc on the sidebar which further makes the site trustworthy.

7.  Think About Mobile Users

If you are not thinking about mobile users then you are making a really big mistake. In fact, there are many users who access the Internet only through mobile devices, and if you are not running an ecommerce site that’s mobile friendly, then you will be losing visitors, and thereby sales.

Google too has recognized the importance of such users who browse from mobile, and therefore wants the website to have a mobile-friendly design. These days it’s also a ranking factor at Google and thus you cannot ignore mobile friendliness of your website.

You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to analyze your website and check if the page has a mobile-friendly design or not. If not, then now is a high time to use a mobile friendly theme, or a responsive ecommerce theme which will offer a better shopping experience to your mobile visitors.

Conclusion

Managing your own an e-commerce store with WordPress can be surprisingly fun and straightforward. By following these top 7 WordPress e-commerce tips, you should be well on your way to earning your share of the 327 billion dollars that will be spent online next year.

What tips would you recommend to someone running an e-commerce site on WordPress? Have you tried any of the above tips? We would love to hear from you in the comments below!