With almost 3 million websites powered by WooCommerce (to be exact, at the time of writing 2,906,789), it is without a doubt the most popular eCommerce platform and there are many reasons for this. One being the massive amount of free WooCommerce plugins available at the WordPress repository that you can grab and, in a matter of minutes, boost your shop and sales.
The WordPress community is very active and adding some marvelous, new WooCommerce plugins each day which means that it can be quite easy to miss a flawless gem in this ocean of information. Therefore I decided to take a dive into it and see if I can bring up a couple of pearls that could make your business better and everyday life as a shopkeeper smoother.
Note: The list is randomly ordered. Most of them are less than a year old and therefore many do not have a huge user base. I have tested them all myself prior to including them.
Here is a list of 12 new and free WooCommerce plugins to boost your online shop and sales in 2019.
1. Offers for WooCommerce
Who doesn’t like a good bargain with a salesman to gain a discount, fun or simply a feeling of satisfaction, right? eBay and Amazon have been offering this feature for years because it drives additional sales.
Offers for WooCommerce provides similar functionality and allows you to:
- Start receiving offers from customers who are interested in buying, respond with counter offers or decline them.
- Receive and send automated email notifications about new offers, counteroffers, etc.
This is an excellent solution for shops that specialize in selling fine art, collectible items, used items, and bulk orders since you can allow your potential customers to make an offer and get a discount on those orders.
2. WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture – Save Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts, just in the United Kingdom alone, yearly result in about 18 billion pounds of lost sales (according to a Barclaycard survey). It’s a rich and fruitful garden just waiting for you to start harvesting. This plugin is an excellent way to open the gates to this garden.
The WooCommerce Live Checkout Field Capture – Save Abandoned Carts plugin is capturing abandoned carts as soon as the user enters their phone number or email address at the Checkout without even submitting the form. Those users who are signed in do not even have to do that – their carts are captured from the moment the first product is added to their carts. What I love about this plugin is the:
- Ability to display a popup when users try to leave your shop (Exit Intent) that contains an email field to capture and later recover additional Abandoned Carts.
- Simplicity and ease of use – no setup required, just install, activate and start sending out abandoned cart reminders.
- Clean code that is added just where and when necessary without affecting your store’s speed.
The Save Abandoned Carts Pro plugin will allow you to integrate with MailChimp and use it to send automated Abandoned Cart recovery emails.
If you are currently not tracking and recovering your Abandoned carts, then you should definitely reconsider your sales strategy because this is a field where you can increase your sales big time.
3. Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
According to research by BrightLocal, 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Customer reviews are essential when it comes to showing off and selling online products. WooCommerce offers customer reviews by default, but it lacks many features that the Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin provides:
- The ability to display a review histogram (one that Amazon also uses for their reviews).
- Automated review reminder to those who have purchased a product.
- Offering discounts for leaving a review to increase engagement.
- Enabling image attachments to reviews which is an amazing feature since images tell so much more than words and you can later use those to showcase real customers appreciating your products.
I have used this plugin and it has got both great support and features that will increase your sales.
4. Currency Switcher for WooCommerce
There have been quite a few times when I come across a website that has the product I need, but comparing the prices is quite difficult due to a different currency that I’m used to. Yes, I know that there are free converters all over the internet, but it is an extra step, extra effort from my side and sometimes I’m just too lazy. This can leave a bad mark on your sales results and that is where the Currency Switcher for WooCommerce plugin comes in. The free version offers:
- Automated currency display depending on the user’s location.
- Automated exchange rate updates.
This plugin will help you boost your international sales.
5. WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce
Research by Timothy Derdenger and Vineet Kumar revealed that offering product bundles can have a very positive effect on sales if the products in the bundle are cheaper than if both products were to be bought separately. This is how Nintendo skyrocketed their sales by approximately 100,000 units when bundles (a video game console and a game sold together as one package) were offered.
Main features I like about this plugin:
- Easy to understand the interface and product bundling process.
- Automatic price calculation if bundle offered is for sale.
The WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce plugin is a great way to boost your sales in case you can offer product bundles. If McDonald’s can do this then why couldn’t you?! 🙂
6. PW WooCommerce Gift Cards
Have you ever thought about buying a gift card? Statistics show that 56% of all purchased presents are gift cards. And for the most part, customers who purchase gift cards do that because they do not enjoy breaking their heads whether the person already has all the “Harry Potter” books or not. Instead, they are enabling recipients to buy their own desired gifts which is very convenient.
The free version of PW WooCommerce Gift Cards plugin enables you to:
- Quickly and easily add a gift card option to your store
- Add different gift card values
- Send a gift card to its intended recipient over email
In case you are running a shop that consists of many cool products, you should consider adding the ability to purchase gift cards.
7. First Order Discount Woocommerce
If you are offering a discount or free shipping on your order once you reach a certain total amount in your shopping cart, you might as well just add something extra just to get the bonus, right?!
First Order Discount WooCommerce is a small, but a clever plugin that allows you to offer discounts to customers and increase the overall sales by providing an incentive:
- Choose the type of incentive (Free shipping or Discount).
- Set the minimum cart value.
- Allow or forbid to use this discount with other discounts.
I have not tested this approach in the live battleground, but I sure would love to try it out to see the results it brings on my next project. I have seen many large companies using this type of approach.
8. WooCommerce Product Addons
Personalization is a trend that is here to stay since people are feeling the need to be more unique and original. The Woocommerce Product Addons plugin allows you to add custom fields to your product ordering page thus enabling your customers to fill in some personalization details like additional text, custom color options and many other field types.
If you are a small shop owner looking to make your way into a personalized product business – this is a great, little plugin to get you started.
9. WooCommerce Additional Variation Images Gallery
While the WooCommerce Additional Variation Images Gallery plugin might not increase your sales directly, it might help you to better showcase each of your product variations with additional variation galleries – something that is not possible using the default WooCommerce setup.
This is a technique that many of the large eCommerce companies are using today and it is easy to understand why.
10. Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer
This addition to your business will not increase your sales, at least not for the first time customers, but it might land you additional returning customers if you tailor the whole experience down to the email designs. It will definitely help you to stand out and render you as a professional striving for perfection.
Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer itself is super easy to use and I love the way it is integrated with the built-in WordPress template designer user interface:
- Very easy to understand and customize each template.
- Live preview that allows you to see the changes you are making to the email templates.
- Comes with some pre-built layouts.
11. WooCommerce Login/Signup Popup
The WooCommerce Login/Signup Popup is a small and simple plugin for allowing a more seamless and uninterrupted shopping experience for your registered users. You no longer will need to send your users to a separate page:
- Allow signing in using Ajax anywhere on your store.
- Lightweight and easy to set up.
12. WooCommerce Product Attachment
Not all products require additional documents to display some extra information, but if you are selling products that could use some additional documents with them – the WooCommerce Product Attachment plugin provides an easy to setup option for uploading product attachments.
The great part about this plugin is how easy it is to setup and that you can mark each document if it should be available prior to a successful payment or not.
Wrap
This concludes my list of free WooCommerce plugins to boost your online shop and sales in 2019.
The WordPress plugin repository is a massive ocean of interesting and helpful products just waiting to be uncovered. And it has been truly a curious experience to plunge myself into to find plugins that will help me (and hopefully somebody else as well) in the future to improve their sales game.
Please feel free to add your thoughts and insights down in the comments if there is a gem I have missed 🙂
Guest author: Nauris is a freelance designer/developer who loves to dig into the UX as much as in the ground for fishing worms. And fishing is just one amongst the long list of his active lifestyle hobbies. Always positive and happy to meet new friends and share his experience. You can reach him on LinkedInor via his freelance website.