As a small business owner, you have to be very careful when it comes to choosing the right online store platform for your business. Worryingly, 22% of Ecommerce businesses fail in their first year, and there are many reasons for this, like a badly designed website, a confusing checkout process, or poor inventory management.
While entrepreneurs concentrate on other aspects of their business, like its product, recruitment, logo, and marketing strategy, they fail to recognize the importance of their website. In Ecommerce, the website is the face of your brand, and it can be the difference between whether a business fails or flourishes.
You no longer need a university degree in web design and years of experience working code to create a good website. There are Ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce that make creating and managing an online store simple.
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What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell products online. It has many features, such as product categories and tags, custom fields for each product, and a simple-to-use shopping cart and checkout for your website.
What does it cost?
WooCommerce is free to use, with no hidden fees, although you need to factor in small costs like domain names, hosting service costs, and any plugins you want to add to your store. If you have a marketing budget, the sky really can be the limit when it comes to getting the most from your online store – especially if you work with a WooCommerce developer.
In this article, we’ll look at what makes a good WooCommerce website, and who is doing it well.
5 Main Factors of a Good WooCommerce Website (Behind our choices)
A successful Ecommerce business focuses on making sure its customers enjoy their time online by providing an excellent user experience. Here are some ideas that you can use right now to make shopping a pleasure not just for yourself, but for your customers too.
Eye-Catching Photos
High-quality images help potential buyers see exactly what they’re buying before making their final purchase decision. The best websites will source high-quality images for their product pages – or showcase their popular products in the best possible light by hiring a professional photographer.
Great Copy
A web store isn’t simply a place where people buy things; it’s a way to showcase your company’s identity and culture. Websites that use a consistent tone of voice ensure their customers know exactly who they’re buying from – and are always the ones with the most loyal customers.
Informative Blog
A well-maintained blog makes readers feel like they’re a part of a community, which encourages them to interact more with your brand and feel more engaged with your business. They’re also a great way for a business to tell its story – helping to attract new customers and convert visitors into buyers.
Professional UX
User experience (UX) plays an important part in making sure your website is both functional and intuitive, reliable, user friendly, and easy to use. These factors determine whether your site visitors enjoy using your website or not – and whether they stay or leave, shop with a competitor, or buy from you. A professional UX can increase conversion rates, generate repeat custom, and lead to good reviews.
Loading fast
In addition to helping visitors find their way around your site quickly, making sure your pages don’t take forever to load helps them be happy and encourages them to stay longer. If people find your product/service frustratingly slow loading time, they’re likely to bounce – which means they’ll leave your site and never return.
WooCommerce websites are fast, but there are many ways you can speed them up, like increasing the WordPress memory limit, optimizing images, using a content delivery network, and using a lightweight theme.
22 Sites That Use WooCommerce and Inspire You
WooCommerce is a major player in the Ecommerce market, powering over 5,000,000 web stores and online shops. Whether you’re about to start an Ecommerce store or are looking to switch platforms, we’ve put together 22 sites that use WooCommerce to inspire you, here they are:
Since its founding in 1851, Singer has been known worldwide for its sewing machines, overlocker, irons, sewing accessories, and sewing software. With Facebook for WooCommerce, they increase their sales by finding new customers through social media sites and integrating their online store with Facebook.
Porter & York offers premium meats, cut to order. Their website is a beautiful and aesthetically pleasing masterpiece featuring the many types of meats they have available. It shows enticing photos of various meats that truly draw the visitor in and make them click ‘buy’.
The All Blacks Shop is an official online retailer for the New Zealand national Rugby Union team. In keeping with its name, the web pages are designed with a very dark color palette consisting primarily of blacks and grays. In contrast, the bold white text helps the copy stand out from the rest of the content. Their clean navigation, featured products, and well laid-out product pages make it easy for fans to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Ceasar’s Ice Cream offers a range of unique ice cream flavors sourced from Peru. With its clean layout, easily navigated pages, and well-organized content, the site makes it easy for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for without having to wade through too much unnecessary clutter. There aren’t any unnecessary filters on their flavor page; just six different types of ice cream to choose from.
Disruptive Youth is a website that sells boutique-style clothing and activewear for women. With its prominent features including large photos of its garments and easy-to-use navigation of each product category, the company’s website offers a great user experience through its minimalist design.
Rotimatic is the world’s most advanced robot for cooking Indian flatbread. With just one push of a button, RotiMatic lets you prepare freshly made rotis in less than ninety seconds! Their website is very clean and simple, using a fresh white and orange color palette and beautiful pictures to showcase its product.
The Stems Brooklyn website is more than just an online portfolio of their incredible range of one-of-a-kind mixed-garden bouquets, its integration with WooCommerce and Square means it’s a true floral marketplace where customers can place orders. The buying process is very streamlined and speedy, and its photography is stunning.
Zoya’s Pantry is an online health and organic food store. They use fantastic branding, using their color scheme (mint green and dark purple) throughout their site. Their layouts use interactivity and white space effectively to reflect their clean product, and keep things simple and clear for visitors.
Airstream Supply Co is a specialty brand for Airstream trailers offering premium products designed to help people enjoy their time away from home. Their website does a fantastic job at displaying both their product range and stories – like details of trips and helpful guides – so you can get a real feel for the products and picture yourself using them.
For nearly 70 years, Sutton’s Safety Shoes has been providing comfortable shoes to customers across North Carolina. Now, thanks to its well-designed WooCommerce website, it can sell to customers all over the world. Their new website is modern, slick, and showcases their shoe products and accessories in neat categories that make it very easy to navigate and shop.
Associated Scaffolding is a full-service equipment and safety supply company, selling safety and construction equipment nationally through its online store. Their page is modern in design, showing just how impressive their products are through visually pleasing photography. And thanks to neatly categorized products, finding exactly what you’re looking for is very straightforward.
Bloomscape is a US-based indoor plant seller with a beautiful site cleverly targeted at their audience. They’ve gone for a natural color scheme to match the products they sell and have created a unique buying experience through their product filter extension – allowing users to filter by plant care, size, light lever, and more.
The Shop Catalog is the Ecommerce sister site to the pop culture blog, the Thought Catalog. Their store is easy-to-use, clean, and effective. On the homepage, they feature beautiful, large photos of their products, including clothing, books, and houseware with the primary goal to inspire shoppers to buy something new.
Henry J Socks is a very well branded sock subscription service that uses minimalist design as a stunning yet simple display of its products – which in this case, is socks in a box. The sock selection page is almost like a quiz or survey, where you customize your sock selection based on different product elements
Fitness gear providers, NC Fitness, offer customers across Australia serious functional training equipment. Their website is very quick considering the number of high-quality images on each page – and it’s easy to use, too. Plus, the way each product is presented gives fitness fanatics a great idea of how their products can fit in within their fitness routine.
Strandberg Guitars is a Swedish guitar manufacturer with a website that’s visually striking thanks to its rich dark color palette and lots of beautiful product images throughout. The header video that appears when someone first visits your site gets people’s attention by showcasing their amazing guitar designs from every angle. Their product pages are packed with relevant information, too, like a detailed product description and measurements.
Thermos is the original creator of the reusable bottle, and their Malaysian website – powered by WooCommerce – is stunning. It presents its products in a very unusual ‘blog-like’ layout that really works. They put a lot of focus on their Pinterest-style blog, and you can see that focus on imagery really reflected in their image-heavy website. It’s fun, bold, and makes shopping Thermos very easy.
Sodashi is a beauty website that offers a stunning storefront that introduces visitors to their brand story and key products. They have opted for a natural color palette and clean design to reflect the natural beauty range. Their online form makes it simple for shoppers to discover products based on their skin type, which makes buying from Sodashi incredibly enjoyable and straightforward.
Ab Aeterno creates unique wood watch designs for both men and women The website communicates the high quality of its pieces and the luxurious nature of the brand. When you’re ready to buy, you can browse all their watches by category or brand name. You’ll find shopping easy and straightforward thanks to its thoughtfully designed WooCommerce store.
Conclusion
For WooCommerce websites, the most important things are simplicity, quality, and branding.
All the above WooCommerce store examples trust the platform for all things Ecommerce, and from the looks of it, they’ve made the right choice.
WooCommerce is an extremely easy-to-use and highly customizable Ecommerce platform for WordPress websites. It’s easy for anyone to use, but if you want something special, there are thousands of plugins available to help customize WooCommerce even further.
Use it to create your professional online store from the ground up, make use of WooCommerce plugins, and watch your brand grow.
About The Author:
Dave Sweeney
Dave’s role at TheeDigital is to help our clients meet their goals by creating websites that outperform their competition. Dave is a student of life and strives to continue learning the latest trends in the industry. Having spent many years in the digital media world working in the television and newspaper industry as a graphic designer & design manager, these skills definitely benefit our TheeDigital clients.
