In recent days, there has been a significant rise in the number of eCommerce stores that have popped up all across the globe. Amongst all, WooCommerce has subsequently occupied the center stage, owing much to its simplicity and ease of the initial setup process.  

The saturated markets in almost every industry today are no news to anyone. From an escape room breakout to WooCommerce sites, competition is heavy in every field. And that is why companies need to be on their toes all the time to be ready and implement effective strategies to help their business stand out on its own. In this article, we will look at 5 vital ways that can help you optimize your WooCommerce store performance in no time!  

1. Update your software  

Software updates are a basic thing when considering your gadget or website. Updating your WooCommerce website when a new version of the software hits the market is a vital step for you to look into.  

Enabling auto-update can often turn out to be a hackle-free way to ensure that your website always remains updated. Keeping your website updated allows you not only to provide the best services to your customers but also to keep away from security breaches.   

2. Regular scanning to prevent malware 

Running a scan of your WooCommerce site on either a regular or twice a week basis is a crucial task for you to do. It will help you keep your website free from any suspicious software or malware threats. Having a good-quality and trustworthy host for your WooCommerce website is also a vital step to keeping away from malfunctions.  

Running scans once in a while and even keeping a stern check on your downtime are essential steps to ensure your customers have a safe browsing experience. Make sure to devote sufficient time to analyzing and studying your scan reports to look for any malware or threats. Thus, you can ward off any virus infection from affecting your WooCommerce site.    

Also Read: Everything You Need To Know About Ecommerce Marketing

3. Do not forget to backup! 

Ensuring that you have a proper backup of all your data is one of the most important things that you need to do. You would surely be lost if suddenly you find out all the data on your website has been hacked or is no longer accessible. Hence, make sure to maintain a proper backup of all your data to avoid any such situation from happening.  

Now there can be several plugins or software available today, like Google Drive or OneDrive, to help you store your data as a backup. You are free to choose one that suits your needs the best.   

4. Go through your checkout process. 

It is essential for WooCommerce sites and even for online businesses to go through their entire checkout process as a customer to figure out issues that may exist. Why wait for your customers to leave behind negative reviews? Instead, you can work on making your checkout process as simple and user-friendly as possible for users to easily handle it. 

Payment processes should be easy and hackle-free; else, you are going to lose out on a lot of customers. Several payment pathways provide sandboxes to test the checkout process without having to make any payment. Checking out your website’s payment process is an essential step to optimizing it in the best possible way.  

5. Check the speed of your site 

No one is going to wait for a long time simply for your webpage to load. Instead, they are all the more likely to drift away to other competitive websites wherein the webpage loads faster than yours. So now, if you wish to hold on to your existing customers and also increase the traffic to your site, run speed tests on a daily basis.  

Following the speed tests, you can utilize the test results to enhance the performance of your website and make it run faster. Usage of compressed image files or video files can be a helpful way to reduce the loading speed of your webpage. The presence of a reliable and trustworthy host is also equally vital to ensure that your webpage takes less time to load.  

Conclusion

You should never stay put and wait for problems to pop up, but instead, work on removing any factor that may create issues in the future. Seeking professional help in maintaining your WooCommerce, if you deem it necessary, might also do you good. 

Author Bio:  Aniya more is one of the brightest content writer at Breakout escape room. She is a passionate writer who loves to read books and explore different escape rooms. With a great work ethic, she spends most of her time researching and reading. When she is not working, she likes to relax with a cup of coffee and enjoy watching her favorite tv show or walking her dog peanut. You can find her on LinkedIn.

In the times of global pandemic when everything has shifted from offline to the online world, Ecommerce has been a well flourished industry. Thus with changing times, it has become even more important to focus on your Ecommerce Marketing and enhance your businesses. 

For the better understanding of our newbies to the Ecommerce world, Ecommerce Marketing refers to the process of using marketing strategies to bring in more audience to your online stores, turning those audience into customers, and then retain those customers for future shopping as well. A great marketing strategy can support your business in various ways such as creating and expanding your brand name, bring in more traffic, and consequently enhance your digital sales and provide a great word of mouth.

Types of Ecommerce Marketing

There are various ways to do Ecommerce Marketing and one varies from another and can contribute to different results as well. Some of the very familiar ones include social media, texts, emails, SEO, blogging, offline marketing, publications, etc. In each of these categories, you can try and explore various new ways to do marketing and grab the attention of customers or possible customers and influence them to not just browse your online store but actually try out some of your products as well.

• Marketing through Search Engine Optimization: With the help of SEO, you get to make your business visible to an audience which has a higher probability of becoming potential customers. Through this, your business is made available at search results by using the keywords in your website. You get to meet customers who have greater intentions to buy the products available at your site. You can start a blog using keywords and attract potential customers.

• Marketing through emails: There are various kinds of mails that you can send to your customers, be it a new or an old one. To begin with, you can send a new customer a welcome mail to introduce your business and products, and basically welcome them. If a customer buys a product, then send mails containing details of the order and delivery. You can even ask to provide post-purchase assistance to them. Send your loyal customers some special benefits and VIP offer emails as well.

• Marketing through texts or messages: Just the way you promote your business over emails you can do similarly through text messages. You should try to focus on building customer relationships and always be welcoming to new customers. You can provide welcome discounts to customers or surprise your loyal customers with few special benefits, offers, rewards or discounts. An added advantage of using SMS marketing is that the open rate of these texts will be more than those of emails. Even if it is not opened, there are chances that a potential customer views your offers through notifications as well.

• Marketing through Social Media: In today’s world of digitalization, one cannot ignore or sideline the power of social media in any way possible. When you mark your presence on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc you are able to reach out to a larger audience all in one go. 

They can view your products, and even contact you if they are genuinely interested. This way you gain some organic followers which can turn into potential customers in the near future. You can even send your products to some very powerful social influencers and work with them in collaborations and other forms. This could again be organic or even involve some paid promotions as well.

• Marketing through content: There are various forms possible for content marketing such as writing blogs, articles, posts, reviews or feedbacks at your sites, ratings of your products and much more. This adds a touch of genuineness to your site and even makes your digital reputation more reliable and trustworthy. With the help of content writing, be it articles or blogs, you can answer a lot of questions and queries that might persist in the heads of your customers.

Quick tips for Ecommerce Marketing

As we are about to end our talk on Ecommerce Marketing, it won’t be fair to end it without discussing some tips and tricks that you can use in your business and turn it from being a good one to a great one.

• Before making any marketing strategies, you should strategize about your marketplace. You should have some idea about your possible target audience, their pocket allowances, etc and even study your competitors in the market as well.
• Always project your outcomes. It is important that you set some tentative goals and ideologies that you want to fulfill and move forward.
• Be prepared for the future. You should always have plans about working when your business succeeds and you have a greater customer tally to serve.

An E-commerce platform refers to an application software that allows the customers as well as the sellers with a combined platform to cooperate and work on it as per their own roles. Basically the customer should be able to browse the e-commerce platform to explore the various products available from the sellers and add them into their carts, shop and check out. 

Some very popular examples using such e-commerce solutions are Alibaba, Amazon, Shopify, Magento, etc. Talking about Amazon, it won’t be wrong if we say that Amazon had been ruling this from a long time and then Microsoft emerged as a competition with its own Microsoft Ecommerce Platform, using Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 Commerce. Through them, Microsoft has always wanted to help small businesses and thus entered the world of digital commerce; providing the option to generate web pages with products for the sellers and giving them to customers to use.

Dynamics 365 Commerce

It is an advancement to Dynamics 365 Retail. With this, you get to have a collected view of all the insights about your website and its performance in a single spot. You can provide your customers a highly customisable platform as Microsoft offers some really great tools for the same. Be it a small business or a large one, with the SSK (Store Starter Kit), you can easily scale your business very easily and you will get some really great features as well. 

We will further be discussing some of the key benefits of using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce as your e-commerce platform:

• To help the customers, you can enhance their purchasing experience with a great Cart, purchasing products, and other options. 
• You can have pages with complete product descriptions and even allow the customers to provide their feedback.
• The customers would have the options to search through the wide product tally easily. 
• They can manage their account and access it swiftly from various spots.
• With Microsoft, you need not worry much about making payments as they are definitely going to be secure and safe as well.

Key Factors

There are various key deciding factors involved in picking up the right e-commerce platform for your business. Costing, SEOs, Scalability, etc are some of the topics that can highly affect your decision about opting for a specific e-commerce platform and influence your decision. So let’s understand how Microsoft deals with them in more detail.

Costing

No matter what features any e-commerce platform offers, whether it is affordable for you or not, is a major deciding factor. Microsoft Azure allows you with the pay as you go pricing model. So you pay for only what you have used. This is a win-win deal wherein you get to use all the exclusive features available without paying for anything extra. Things could not get pocket friendly anymore.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO plays a very vital role in deciding how much your business and products get to flourish in the digital world. Every single search can open better opportunities for you after all. 

Scalability

As the Microsoft platform is a cloud one, there won’t be many issues in providing scalability as it is one of the prime advantages of being with Microsoft. This will not only help you in using the resources but will also make this usage more efficient.

Before Selecting Dynamics 365 Commerce

No doubt Microsoft is a trusted brand, with great apps and features, and has a lot to offer to you in this deal. But with all these great benefits there are some quick pointers that you should keep in your mind before making any final call.

• You cannot directly buy the software and start using it. You need to have Dynamics Lifecycle Services which indirectly includes having an Azure subscription as well.
• There are some features which are limited to cloud platforms only and cannot be made available with on-premises services.
• The pricing structure may be a little steep for very small business and medium businesses. For adding Customer Insights, you need to pay extra and another additional extra cost will be added if you need Fraud Protection as well.
• Also if you are planning to opt for Commerce 365 you will be required to shift to the cloud platform Azure initially and this will certainly increase the overall cost. 
• Since there are so many added applications that are required, your team will need some extra time to learn how to use them and get used to all of it.

Microsoft is a big name that can certainly be trusted and if you are looking for a big business digital model with some decent fundings then you should certainly go for Microsoft Ecommerce Platform. Initially settling on a new model might be a little difficult but it will surely be worth the effort.