E-commerce plugins to help scale online businesses
The options for building an E-commerce website and converting products and services into a monetized sales generating business continue to grow as we move into a new decade full of technical innovation and innumerable possibilities. Today we are going to talk about the relatively newer but equally effective kid on the block, the WordPress E-commerce plugin. These simple plugins turn what could be a normal and typical WordPress website into an E-commerce store in just a matter of a few minutes. You could be a travel blogger who has seen the world and writes about your experiences for the world to share and then just as suddenly turn into someone who sells travel memorabilia from all the journeys that you have made thanks to the plugins.
The comforting factor about these WordPress E-commerce plugins is that in terms of features and benefits they go toe to toe with almost any kind of SAAS website and product. Not only will you be a part of a thriving resource group, with excellent support and development global communities, your E-commerce store will also be privy to easy integrations with the most popularly used content management systems used the world over. So whatever you sell — donuts or digital downloads — you can be up and running in just a few minutes.
A plugin can best be described as a piece of software that integrates with your current website and acts as an add-on to provide the E-commerce store with added functionality. It’s almost like a software update that devices receive from time to time enabling them to display additional content that they were not originally designed to display. Now that we are all caught up on what a plugin is and how it can transform your regular website into an E-commerce store for your small business or large enterprise, it is also time to know which of these plugins are essential across the different parameters of E-commerce marketing and deliverable execution.
Popular E-commerce Email Marketing Plugins
An ideal way to increase traffic to your E-commerce website and to make it popular is to have an email subscription database of past prospective and converted customers. These are people who may have either shown interest or then patronized your products and services at some point of time in the near or distant past and can most certainly be tapped up again to either resell the same product or service or to introduce them to new products or services that you may be now selling on your E-commerce store. However, building a list of this proportion manually and shooting individual emails is not just a very tedious and time-consuming process, it also hampers the ability to conduct an Email Marketing campaign with any hope of optimization.
Fortunately, WordPress Email Marketing plugins make this task simple and quick. These plugins allow you to create professional and content-driven emails in your dashboard at the backend and shoot them off to a multitude of people all at once. This helps to grow readership and also to spread the word effectively and economically on any new developments, promotions, and other such information. Some of the more effective Email Marketing plugins include:
HubSpot is easy to use and has integrations with over 300 tools. Having all the data of your contact database in one tool makes your Email Marketing personalized and actionable. Best suited to small businesses trying to scale, digital agencies, and service offering based companies.
MailChimp is one of the most popular Email Marketing platforms, and plugins. It is a trusted, streamlined, and impeccably supported plugin and makes email designing creative and easy. Best suited for consultancies, businesses, creative and advertising agencies, and even non-profit organizations.
Newsletter equips you with gorgeous, easy-to-customize email templates and subscription widgets. Newsletter also offers free extensions for archiving, as well as locking premium content with an advanced tracking option, drag-and-drop email composer, and a number of other extensions. Ideal for personal blogs, scaling businesses, and community event management.
This plugin makes it incredibly easy to generate impactful landing pages, as well as advanced analytics that can help better advise your marketing campaign. There is also a lot of creative leeway to create interactive Call To Action (CTA) buttons. A compliment for just about any sort of E-commerce business and handy for online publications as well.
SendGrid allows you to partner with the email service trusted by developers and marketers for timesaving, scalability, high ROIs, and delivery expertise. Ideally suited for small businesses trying to scale, digital agencies, and service offering based companies.
Popular E-commerce Google Ads Plugins
To get your products in front of the millions of shoppers searching on Google, running Google Ads on your E-commerce store has almost become mandatory these days. It is one of the easiest and also more cost-effective ways to promote your products to interested shoppers across Google so you can get discovered on even smaller sized budgets. Google Ads are essential since they help grow sales, expand reach, and track performance all at the press of a few clicks when the various plugins are installed correctly on the dashboard of your E-commerce online store. Some of these more popular plugins to run Google Ads for your growing online business are listed below:
Google Ads & Marketing by Kliken
Kliken’s Google Ads & Marketing manages and automates everything you need to get your products on Google. It helps eligible merchants create Google merchant center accounts, optimize smart product feeds, access free listings on surfaces across Google and the Google Shopping Tab, and run paid Smart Shopping campaigns to promote products across Google, Gmail, YouTube, and the Display Network.
This plugin boats of getting your Google Ads campaigns on WooCommerce and targeting the right audience with a Premier Google Partner by your side. They do so by creating and automating Google Ads campaigns for WooCommerce both easily and speedily. The extension features clever automation tools, the ability to target the right audience for you as well as maximize your return on investments.
This plugin allows you to boost your marketing strategy with Automate Ads on Google. It allows you to run Google Ads, easily, fast, and free. Display, Search, Shopping, Retargeting, and more is also simple and possible via this plugin. It also allows for an improved Adwords strategy due to its advanced, innovative, and powerful marketing automation tools, based on machine learning and big data.
If you feel that other advertising solutions for WordPress can be complicated, then AdSanity is perfect for you. It is beginner-friendly and doesn’t compromise on any features. The plugin works as a light ad rotator plugin. It allows the user, to create and manage ads shown on the E-commerce website as well as real-time keep statistics on views and clicks.
This is a popular option to manage ad campaigns. It is compatible with several popular ad networks and helps you display any kind of ads on your site. It also allows you to create HTML banners while also offering features like auto-positioning of ads to save you from hassles.
Popular E-commerce Facebook/Instagram Ads Plugins
Facebook and Instagram are probably two of the most used social media networks to effectively target customers online. Considering the incredibly high volumes of impressions that both these social media platforms generate due to their ability to curate, like, share and subscribe to the content of different nature, it is also important that your E-commerce brand and subsequently the many products and services under that brand should share a piece of this pie too. Manually running ad campaigns on both these networks can become a daunting affair not just in terms of technicalities but more importantly in terms of time invested. That is why plugins become ever so useful because they not only simplify how you can run the ad campaign but also feed you consistently with data to tell you how the campaign is performing with regards to money invested. Some of the more popularly used Facebook and Instagram Ad plugins are:
emarketing is the ideal solution to promote products on Google Shopping, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads. emarketing offers plugins for every e-commerce platform. Moreover, E-commerce stores can directly link their existing Google account with emarketing, so that it can optimize Google Shopping campaigns and retrieve the data feed for Facebook Ads and advertising on Instagram.
This plugin empowers you to grow your traffic and sales with powerful Facebook and Instagram advertising. Its cutting-edge ad automation tool makes it easy to launch sophisticated campaigns while the intuitive interface of the campaign builder allows users to create powerful prospecting and retargeting ad sets that ensure reach and sales.
This plugin helps to automate Facebook marketing with a strategy devised by seasoned experts in the field to deliver high returns and increased sales. It sets up a Facebook marketing campaign in just a few clicks via well-devised strategies by digital marketing experts who help create multiple marketing Ad sets simultaneously.
This plugin allows you to sync your WooCommerce products to a Facebook store to drive traffic to your website, or quickly create Facebook and Instagram ads for your products. You’ll also have the ability to design your ad, set targeting and placement, and pay, all directly on WooCommerce.
Facebook pixel is a plugin on your E-commerce website that collects data to help track conversions from Facebook ads, optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.
Popular E-commerce Payment Gateway Plugins
One of the most basic ideas of having an E-commerce business is to be able to make sales from it and the only way you can make a sale directly is if the customer can pay for a product or service that they want to buy from your E-commerce store. This is why payment gateways are one of the most integral parts of any E-commerce business and getting the correct plugin for the same is reliant on a few basic parameters.
One of course being the transaction fees and other charges that the payment gateway partner charges every time a sale is made on the online store. Having a strong presence and high availability in your target region is another crucial parameter that should not be overlooked while choosing a payment gateway partner. Features like easy refunds, extra security, verification, and regulatory compliance based on your region are also important to keep in mind. Some of the more popular E-commerce payment gateway plugins are:
Stripe supports all top credit and debit cards. Your customers can also pay using Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Alipay. It is available in 40 plus countries and supports 135 plus currencies. There is no setup or annual fees required and they charge 2.9% per. It has a great checkout experience, and it works smoothly on mobile as well as desktop.
A pioneer in the payment industry, PayPal offers a variety of services suitable for your E-commerce online stores and businesses. It is available in several different countries across the globe. PayPal charges are based on your account type and the number/volume of sales you make. However, it does not offer an on-site checkout experience and your customers would automatically be redirected to a PayPal website to complete any purchase.
Square is a great payment gateway for E-commerce stores especially for those online businesses that still need to have physical locations, delivery, and other selling options. This payment gateway is exclusively available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and the UK. The transaction fee varies for each country, but it offers a fixed transaction rate.
This is a payment gateway used by a large number of online businesses in the United States, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia. This extension provides a seamless checkout process for customers using credit cards where customers do not need to leave the E-commerce store or get redirected anywhere else. It is also user friendly and allows customers to save their payment details and method for regular reuse.
This plugin is easy to install and gets updated regularly. It includes features such API secure capturing of the order overview, money refunds, order cancellations, and more. It is also compatible with the latest versions of WordPress.
Popular E-commerce Delivery Service API Plugins
It’s one thing to have the perfect and most attractive E-commerce store. It another thing to have it loaded with great products and service offerings. But the most important thing in the E-commerce process is to ensure that those products and offerings are reaching your customers in a timely and correct manner with the quality intact. This is where having good delivery partners comes in very handy. For an E-commerce store that generates significant volumes, manually tracking and keeping up with each delivery can be an impossible endeavor. This is why it is essential to have a strong plugin to help process the online store with delivery details. Some of the more delivery service API plugins include the following:
This is a delivery management system where the plugin connects your online store to an Xpressdelivery app delivery management service and sends all the orders as tasks to that app. This allows for tasks to be managed using geolocation and assigned to delivery agents. Customers can also benefit from features like live tracking of the delivery driver from their user accounts.
Delivery Drivers for WooCommerce
This plugin offers better driver management for all delivery services that use WooCommerce. Your business benefits from this plugin because drivers are allowed the ability to easily connect with both the customer of the order and the dispatch center. It also reduces paperwork and needless communication which can otherwise be a time-consuming process.
This is a WordPress plugin designed to provide technology solutions for freight forwarding, transportation, and other logistical operations. It helps manage operations, customers, drivers, quotation, form, branch, and employees. It can also be utilized as a transport management, project management, or other status tracking management system.
This plugin automatically adds tracking numbers to your orders and shows the latest tracking information for users. It displays the latest orders and imports tracking numbers. The plugin also allows you to effortlessly choose any of the reputed global carriers by creating a free After Ship account.
This is one of the best ways to assimilate and mechanize an entire order workflow. The plugin automatically forwards orders to a fulfillment center and returns tracking numbers to your shopping tray, besides updating levels of product inventory.
The above is an indication of how the right plugins for your E-commerce store can make all the difference to the smooth functioning and easy execution of your online business.
AmareSol Global is a digital business consultancy creating innovative change through a team of talented designers, developers, and strategists creating digital experiences for brands and companies around the world. We are continuously fueling growth across constantly changing and advancing digital landscapes, by seeking and formulating newer and better ways to service clientele on a global scale across industries. Look up more about us at www.amaresolglobal.com.
References:
https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-ecommerce-plugins/
https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-Email-marketing-plugins/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/newsletter/
https://woocommerce.com/products/google-ads-and-marketing/
https://woocommerce.com/products/
https://www.cleverecommerce.com/
https://www.facebook.com/business/ads
https://woocommerce.com/products/facebook/
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel
https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/best-woocommerce-payment-gateways-wordpress/
https://www.paypal.com/us/home
https://xpressdelivery.app/wordpress-delivery-management-plugin
https://wordpress.org/plugins/delivery-drivers-for-woocommerce/