How do I scale my WooCommerce store?

E-commerce software doesn't come much more powerful than WooCommerce!

As a powerful tool for growing your online business, WooCommerce has many features that make it ideal for scaling your business. That said, tools are only as good as the person using them. So, here's how you can use WooCommerce to scale your online business:

Getting the design right

Scaling will be much easier and faster for your business with an easy-to-navigate website tailored to user experience. Of course, the best way to get this right is to build a custom WooCommerce theme tailored to your business needs. However, even if you don't have a custom WooCommerce theme, there are still many things you can do to improve your site's design.

Here are some insights that can help you improve your store today:

• People tend to read websites in an F-shaped pattern, which means you should have your cart button and essential calls to action in the top right corner of the page.
• Your sales will increase by around 13% if you offer some form of guest checkout on mobile.
• Want to keep a member-only side to your site? Most retailers do! Instead of going all in on guest checkouts, you can compromise on this and tackle the root of the conversion issue by offering a faster path to checkout. Allow users to use social or Google logins with a plugin for a 40% conversion boost.
• Experimenting, and listening to data, is at the heart of any successful e-commerce business. Prepare yourself for scale by setting up A//B testing ahead of time. The easiest to get started with this is by using Google Optimize. By installing Google Optimize, you can automatically display different versions of your website to audiences depending on demographics or percentages of people.

Prepare your WooCommerce site for scale

Famously, Amazon estimated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost $1.6 billion in sales annually. How your site works matters just as much as how it looks, especially at scale. Here's what to consider:

1. Hosting: One of the biggest things you can do to prepare your site for growth is to look at your hosting. You'll need to ensure your WooCommerce host remains stable no matter the traffic spikes your site experiences and that there won't be a loss of function or speed if users on the site increase.
2. Caching: This is when your website is temporarily stored on a person's device so that it can serve your website to visitors faster (and improve site speed). Check out this guide on how to set up your caching policy correctly.
3. Clean up your code: Easier said than done, but a site with clean code (and good structure) will load faster. An easy way to speed up some loading time is to remove any plugins you don't use from your site.
4. Go green: Your WooCommerce store will also consume more energy as more users visit and purchase from the store. If your business is focused on sustainability, consider looking into carbon-neutral hosting solutions.

Optimise for search engines

You've probably already figured this out, but search engine optimisation is crucial to your e-commerce growth strategy. Happily, WooCommerce sites often have a structure already optimised for most search engines, so you have an excellent base to build on.

Here's how to scale with SEO:

• Use keyword research tools like Google Ads Planner and Google Trends to find the keywords your target audience is using. Knowing what words, phrases, topics, and terms are related to the subject matter you want to rank for is critical. Beyond that, validate that people searching for those topics are your potential desired audience. Good tools for this include Semrush, Moz, and Ahrefs.
• Once you've researched, it's time to implement a strategy. Making a site perform well in Google rankings doesn't mean jamming in every possible keyword in the world to every possible page. In fact, keyword stuffing is a fast way to get yourself nixed from Google entirely. Instead, focus on making systematic and consistent gains on high-value keywords with high commercial intent.
• If you haven't already, ensure your store has a sitemap.xml file and robots.txt page. This will make it easier for search engines to crawl and classify your pages.
• When looking at SEO, make sure to optimise for mobile search results. Most shoppers begin their product research process by searching on their phones instead of through traditional desktop browsing channels like Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
• Quick wins for WooCommerce stores include adjusting product titles (product name), description tags (product description), meta tags (keywords), and image alt text attributes.

Nail your email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to nurture leads, convert customers, and generate sales. This is often an underutilised channel for many e-commerce businesses, which is ironic when you consider email has the highest ROI in the e-commerce game.

Using targeted emails based on customer behaviour will increase conversions dramatically. For example, someone who visits multiple pages before purchasing might need more information about shipping times than someone who completes purchases quickly without looking around too much beforehand.

Here are some other emails you can send to scale your business:

1. Abandoned cart: most e-commerce sites have an abandoned cart rate of 15%; for some, it's as high as 50%. Abandoned cart emails offer incentives and reminders to encourage customers to complete the purchase they were on the brink of making. When you get these emails right, you'll quickly regain around 40% of abandoned carts.
2. Post-Purchase: you'll want to automatically send emails after a customer has made a purchase to encourage more spending. This is a great way to stay engaged with customers and provide excellent customer service to increase retention.
3. Browse Abandonment: this email series is sent to subscribers after they have browsed items on the website but have yet to add them to a cart. The goal of the sequence is to bring customers back to the store and facilitate further browsing.

Scaling your operations through WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an excellent commerce platform because of the range and depth of integrations your store can hook into. Choose the right partner software, and you have yourself an unstoppable force when it comes to sales.

Some WooCommerce functionality we recommend includes:

• Wishlists: Around 74% of users already use shopping carts as online wish lists. And so, giving customers an actual wishlist functionality can increase order values and repeat purchases for your store. Want to go one step further? Give customers a reason to return with seasonal coupons and free shipping offers on products in their wishlists.
• Use WooCommerce for PDF invoices and automatically generated packing slips. When thinking about scale, what takes just minutes for one order can become a significant time suck. Save your team time by letting WooCommerce generate your packing slips for you.
• Use WooCommerce for automated delivery notifications. Customer experience is everything in the e-commerce world. Use WooCommerce with your fulfilment team and instantly send your customers messages when their parcels are on the road.
• Manage your bulk stock and print stock levels inside WooCommerce using custom code or a suitable plugin. This will help you make sure any physical stock and SKUs match your website. Need a way to sync large warehouse inventory with your store? WooCommerce can do that, too, using your smartphone as a product scanner.

Hitting that first $1M with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is built for scale, so it can grow to meet your needs as you scale to your first $1M revenue targets. It only needs you to make a plan to meet the demand you want to generate. Then, the sky is the limit.

As you scale, if you need a commerce partner ready to grow with you, our team of experts is here every step of the way. Get in touch with us today to book a free consultation.

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