An online store that fails to cater to its users can result in frustrated customers, low conversion rates, and missed opportunities for marketing and communications.
In this case, WooCommerce plugins are great tools to pair with the well-known e-commerce platform, helping to improve your customer’s experience and increase conversions. And there are many free plugins that can help optimize your WooCommerce store into an online shopper’s dream.
But first, let us emphasize one thing: a free plugin doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good quality.
Our top advice is to choose the plugins you use wisely, making sure to only select those that suit your target market’s needs. Also, don’t forget that overloading your store with too many plugins can result in poor site performance and a cluttered user interface.
What are the best WooCommerce plugins for WordPress?
Read our complete guide to the top 40 free WooCommerce plugins for help choosing the very best WooCommerce plugins that will help impress your customers and grow your business.
The Checkout is considered one of the most important parts of your webstore. Don’t use anything but the best WooCommerce plugins to help optimize the process for your customers.
Simplify the payment process by giving customers as many payment options as possible. That’s what Stripe Payment Gateway is all about. It lets you accept payments from a very wide range of credit/debit cards in most countries, as well as (mobile and desktop) Apple Pay, Google Pay and Payment Request API.
Add custom fields to your WooCommerce checkout page with this smart plugin. It lets you not only add, but also rearrange the order of fields on your checkout page by dragging and dropping. This way, you can create a layout that works best for your customers—especially handy if you sell to businesses that want to add their own reference numbers or other info to an order.
With Amazon Pay, users can place an order on your site but have the same payment and shipping options as they would have when purchasing from you on Amazon. The buyer simply logs in to their Amazon account to complete the order, but they remain on your site the whole time. This plugin is not available in all countries.
WooCommerce Direct Checkout speeds up the checkout process by letting shoppers bypass the shopping cart and go straight from the product page to checkout. Faster, more efficient check-out means less cart abandonment and happier shoppers.
Offer your shoppers a personalized checkout experience with WooCommerce Checkout Manager. This plugin lets you add custom fields to the checkout, based on the customer’s preferences. It also makes order sorting a breeze for them. It’s a very customer-friendly tool for retailers who sell to other businesses.
With WooCommerce Wallet, your customers have a virtual wallet for handling payments and refunds. This is a secure way of handling online transactions and it also enables shopkeepers to issue instant rebates (cash-back offers) and refunds.
International Ecommerce Plugins
Selling online to international customers can result in many obstacles. Read on to discover the best WooCommerce plugins to help you succeed in going international.
This tax compliance plugin enables WooCommerce sellers to sell around the world without fear of making mistakes. The plugin automates the compliance process for US sales tax, VAT, and GST wherever you sell. Quaderno calculates the correct amount of tax on each sale, sends tax receipts, and provides comprehensive reports. It also alerts you when your business is liable for taxes in a new place.
No international e-commerce site would be complete without automatic currency conversion. This free plugin gives your customers automatic, real-time currency conversions. This added transparency can have a positive influence on their decision to buy.
Nothing shows your shoppers how much you care better than communicating with them in their own language. WooCommerce Multilingual is compatible with all WooCommerce themes and extensions, enabling you to translate every aspect of your site. You shoppers can choose which language version of the site they want to view.
If you’re operating an international business, then Booster for WooCommerce can save you lots of trouble. This powerful plugin offers loads of features, from language settings to bulk price discounting to currency conversion and country-specific pricing and more.
Best WooCommerce Plugins for Shipping and Operations
One of the most vital parts of your business is getting the products efficiently and effectively to your customers. Plugins can make this task run smoothly so don’t forget to consider adding the following suggestions.
Generate professional PDF invoices and packing slips in multiple languages with this handy plugin. It comes with a customizable template, covering all the usual invoice and packing slip essentials. Plus, you can create, download and e-mail invoices in bulk.
Easily set and enforce a minimum purchase amount. If shoppers don’t reach the minimum, a message will appear when they try to check out, informing them that they need to add more items to be able to place the order.
The true test of your e-commerce success is how you handle your shipping. SendCloud is a smart plugin that lets you offer your customers branded delivery options (from major couriers like UPS, DHL and DPD) with one simple step in the checkout process. It’s never been easier to offer fast shipping.
Once you set up your integration with multiple carriers you can optimize the whole shipping process without any coding requirement.
You can offer maximum flexibility by combining various shipping methods on your terms.
For example, depending on your schedule to pick-up or drop-off the parcels, you can offer same- and next-day delivery. But these are not the only things that you can do. If you want to learn more, please check this out.
Shipping is still one of the biggest customer service challenges for e-commerce. Reduce shipping-related service queries by letting shoppers specify a delivery date during the checkout process. That’s what Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce lets you do, along with managing other shipping options, like local pickup.
Smart Manager gives you an Excel-like interface for easily managing all your site’s information, such as products, orders and customers. It’s a great way to maintain an overview of your most important information, and even includes a full-screen mode for easier working.
If you’re thinking of getting on board the multi-vendor marketplace trend, the WooCommerce Multivendor Marketplace can help you get set up. Maintain oversight over important payment-related topics, like commissions and withdrawals. It is also compatible with all the major payment systems, including PayPal, Stripe and Skrill.
WooCommerce Plugins for Products and Website Optimisation
Remember, ensuring your users have a smooth and enjoyable experience on your website is vital. Plugins can help to enhance the performance of your webstore, from optimizing the product pages to the shopping process for your customers.
WooCommerce My Account Widget is a straightforward plugin for displaying customer account information and letting shoppers conveniently log in within the widget. It gives the shopper quick links to the shopping cart, checkout, their account and other pages. This gives returning shoppers a quick and easy way of navigating your site.
If the WooCommerce theme you’re using does not prominently display a cart button at the top of your screen, consider using WooCommerce Menu Bar Cart. This adds a cart button right to your WordPress navigation menu, so the cart is always just a click away.
Add clarity to your shop page with YITH WooCommerce Quick View. When shoppers hover over a product thumbnail, a lightbox will appear containing a clear overview of the product, including a larger image, description and ‘Add to cart’ button. This is a great way to maintain a clutter-free product list and still give interested shoppers the information they need.
Create customized modern-looking product sliders and carousels on any page of your WooCommerce shop with WooCommerce Products Slider. This is a great way to display multiple products in a limited amount of space without overwhelming the shopper.
Simplify the use of built-in WooCommerce filters with WooCommerce Customizer. This plugin lets you customize button text, fields and other onscreen items without having to write PHP code. It provides a separate Settings page where you can easily configure your custom-made buttons, text etc.
Shoppers love being able to compare multiple items side by side. That’s exactly what YITH WooCommerce Compare lets them do. You can choose which information fields appear in the comparison chart and in which order.
Nothing annoys shoppers worse than slow, clunky search options. You don’t have to worry about that with YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search. It offers a superfast, high-power search tool using Ajax, so that shoppers can search your shop quickly, without leaving the page they’re currently viewing.
Use the YITH WooCommerce Ajax Product Filter in combination with the Ajax Search plugin from YITH, and you’ll keep your customers happy with a user-friendly, intuitive product search. Now, customers can easily find the products they’re looking for, without any aggravation.
Now you can customize the colors of your WooCommerce buttons and other elements without adding any custom CSS. Simply install the WooCommerce Colors plugin and you can change button colors easily, right inside your theme customizer.
Give your shoppers a fully customizable shopping experience with WooCommerce Products Filter. This lets them filter products based on their chosen criteria, such as category, feature, tags, price or more.
Create a modern user experience with Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce. Instead of scrolling to see your products, shoppers can open multiple tabs within the site, so they can easily navigate the shop without having to scroll or click back and forth or open loads of tabs in their browser.
Give your shoppers an up-close look at your products with WooCommerce Image Zoom. This plugin improves conversions and reduces returns by giving customers a chance to carefully view large images of the product before buying. The large images only load when the user chooses to zoom, so this plugin doesn’t slow down your page’s loading time.
With Product Enquiry for WooCommerce, a button will appear on each product page enabling customers to easily ask a question about the product. This creates a helpful, interactive shopping experience and helps prevent customers from buying the wrong item and needing to return it.
If your business offers personalized products, such as customizable (printed) clothing and accessories, make things easy with WooCommerce PPOM (short for ‘personalized product option manager’). This plugin is available in a free version that covers its most important features, giving your customers an easy way to personalize their products, and shopkeepers an easy way to handle the orders.
Best SEO, marketing and communications WooCommerce plugins
Don’t forget, without marketing activities, it will be hard to capture customers and increase success for your e-commerce business.
Read below for help from the best WooCommerce plugins for marketing.
Omnisend is an email & SMS marketing automation platform that’s specifically designed for e-commerce businesses. This means that all the templates, features, reports, automation workflows, etc., are geared towards getting businesses to better understand their subscribers and thereby increase their sales.
Omnisend offers a flexible email builder that comes packed with pre-built templates, making it easy for Shopify businesses to build high-converting, on-brand, beautiful email campaigns. The strongest part of Omnisend is the ability to create powerful automation workflows, so you can set up trigger emails like cart abandonment, welcome email, and much more.
Although this plugin is not for free, it has to be added to the list. Because Yoast SEO is without a doubt one of the best and most popular SEO WordPress plugins available online. It also exists for WooCommerce which helps to make products stand out from search results. It adds extra SEO features to your WooCommerce store so all aspects of SEO can be optimized instantly.
One of the best WooCommerce plugins that let you apply discounts to items you want to sell in bulk. Once you install the plugin, you can use it to specify the products and set the minimum quantity as well as the discount rate that will apply. There are multiple discounting options, including fixed or percentage-based. The discount appears on the product page, e-mail invoice and during checkout.
This plugin lets you create your very own referral program to reward your most loyal customers with discounts, prizes and freebies when they refer friends. We all know the value of word-of-mouth referrals, and ReferralCandy helps you leverage that by letting shoppers know they will be rewarded by spreading the word about your shop.
Sumo’s free trial and basic plan let you create customizable pop-ups to help prevent cart abandonment. It gives shoppers nudges that encourage them to complete their order or provide their e-mail address to access special offers, for example.
Let shoppers conveniently add items to a wish list with the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin. The shopper can share their wish lists with others, or use them as a personal shopping list for future purchases. This is a great feature for holiday shopping or shopping related to special events like a wedding or baby shower.
MailChimp for WooCommerce is the official WooCommerce extension from MailChimp, one of the world’s largest e-mail marketing services. If you’re already a MailChimp user, this plugin provides smooth integration with your WooCommerce site. It lets shoppers opt into your mailing list by clicking a tick box during checkout.
Instead of requiring your customers to navigate away from a product page to look up theFAQs, give them instant access right on the page. This is what WooCommerce Product FAQs lets you do. This eliminates obstacles that might lead your customer away from the path to checkout.
Stay relevant and visible to customers with Constant Contact for WooCommerce. This plugin lets you create high-quality marketing e-mails. It helps by automating follow-ups to customer purchases, recommending similar products or reminding them about items left in the cart.
Out-of-stock items can pose a big challenge for e-commerce retailers and shoppers alike. Help maintain good customer relations with WooCommerce Waitlist. This plugin lets you track demand for sold-out items and e-mail your waiting customers once new stock is available.
Try automating your marketing activities with Beeketing. This convenient plugin offers a suite of marketing features to help increase conversions. You can use it to chat with customers on your site via Facebook Messenger, and it also automatically upsells and cross-sells.
Everyone loves giving and receiving gifts! The WooCommerce Product Gift Wrap app adds a tick mark option for gift-wrapping to your checkout process. The plugin is adjustable, so it will only appear with items that you offer gift-wrapping for. It’s a perfect way to personalize the shopping experience and make a personal connection with your shoppers.
When you create a website, you will also need proper analytics to track your progress and performance. Whilehosting companies can help you create a website, you need a powerful tool like Google Analytics to monitor it better. It is particularly important, however, for e-commerce sites. You need insights into customer behavior to better move website visitors down the sales funnel. You can use Google Analytics to map WooCommerce-related activity with this plugin.
Final notes on using WooCommerce WordPress plugins
The above options are all about making it easier for your clients to interact with your online shop. You must remember that the success of online shopping depends very much on reducing barriers and friction as much as possible and ensuring a smooth user experience so that conversions happen and clients shop with you again.
Not selling products but services such as bookings and appointments? Then it’s even more important! Return customers are critical for these types of businesses.
Did we miss one of your favorite plugins? Let us know which plugins you use and how they help your webstore and business grow. And if you’re interested in learning more about our Sendcloud plugin, be sure to check out our How It Works page.
Iris Dings is Head of Content at Sendcloud. With her great passion for online marketing, e-commerce and logistics, she is always looking for content that can help you with your online business.
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