The Ultimate List of Plugins to Build a WooCommerce Store

You can’t run a successful WooCommerce store simply on WooCommerce, you’ll need this list of plugins for functionality and growth.

The Ultimate List of Plugins to Build a WooCommerce Store

Image Source: WooCommerce

 

WooCommerce in itself is a great plugin to convert your WordPress website to an e-commerce store, but it’s simply not enough to build a successful, let alone fully functional store.

You have to know that to create an e-commerce website that stands out from the rest and provides the best customer experience, you need to include some additional plugins.

 

This article lists some very necessary plugins that can help you make and scale your WooCommerce store.

The list includes the following categories of plugins:

 

  • Payments
  • Invoicing and other shipping documents
  • Marketing
  • SEO
  • Chat Plugins
  • Compliance

 

What to Check When Selecting a Plugin for Your WooCommerce Store?

Reviews

Reviews are a great way to decide whether you should go for a plugin or not. 

You can also check how a plugin developer responds to negative reviews if at all to decide whether or not you should go for that plugin.

 

Support

You will always want to make sure that the plugin that you are going to use actively provides support for its users. WordPress.org plugin page shows how many issues are resolved in the previous 2 months. You can also check the queries on how quick is the response time for the plugin. You should avoid plugins that do not provide good support for its users.

 

WordPress Compatibility

Check whether or not the plugin is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. WordPress releases multiple security and other updates frequently. So you need to make sure that the plugin that you are choosing is compatible with the current version of WordPress.

 

Last Updated Date

Check the ‘Last updated’ date of the plugin. It is important to make sure that the plugins that you use are regularly updated and compatible with the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce. You can check the last updated date from the plugin page itself. If you need to know the plugin’s update frequency, you can check out the ‘Advanced view’ section on the plugin page.

 

Compare WordPress plugins is a tool that can help you easily compare multiple plugins for a given type at the same time.

 

Since most plugins are free, you can check their functionality by installing them on your test server and check whether they have any conflicts with other plugins or themes that you have already installed on your website. 

 

Always be mindful in selecting the plugins you need on your website. For some plugins, once you start using them on your live website, it won’t be easy to replace them with others. Not all the plugins that have a high number of active installations are the right ones for you and you might end up using the ones that do not have a lot of numbers.

 

Now let’s look at some of the plugins that can be helpful for you. 

1. Payments

Payments are crucial for your WooCommerce store. WooCommerce provides support for certain payment gateways out-of-the-box, here are some plugins that will help you integrate your WooCommerce store with different payment gateways that will ensure the best payment experience for your customers.

 

Paypal Express Checkout Payment Gateway for WooCommerce

WooCommerce

This PayPal plugin allows you to easily integrate your store with PayPal Express Checkout or PayPal Smart Checkout in WooCommerce. 

 

The plugin provides a smooth and quick checkout process for the customers thereby enhancing the user experience.  

 

Using the plugin, you can add a payment button to the cart page, so that customers can check out from the cart page itself. It reduces the number of clicks needed to make a payment thus helping reduce the cart abandonment rate for your store.

 

The plugin helps you accept major payment methods like credit cards, debit cards, PayPal Credit, and PayPal money. 

 

Payment Plugins for Stripe WooCommerce

stripe

This Stripe payment plugin has a near-perfect rating on WordPress.org. The plugin allows you to process multiple payment methods supported by Stripe including credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Alipay, etc. In addition to that, what sets this plugin apart is that it supports a lot of local payment methods that are specific to a country or a region. 

 

If your store has subscription products, you need a plugin that will support recurring payments. Payment Plugins for Stripe WooCommerce offer subscription support. 

 

Also, if your business model lets customers pre-order products from your store, then you should try this plugin.

2. Invoicing and Other Documents

When an order is placed in your store, the next thing you need to do is provide an invoice to the customer. WooCommerce sends the customers these details via email, however, if you need more than the standard WooCommerce email for your store, then the following plugin will help you.

 

WooCommerce Print Invoices, Packing Slips, Delivery Notes, and Shipping Labels

woocommerce invoices

The benefit of using this pdf invoice plugin is that you can allow printing the invoices from the orders page in your WooCommerce store itself, which WooCommerce does not allow by default.

 

In addition to creating WooCommerce invoices that are more advanced, you can modify and customize the invoice so that the invoice is more representative of your store’s brand. 

 

When an order is placed a PDF invoice is sent along with the order email sent by WooCommerce. The customers can also download the invoice from their account page in your shop. 

 

The plugin also provides 2 standard templates that you can use to create your invoice. It will also help you generate custom invoice numbers if you want to avoid the order numbers being used as invoice numbers. Plus you can configure the plugin to not generate invoices for free orders.

 

As the name of the plugin suggests, it also supports other important documents for packaging and shipping such as packing slips, delivery notes, shipping labels, and dispatch labels.

 

3. Marketing

You will need to run several marketing campaigns to get a boost to the sales in your store. If you have some tough competition in the market for your products, the below plugins will help you get customers’ attention to your products.

 

Smart Coupons for WooCommerce

smart coupons for woocommerce

As the name of the plugin suggests, it allows you to create advanced WooCommerce coupons in your store. 

 

WooCommerce by default provides you with a coupon system that allows you to create coupons to provide discounts to your customers. But, it is limited in functionality, and to create advanced coupons, you can try Smart Coupons for the WooCommerce plugin. 

 

With the plugin, you can create coupons that auto-applies when a customer adds a product to the cart. This way the customers do not have the hassle to remember and copy the coupon code at the checkout.

 

Other useful features that the plugin provides are – coupon customization, coupon restrictions, categorizing coupons, creating duplicate coupons, etc,

 

You can restrict the coupons based on the quantity of the products in the cart, checkout options, and even create gift coupons. With the options provided by the plugin, you can get creative and create custom campaigns that suit your store.

 

Also, you can create easily shareable coupons using the URL coupons feature of the plugin. The URL coupons are also helpful in reducing cart abandonment by letting you remove the coupon field from checkout.

 

Mailchimp for WooCommerce

mailchimp

With the help of Mailchimp for WooCommerce, you can get your customers to subscribe to your email newsletter. The plugin makes it easy to sync your website with Mailchimp Audience.

 

When using this plugin you need to have a Mailchimp account set up for your website. After you have created an account in Mailchimp, you can automate your marketing emails, send abandoned cart emails, win back lost customers, keep in touch with your existing customers, and more.

Emails are a powerful marketing tool that if used properly can make a huge difference in growing your business.

 

4. SEO

This part should be in the marketing section, but it must deserve a spot of its own. SEO for an e-commerce company is something that we can’t ignore. It is a great channel that can drive sales consistently and grow your business in the long run with considerably less money invested.

Yoast

yoast

Yoast is the undefeated champion of SEO in WordPress. At the time of writing, it has over 5 million active installations on WordPress.

 

With Yoast installed, you can pretty much be sure that a lot of technical SEO tasks are taken care of. Like creating an XML sitemap, options to easily add meta tags and canonical URLs, getting rich results for the content of your website that helps search engines to understand what your content is about, etc.

 

When it comes to creating and publishing articles on your website, Yoast provides you with readability analysis, SEO score, a preview of what your page will look like in search results, etc, – these are powerful features that make SEO optimization easy. 

 

There is more you can do with Yoast when it comes to SEO and the plugin provides even more features in its premium version and has a dedicated add-on for WooCommerce as well.

 

5. Chat plugins

Your chances of converting your website visitors into paying customers increases when you have a direct channel to connect with them. Chat plugins help you easily converse with your customers and answer their queries in real-time.

Below are some plugins that can help you do that.

 

Tidio – Live Chat, Chatbots & Email Integration

Tidio is a powerful and feature-packed chat plugin for WordPress that allows you to converse directly with your existing and potential customers. 

 

With this plugin, you can view who your visitors are and what pages they are viewing on your website. You can also stay in touch with your customers using the Tidio app that can be used on mobile devices.

 

When it comes to the looks of the chat widget, it is responsive and customizable so that the widget does not interfere with the aesthetics of your website.

 

With the plugin, you can also include a chatbot on your website and thus help the customers with quick answers to most of their frequently asked questions.

Click to Chat

Click to Chat is a simple chat plugin that allows you to integrate your website with your WhatsApp or WhatsApp Business account. WhatsApp is the most popular chat application and it becomes convenient for your customers to reach out to you. 

 

The plugin will connect with the WhatsApp app when using a mobile device and connect it to the WhatsApp web when on the desktop.

 

The plugin allows you to select from pre-built styles that you can choose for your website.

 

Compliance

There are multiple laws that you need to follow when you have set up a store. If you have customers from the EU, the following plugins can help. The plugins listed below help in compliance with the laws, but you, as a store owner, need to make sure that everything is in place and your store is compliant with all the rules and regulations.

WooCommerce EU VAT Assistant

The WooCommerce EU VAT Assistant plugin helps you with the EU VAT regulations if you are selling to customers from the EU. When selling to customers from the EU, you need to be aware of the different VAT rates that are applicable in different countries. This plugin takes care of that for you.

 

CookieYes | GDPR Cookie Consent and Compliance Notice (CCPA Ready)

This WordPress GDPR plugin helps you to comply with the EU privacy law GDPR and California privacy law CCPA. 

 

People are now more concerned about their privacy online. So it is becoming increasingly important that your store is transparent about what data you collect from your customers. The customers should be made aware of what data is being collected and what they are used for. 

 

Not just that, before collecting their data, the laws mandate that the data subjects (people from who we are collecting data) give their informed and explicit consent to it. This plugin helps you in getting and managing users’ consent for the usage of cookies and helps you comply with different privacy laws.

Wrapping Up

Most plugins included in the above list are free and available in the WordPress.org plugin repository. Some of these plugins also have paid options provided on the respective third-party vendor website.

 

Every e-commerce store is different and so are its requirements. Please share which awesome WooCommerce plugins you use on your website and for what purpose in the comment section below.

For more insight and reviews of WordPress and WooCommerce Plugins, visit here.