Order Management

Stock

WooCommerce comes with a comprehensive stock management system as standard. With this, you can manage your stock on a per product (for example, 10 t-shirts) and even per variation (for example, 3 blue t-shirts) basis, hold stock for a specified time for unpaid orders, receive notifications for low and out of stock items, and even hide out of stock items from your product catalogue.

Refunds

Via the WooCommerce dashboard, dependant of course on the payment gateway you choose, you will most likely be able to issue partial and full refunds directly from the back-end of the system – this saves you the hassle of having to log into third-party applications to achieve this.

*PayPal and Stripe both support this functionality.

Customer Management

WooCommerce offers both guest and account functionality – for customers wishing to check out quickly, the guest option is ideal, whilst for those loyal, returning customers, setting up an account would be more beneficial as it would allow them to log in, check previous orders, review the status of current orders, etc.

It’s also possible to extend the account functionality, so if you would like to offer gift cards, or allow customers to set up trade accounts, this can all be catered for via additional add-ons.

Marketing

Related Products, Up-Sells & Cross-Sells

If an increase in conversions is what you’re after, then I would seriously recommend that you consider setting these up – and although you can’t specify exactly your related products, you can handpick both your up-sells and cross-sells.

So, what are these exactly?

• Related Products – these are products similar to the one currently being viewed, e.g. products from the same category;
• Up-Sells – these are products which you would recommend instead of the one currently being viewed, e.g. a branded t-shirt instead of white label; and
• Cross-Sells – these are complimentary products which you would recommend to go along with the current products in the cart, e.g. if a customer currently has a laptop in their bag, a protective case would make a logical cross-sell.

Coupons

Using WooCommerce’s built-in coupon functionality to create discount codes is a great way to reward your customers, and in turn increase sales across your shop – and used in conjunction with a newsletter signup form integrated with the likes of Mailchimp, it’s a sure-fire way to ensure repeat custom.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

I’d consider this little trick marketing 101, turning those customers that NEARLY checked out into customers that DID check out – if someone makes it the whole way to the payment page but never completes their purchase, after some time they’ll receive an email to let them know that their order has been saved, ready for them to complete their purchase at a time convenient to them (sometimes even with a small “money off” incentive to boot).

In conclusion…

I think WooCommerce offers some serious clout as an eCommerce solution – it builds off the world’s most popular CMS, is therefore easy to set up, it has great support and it is the most customisable.