Last updated - February 24, 2020
WooCommerce powers around 28% of all online stores across the world. The fact that it is built on WordPress itself inspires a lot of people to choose it. The huge popularity of WooCommerce as an eCommerce platform is also due to its flexibility to manage customization. In the WordPress community, you will easily find extensions for WooCommerce on a lot of desired functionalities. Depending on your specific requirements, you can choose a free or premium plugin to extend numerous useful features to your store. This article compiles a list of the best WooCommerce plugins that you may find necessary to run a successful WooCommerce store in 2018.
WooCommerce Subscriptions
When you are running an online store, ensuring consistent revenue is one of the challenges that you may face. The natural ups and downs in customer interest and conversion rates should not affect your daily functioning. You might be thinking it would be really nice if you could ensure a certain fixed income every week or month. That way, you can plan store management better, and also be better prepared to face troubles when they appear. WooCommerce subscriptions extension is a great option that will ensure recurring income on your store.
Basically, this extension helps you create and manage products that have recurring payments that will repeat at a specific time interval. You can create subscriptions out of any product type in WooCommerce. The subscriptions will be for a time period that you specify while creating the product. Similarly, you can integrate a convenient billing cycle too. In addition, if you want to charge any additional fees like installation charges, or one time sign up fees, that is also possible.
Great features
The extension has become really popular due to the abundance of features. Let’s take a quick look at some of the features of WooCommerce subscriptions extension:
- Offer free trial – You can offer a free trial period at the start of the subscription so that customers get a chance to try out your product. At the end of the trial period, they can subscribe to the best plan.
- Multiple options for customers to choose – Setting up multiple subscription options is quite easy with this extension. Just create a variable subscription product and set different terms for each variation.
- Option to purchase multiple subscriptions – If you have multiple subscription products in your store, you can allow your customers to purchase more than one in a single transaction.
- Both store owners and subscribers can manage their plans – Though subscribers too can modify the basic aspects of their subscription, store owners get great overall control.
- Prorating the payment – If you want the billing cycle to always start on a particular date, any sign-ups before that period can be calculated on pro-rata basis.
- Great discount options – With coupons, the extension allows you to provide discounts to customers on initial or recurring payments.
- Notify customers automatically – The extension will send an email to customers when their subscription is canceled, expired or renewed.
Dynamic Pricing and Discounts
Dynamic pricing is one of the essential strategies that you need to apply to your store to keep your customers interested in your products. You need to set up complex calculations to offer the best deals to customers without compromising on profitability. A good solution to help you with this would be ELEX (previously XAdapter) Dynamic Pricing and Discounts plugin. The plugin helps you set up dynamic pricing on your store at multiple levels such as product, category, cart, and combinations. Price adjustment can be made with a flat value or a percentage value. In addition, the plugin helps you set a maximum discount value for every calculation so that the discount won’t exceed the limit that you specify.
Here is a quick glance at some of the best features of this plugin:
- Discounts based on the date of purchase, previous order, weight, quantity, price, cart parameters, product combinations, etc.
- You can also set discounts based on user roles or user emails.
- Option to import and export rules.
- Pricing table display on the product page.
- Option to pick a rule to apply, in case of multiple rules satisfying the criteria.
WOOF WooCommerce Product Filter
Good filtering options are especially important for site navigation in an eCommerce store. If your site has quite a large number of products, your users need to have adequate filtering options to narrow down to what they are looking for. WOOF plugin allows your customers to narrow down their searches based on categories, tags, attributes, price and other custom taxonomies.
Furthermore, the plugin has several extensions including “Search by Text”, “Search by SKU”, “Taxonomy Range Slider”, etc. Furthermore, you can create custom extensions using HTML elements. The plugin enables your WooCommerce store with widgets, product shortcodes, Ajax product searches and varied display options for taxonomies. With a simple user interface, the plugin is pretty is to set up and configure. And if you don’t want to opt for a purchase right away, you can make use of their trial option.
Table Rate Shipping Pro
The ability to customize shipping options on your WooCommerce store would save you from a lot of hassles. You will be able to offer great shipping options to customers and at the same time ensure your profitability as well. PluginHive Table Rate Shipping Pro plugin is a great choice to customize shipping options on your WooCommerce store. With the help of this plugin, you can set up a table that will help you calculate shipping rates based on a variety of conditions.
You can create rules based on product weight, price, number of items, cart subtotal, Shipping class, shipping destination, etc. In addition, it helps you set up multiple rates per shipping zone. Also, you can set up various shipping options catering to different priority levels which the customers can choose. For example, you can set up ‘Express’ or ‘Priority’ services at a higher rate than the ‘Standard’ options. Furthermore, it has a unique option to estimate the shipping requirements at product level itself. Also, you can set up a base cost for shipping, and then add a variable cost for each extra item in the cart.
WooCommerce Lightspeed POS Integration
To make an eCommerce venture successful, sometimes you may need to connect multiple sales channels. That’s how WooCommerce store owners often find the need to connect their point of sale store to their online store. WooCommerce Lightspeed POS Integration plugin allows you to synchronize your inventory between your WooCommerce store and Lightspeed account. Obviously, you need to have a Lightspeed account for this integration to work.
Here is a quick look at some of the advantages of Lightspeed retail POS:
- Flexibility to sell from a store and online.
- Great inventory management
- Insightful reporting and analytics
- Ensures customer loyalty
- Integrated payments
- Cloud-ready to ensure mobility to your business.
- Dedicated support
WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor
You need to provide a hassle-free checkout for your customers to feel good and come back to your store. Experts advise on optimizing the checkout for better customer satisfaction. WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor extension is a great option to customize the checkout experience to the liking of your customer base. Basically, using this extension, you can add additional fields on your checkout page. You can add different types of fields such as check boxes, select options, text area, date pickers, etc.
In addition, the extension gives you an option to shift the default options on the WooCommerce checkout page. If you are constantly doing a research on customer behavior on your store, this extension can be a great asset to try out new ideas.
WooCommerce Memberships
A proven strategy to sell content online is by creating memberships option to access it. This WooCommerce extension provides you with an option to restrict access to your site’s content. The extension enables you to try out multiple strategies. For example, you can actually sell the access to memberships on your store for a price, or offer it complimentary with purchases. Moreover, it gives you total control in assigning memberships and helps you integrate the entire membership strategy.
The extension gives you great control to decide how users can access your content. You can set different strategies to restrict access depending on the membership process on your store. When used along with the WooCommerce subscriptions extension, memberships offers much more scope in your store strategies. The extension also enables you to be in constant touch with members via email, and occasionally reward them with interesting deals.
WooCommerce Product Add-ons
One of the growing trends in eCommerce is product personalization. When too many choices are available for customers to pick the same product, you need to offer value additions. Involving customers in personalizing products is one such strategy that is attempted by multiple store owners. Similar to Checkout Field Editor, this extension lets you add fields on the product page. It is a great way to take inputs from customers on products before they add it to the cart.
The extension allows you to add multiple field types like text areas, select boxes, check boxes, custom price inputs, etc. Moreover, you can add fields specifically on one product, or across all products. More importantly, you can charge customers for the additional options they select. On the front end, customers would see the additional product options just above the ‘Add to Cart’ button.
Product Import Export
Often, you need to import and export products to and from your WooCommerce store. This may be to add products to a newly created site or to share the information with an external solution. When you have too many products in your store, this process can become quite complex and tedious. XAdapter’s Product Import Export plugin is a great solution to streamline your product migration process. The plugin helps you import and export all kinds of products, including variations.
With the help of this plugin, you can export products to a CSV file from your store. Similarly, you can import products to your WooCommerce store from a CSV file. In addition, you can import products from a specified URL as well. Furthermore, you can schedule import and export via FTP using Cron Jobs. In fact, you can schedule automatic import and export simply by specifying the start and end time.
This plugin also allows the import and export of product reviews. The process of importing and exporting reviews is more or less similar to that of products. You can use the plugin along with some of the other popular WooCommerce solutions such as Product Bundles, Yoast SEO and Google Product Feed.
WooCommerce Booking & Appointment Plugin
Through an eCommerce store, you can easily take bookings and reservations for services and facilities. Here is an awesome plugin that will help you accept bookings and reservations through your WooCommerce store. With the help of this plugin, you can create booking option for any kind of products on your store including variations and bundles. You can even create time slots of different length for the same product. The plugin is a great option to sell bookings, appointment, and rentals through your store.
Conclusion
One of the distinguishing factors that helped with the popularity of WooCommerce is the vast choice of extension plugins. Every passing year, there are new features being added, and it is important to stay updated. This article has compiled a list of some of the most essential WooCommerce plugins that you need to have on your store this year. Let us know if we have missed anything.
