Last updated - January 18, 2021
Customer experience is getting redefined every day with new technologies and innovations in eCommerce. WooCommerce is one of the best platforms to start an online store of any size and scope. You will find a great range of options to configure the most advanced features trending at the moment. WooCommerce product add-ons is such a feature that offers a lot of scopes to store owners. Providing an option to customers to personalize their products is one of the most definitive ways to ensure satisfaction. This article focuses on some of the best WooCommerce add-ons that would help you offer product personalization. You will also find some tips to help you utilize this feature in the most effective way.
WooCommerce add-ons to personalize products
WooCommerce plugins provide great flexibility to set up specific capabilities the way you want it. This way you can make instant changes in store functionality based on customer feedback or market research. Let’s look into some of the popular plugins that would help you configure WooCommerce add-ons.
Product Add-Ons
Your customers would love the idea of adding their own personal touch to the products they purchase from you. This WooCommerce extension provides the right flavor to set up a feature like that. You can provide input boxes, dropdowns, checkboxes, etc., to let customers feed on what sort of customization they want. Wherever you want to take an input from customers, you can use this feature. You can easily manage special messages for products that are gifts, laser engravings, custom t-shirt prints, and many other inputs. It also supports file uploads by customers, which is especially useful in the digitally enhanced shopping scenario at the moment.
You can choose whether to offer the add-ons for free or to set a price. The add-ons offer options to add descriptions, and you can rearrange how you display them according to relevance. There are options to set add-ons for all your products at a global level, or only to specific products individually. However, you need to note that it works on an individual product level and not in individual variation level. That means you can’t just set up an add-on for only one of the multiple variations of a product. Another great advantage of this extension is that you can use it along with WooCommerce Subscriptions. Read our article if you want to understand the nuances of WooCommerce subscriptions business. Price of the plugin starts from $49.
Gravity Forms Product Add-ons
You can build advanced product configuration forms using this extension and link them to any product in WooCommerce. Moreover, you can create forms with conditional logic, conditional pricing fields, user input prices, etc. The extension also ensures that no duplicate configurations are created in the cart, by tracking all your products with a Gravity form. It also offers you great control in terms of the display of your product prices. If you want to add a custom text to price display, the extension helps you manage that easily as well. You will have complete control over how to display the automatic price calculation.
The extension is available for purchase at $99 for a single site subscription. 5 site and 25 site subscriptions are available for $119 and $199 respectively. Please note that you need to install Gravity Forms plugin to get this one to work.
Name Your Price
Product personalization gets a whole different dimension when you let your customers choose what price they want to pay for your products. This WooCommerce extension provides you an option to do exactly that. It really gives you a lot of options in terms of pricing. You can suggest a reasonable price for your products or set a minimum acceptable value for a product. If you are really letting it all into the hands of customers, you have that option too with this extension. Additionally, you can use this extension to accept donations on your site.
Actually, there are two important areas where you can use this extension. You can earn a profit on products that you probably would give away otherwise. In addition, you can use it to understand the psychology of customers as in how much they are willing to pay for a particular product. Unlike the product add-ons extension, you can set the ‘Name your Price’ option in the variation level. For example, you can set all the variations of a product or just one variation of the product under this pricing scenario.
Use it along with other popular extensions
You can use the Name your Price extension along with other popular extensions pretty effectively. If you are using Product Bundles extension, you can use this one to set the entire bundle for customers to name the price. And, when used along with WooCommerce Subscriptions, Name your Price helps you let the customers choose the billing period. In fact, you can create a variable subscription with different billing periods as variations using this extension. Also, you can create printable gift certificates that can be redeemed directly from a physical store. This is especially useful when you want to connect your offline products to your WooCommerce store. However, you need to use PDF Product Vouchers extension to achieve this.
Purchase this extension from the WooCommerce website at $49 for a single site subscription. The 5 site subscription is $79 and 25 site subscription is $149.
YITH Product Add-ons
This plugin helps you set up a large variety of combinations of your products. In fact, it enables you to sell products at different price ranges according to different combinations of add-ons. Thus you gain the flexibility to price your products or services according to the level of customization requested by your customers. Interestingly, this plugin can really help to make your store extremely customer friendly.
This plugin offers a plethora of features to set interesting WooCommerce add-ons on your store. You can set the add-ons at a global level to apply to all the products in your store. At the same time, you get the option to create add-ons only at a single product level. In addition, the plugin provides an option to selectively display the add-on fields according to the variations that customers choose. It also allows to set up conditional logic in displaying add-on options, and you can even make add-ons mandatory to add a product to cart. The plugin also allows file uploads from customers, and you can choose the formats to allow this.
The single site license of the plugin is available for purchase at $89. You can get a license for up to 30 sites at $199; and if you want 6 site license, get it for $149.
WISDM Custom Product Bundles
The WISDM Custom Product Bundles is a popular plugin that enables you to create and sell exciting product bundles or kits. The extension is also ahead of its competitors as it allows your customers to mix and match items and create their own product assortments. Apart from dynamically pricing the kits, adding gift messages, offering shopping deals on bundles, etc. what makes this plugin unique is its mobile-friendly layouts. It makes it super convenient for your customers to shop for product bundles through their phones thereby, leading to an increase in your average order value.
This plugin, with its unique features, adds value, and helps in increasing sales and profitability of your WooStore. The best thing is that Custom Product Boxes comes with a 15-Day Trial period, within which you can check if the product is working well for you and then accordingly upgrade to the premium version.
Custom Product Options
This plugin helps you set up unlimited options for your products at a global or individual level. You can use multiple field types like checkboxes, dropdowns, select boxes to get the input from your customers. In addition, you will also have the option to charge the customers based on the product option that they choose. Moreover, you get to customize the product option by adding a title, choosing the input field type, making it required or optional, etc.
In addition, you can add custom images to radio buttons and checkboxes using this plugin. All the add-on fields and customer inputs will be displayed on Cart, Checkout and order confirmation mail. You can purchase the regular license of the plugin for $29.
Advantages of product customization
Product customization is a practice that has been tried by many brick and mortar business domains. Fashion and food industries have always thrived by customizing the experience for their customers. However, with eCommerce becoming more popular and advanced technologies opening new doors, product customization gained more relevance. Interestingly, it is a win-win scenario for both customers and store owners. Let’s look into this fact in more detail.
Customers’ perspective
Product customization option has proved itself to be one of the important aspects that can help you lure more customers to your store. We’ll discuss a few of the related aspects here.
Delightful experience
Product customization options contribute greatly towards customer experience. Naturally, there is a tendency in people to personalize the products they purchase to align them to their personal sensibilities. Moreover, eCommerce is constantly offering a sense of instant gratification to customers. In physical stores, often there is that time delay in getting a certain customization option done. That delay is not really perceived when somebody orders a customized product from an online store. The ability to experiment with design, color and other visual elements of a product they are about to purchase surely delights most customers.
Easier decision making
One of the qualms of the modern day consumer is an excessive choice. Often when too many options are presented at once, customers fail to make a decision and might abandon the cart. This is largely avoided when they take part in the design process to personalize the product.
Adds value to the shopping process
Shopping itself is a fulfilling process for a lot of people. But product customization adds a certain charm to the whole process. In fact, it invites the customer to take part in the design of the product. The result would be a better attachment to the products they themselves helped to design. This sort of emotional fulfillment is supposedly better than merely shopping for a product designed by someone else.
Great advantages for shop owners
Offering product customization might seem to be an expensive affair to store owners. But the value that it adds to the store in the long term outsmarts any initial expenses. Due to an increased sense of satisfaction among customers, they are going to come back to your store. Let’s look into some specific areas that it helps.
Customer loyalty would bring in more profits
When you consider various business models, it is an obvious fact that your existing customers would bring in more revenue than new ones. When you offer product customization options on your store, suddenly you are opening up new vistas of the shopping experience. This will clearly leave a good taste in your customers and they’ll come back to your store for more.
Helps with conversion
This is another relevant observation when it comes to product customization options. When there is an option to customize a product, customers are spending much more time on a product page compared to the normal ones. The chances of them buying a product that they spend considerable time on are really high. Thus product customization influences the conversion rate on your store as well.
Opportunities for product innovation
Experts always talk about providing products that customers want. Though theoretically, it makes perfect sense, often it is not practically possible to understand what customers are looking for. Offering product customization opens up a great scope to store owners to understand the perspective of customers. Moreover, it helps a lot to introduce innovative products to the market. When you are engaging your store visitors to take part in the design process, you get valuable insights into emerging trends. When optimally used, product optimization holds great potential to help you pioneer in certain products or experiences.
Conclusion
Engaging customers to personalize the products they want to purchase is a sure shot way to improve satisfaction. From simple features like adding a personalized note inside a gift package to critical design, inputs come under product customization at the moment. WooCommerce add-ons plugins offer great scope to offer customization of products. This article has compiled some of the best WooCommerce add-ons plugins that you can use on your store. You might have also got a perspective on how product customization is an emerging trend in eCommerce that is here to stay. Let us know if you any specific insights to share on this matter.
