Supporting over a quarter of the e-commerce websites around the world, WooCommerce has taken online businesses to a whole new level. Highly flexible and with plentiful add-ons, it allows you to sell anything and everything beautifully.
This works well enough for goods like clothes, jewelry and the like, which have a longer life. The stakes are higher for stores selling perishable products like foodstuffs, confectionery items and more. Maintaining the appropriate inventory so that there is neither want nor waste, successfully marketing your products so that a decent profit margin is reached, and allowing your customers a wide variety of products to choose from, are just a few of the many considerations to be taken note of.
There is more to confectionery stores than beautiful themes and mouth-watering layouts, though these are of course necessary. For the site to function efficiently, robust plugins are required for all the functionalities that crop up.
Considering the five main aspects of sales, marketing, inventory, order management and presentation, here are five must-have plugins for a confectionery store on WooCommerce.
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#1 WooCommerce Custom Product Boxes
Useful for stores selling product assortments, like cupcakes, chocolates, postcards, magnets, flowers, juice boxes and more, WooCommerce Custom Product Boxes lets the customer add selected products to their customized product box.
The plugin has several features like unlimited box creation, variable pricing with fixed prices or dynamic cost calculation, selective display of products to be added to the product boxes and more. The ability to allow shoppers to create their own bundles makes the plugin quite suitable for a confectionery store on WooCommerce.
Developed by WisdmLabs, the plugin has different pricing plans, starting from $59.
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#2 TradeGecko for WooCommerce
Considering that confectionery items are usually purchased in bulk or as bundles, inventory management is quite crucial.
TradeGecko is an independent inventory management platform that works intuitively to control all sales and stock movements efficiently. Additionally, it lets you analyze sales and preempt orders so that stockouts can be avoided.
TradeGecko syncs your inventory to the orders placed so that your stocks change automatically, reflecting current levels in real-time. It also enables you to manage stocks across multiple channels and warehouses.
The integration plugin for TradeGecko and WooCommerce is completely free and requires nothing but a TradeGecko account. TradeGecko pricing plans are scalable according to your business and start from a subscription of $79 per month.
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#3 Smart Manager for WooCommerce
Using an Excel spreadsheet interface, Smart Manager for WooCommerce lets you handle customers, products and orders with flair. The plugin has numerous features like in-page detail order views, multiple item and field updates, distinct user privileges, date filters for orders and more.
Developed by StoreApps, Smart Manager is especially helpful when you have a wide variety of products and need an easy interface to manage product details.
Available in free and premium versions, the plugin is a great way to manage your orders quickly and easily. Smart Manager Pro is localization ready and supports over seven different languages.
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#4 Chimpy- MailChimp WordPress Plugin
In the world of online business, marketing is pretty much everything. A great way to market your products is by sending newsletters and store updates to your subscribers. MailChimp does this wonderfully.
With customizable e-mail templates, automatic back-in-stock messages, variable designs for product campaigns, targeted sales according to customer behavior and preferences and in-depth website monitoring, MailChimp is a feature-packed email marketing platform for any business.
And the plugin that brings MailChimp to WordPress users is Chimpy. Chimpy-MailChimp WordPress Plugin integrates WordPress and MailChimp and is available at $22 for a single site license.
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#5 WooCommerce Product Add-Ons
The Product Add-Ons extension for WooCommerce developed by WooThemes is great for adding donation, gift and personalization functionalities to the store. The plugin allows the store owner to opt for both, global and per-product customization which can be free or charged separately.
Product Add-Ons works for simple as well as variable products. From the customer’s point of view, being able to personalize the confectionery product they might very well be sending as a gift, is very desirable.
Available at $49 for a single site license with included support, the plugin is a great option for letting your customers add a personal touch, to your products.
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Endnote
Good confectionery stores on WooCommerce are few and far between. To build a good one focusing on the look and the feel of the site as well as the functionality is equally important.
Besides the five plugins mentioned above, several other plugins for product recommendations, up-sells or cross-sells, abandoned cart recovery, product ratings can be added to your site, each unique in their functionality. A confectionery store with an interactive end-user interface and a social media connect helps boost sales to a great extent too.
Do you have any favorite plugins you can recommend? We’d like to hear from you. Let us know your thoughts below!
