Running a WooCommerce store means you’re constantly on the lookout for ways of improving your customer experience, and therefore, your sales.
The buying process is one of the most crucial steps in the buyer’s journey. Speeding it up is not only helpful for your customers but also ensures that you lock in sales quickly without having potential clients dropping out of your site before hitting the “buy now” button.
To help us tackle this, we turned to Katie Keith, Co-Founder & Director at Barn2 Plugins. Barn2 produces many hand-crafted plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce. In short, they’re one of the leading plugin developers in this field.
We met up with Katie to pick her brain on how to speed up the buying process for most WooCommerce stores.
Hi Katie! Welcome to the WP Mayor blog. To kick things off, can you talk us through a typical buyer’s journey on most WooCommerce stores?
With the typical WooCommerce store, the buyer visits the website and clicks through to the Shop page. They may then click on a product immediately, use the basic filters or search box that come with WooCommerce to find specific products, or navigate to a product category page. Either way, they will then click through to the individual page for each product they’re interested in. Once they have made a decision to purchase that product, they then choose a quantity, select variations (if the product has variations), and add it to the cart.
They then repeat the process for each product that they wish to buy.
Once the customer has finished adding products to the cart, they click through to the WooCommerce cart page to review their order. After making any changes, they then click through to the WooCommerce checkout page where they enter their details, pay, and complete their order.
As you can see, there are a lot of steps to that process!
What questions should store owners ask themselves when trying to determine what to improve on their WooCommerce site?
The first step is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Imagine that you are a customer who has never visited the store before.
Think about what you want to buy, and what journey the customer would follow in order to find the product and buy it. Try to put aside your pre-existing knowledge of the site and think about it from a fresh perspective.
Or even better, ask a friend to do this for you. Watch over their shoulder (without giving them any guidance!). This is a great way to start thinking about what needs to be improved on your site.
Of course, you can hire professional user testing companies to do this, and I would recommend this for established stores. However, you can
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This article was written by Gabriella Galea and originally published on WP Mayor.