WooCommerce Extensions to Boost Your Online Business

WordPress is an amazing platform full of possible use cases. With it you can take your potential to do business online to another level. With WooCommerce you can turn your WordPress website into a simple, powerful eCommerce solution. WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin on the market today. You can use it to create and manage and eCommerce store with advanced functionality.

The WooCommerce plugin dominates the WordPress market with over 14,000,000 downloads to date! This accounts for 1/3 of all online stores. This is for good reason too. WooThemes are the developers behind WooCommerce. They have a proven track record for building solid WordPress Themes, extensions and plugins.

WooThemes has built their reputation on reliability, professionalism and strong customer support. That’s right, when you reach out to their support staff you will get to talk to actual live people without waiting forever. While the WooCommerce plugin itself is free to use and download, anyone serious about running a successful online store will most likely want to purchase extensions.

Don’t get me wrong, any small business owner can use the WooCommerce core to run their online store. You get all the basic tools you need to add product pages, a shopping cart and handle payments. But if you want to unlock the true potential of your WordPress eCommerce site, extensions can help you do it. This post will show you some of the best WooCommerce extensions to help you accept payments, streamline communications, manage users and optimize your store.

Payment Gateway Extensions for WooCommerce

We will start out with payment gateway extensions. With WooCommerce and WordPress, anyone can start an online business. One of the very first things you should consider is how you are going to collect payments. With a payment gateway extension for WooCommerce, you can easily accept credit card and debit card payments from all over the world. Below are 4 payment gateway extensions from the biggest players in the industry: Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe and Amazon. All provide your customers with seamless, secure transactions directly on your website.

Authorize.Net AIM

Authorize.net provides one of the most comprehensive set of tools for accepting payments from your website. The Authorize.net AIM extension for WooCommerce is a reliable and trusted payment processor. Recently they have added support for accepting eChecks.

Authorize.net has been in the game longer than any of the other payment processing companies on this list and for good reason. People trust the brand because they provide an easy, secure and affordable way to process credit cards. This payment gateway is full of advanced functionality. Including top-notch fraud protection tools and an easy to use web interface. You can see your transactions online and easily make changes when you need to. If you need support you can reach someone by phone, email or chat.

This payment gateway is fully PCI compliant, which means that you will need to obtain an SSL for your server for your checkout pages.

Features

• Accept transactions from all over the world
• Process refunds directly from WooCommerce
• Flexible checkout experience
• Customers never need to leave your site to complete a transaction
• All major credit and debit cards are accepted

PayPal Pro

Unlike the PayPal Standard payment gateway, with PayPal Pro you can accept card payments from customers without them ever leaving your site. It’s designed to process online transactions directly from your site. The PayPal brand has a lot of weight behind it. It’s a household name that is trusted around the world. This payment gateway moves money into your PayPal merchant account, which is required along with an SSL certificate. With this extension you can accept card payments from the UK, the US and Canada.

The beauty of this extension is that setup is easy, there are no startup fees and you won’t have to obtain a merchant account from a separate company. You can check out more WooCommerce PayPal extensions to compare products.

Features

• The buyer never has to leaver your website for checkout
• Optimized for mobile checkouts
• Currently supports 6 currencies for card payments
• Also accepts PayPal payments from 23 currencies from 203 countries
• PayPal can provide you with a merchant account

Stripe (Free!)

Stripe struck up a recent partnership with WordPress. This is great news for developers and business owners because the stripe payment gateway for WooCommerce is now free. It’s easy to take credit and debit card payments with Stripe. This plugin extends WooCommerce by giving your store access to Stripe’s API.

Currently Stripe is available in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and many more. With Stripe you can accept payments from all the major credit cards but that’s not all. Stripe gives customers even more ways to pay such as Apple Pay, Bitcoin and Amex Express Checkout – all directly from your online storefront.

Another useful feature is the ability to accept recurring payments. This means that you can offer subscription based payment models. Stripe can save customer data to make future checkouts much easier. This creates a better checkout experience, giving users all the more reason to buy from your store.

Features

• Accepts cards from many countries all over the world
• Flexible billing options
• Accept recurring payments
• Coupons
• Free trials
• Special deals and promos
• Stripe can provide you with a merchant account

Pay with Amazon (Free!)

Amazon is trusted worldwide. You can use this free payment gateway extension to give customers a seamless checkout experience they can rely on. Pay with Amazon gives allows you to let millions of Amazon shoppers purchase products on your website using their Amazon accounts. This saves time, makes things easy and increases your chances of making a sale.

People can log in with their Amazon username and password directly from your WordPress website. When you use this extension to make a transaction, you get the customer’s name and shipping information. You can use this to help create a more personal checkout experience.

Features

• No startup fees
• Accepts all major credit cards
• Orders are processed via Amazon Payments
• You get the power of Amazon Payments’ fraud protection tools
• Responsive so your site looks good on any device

WooCommerce Subscriptions

This extension is extremely powerful. There are plenty of advantages to selling through a subscription based model. One is that you can guarantee the amount of money you make each month. With the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, you can accept recurring payments. It gives you all the tools to manage and create revenue that you can count on.

This extension lets you introduce different subscription models for physical or digital goods. With it you can manage giveaway promotions, offer service subscriptions, or annual billing packages. This is extension that is designed to help you earn revenue. Offer special discounts, coupons or free sign ups. Allow your subscribers to call the shots by managing their own plan. WooCommerce subscriptions has lots of tools help you keep customers happy.

Features

• Subscription management
• Manage subscriber accounts
• Customers can upgrade or downgrade
• Sync payments
• Lots of product options
• Multiple subscription types
• Special offers (coupons, giveaways etc.)
• Renewal emails to let customers know when they are being billed

Table Rate Shipping

This extension gives you advanced shipping options. For those who want to move beyond the default WooCommerce shipping options, this extension is the answer. You can set multiple shipping rates based on criteria such as price, weight, location, amount and more. Table rate shipping can be a very complex task. This is why the developers made the user interface intuitive so it’s easy to add, duplicate and remove rates.

Features

• Easy to use
• Define zones for target shipping locations
• Add multiple tables for each zone
• Calculate rates by order, item, line or class
• Add rules based on weight, location, item count etc.
• Ad costs per row, item or by percentage

WooCommerce Customer History

Learn how to maximize conversion rates by observing customer behavior. You can use this extension to see just how people are browsing your online store. You can keep a full log of a customer’s history and calculate the value for your customers.

Features

• Shows browsing history for specific orders
• Shows purchase history for specific customer
• Observe and log how customers browse your store
• Track the lifetime value for each customer
• Get insight into customer browsing habits to optimize conversion rates

Follow Ups

It takes a lot of time to create and send personalized emails to follow up with every one of your customers and/or subscribers. Follow-Ups allows you to monitor and manage relationships with your audience.

This extension streamlines communication between you and the customers. Follow-Ups can help you keep customers engaged and encourage them to buy. You can save lots of time by automating emails and Twitter communications between customers. Engage your students and customers by adjusting campaigns to their interests, purchase history and subscriptions.

Features

• Email and Tweet customers or prospecs
• Automate marketing communication
• Gauge customer value
• Keep track of student progress
• Create reminders
• Optimize email marketing efforts
• Create and manage mailing lists
• Build custom templates for each campaign
• Send automated, personalized emails to customers