Yesterday was ‘Cyber Monday’. Do you know what that meant? That meant, I was glued to my computer, searching for deals online. Online shopping isn’t like shopping in conventional retail stores. For example, with Black Friday, I planned early, decide on one store, and stuck to it. (You can’t drive to every place in town). But Cyber Monday, was all about visiting websites. And that didn’t take time.
The whole process got me thinking. As a buyer, I wanted great deals and fast checkouts. And as the seller, the store had to cater to my needs.
As an e-Commerce store owner, you can’t miss an opportunity to close a sale. It’s up to you, to set up and advertise the deals, you wish to offer. And set up faster checkouts, with some innovative thinking 🙂 .
Faster Checkouts in WooCommerce
Let’s talk about your WooCommerce store for a while. The usual store has a homepage, and a shop. The shop has products. A customer lands on your website, goes to the shop, views a particular product, and then adds it to his cart. To then purchase it. (Finally! Phew!)
What was that? Around 4-5 pages, a customer needs to navigate across to purchase a product?! Not happening. If I was the store owner, I’d be worried. Think about it. Anything could happen before the purchase could be made. The network connection could die, the customer might navigate to another page, and lose the page he was originally on, or could just abandon the process, because of the number of steps involved.
The solution? Instead of an elaborate process, store owners have to just simplify the checkout activity.
Let’s break it down.
- Homepage
- Shop Page
- Product Page
- Cart Page
- Checkout
When you look at this list, you can immediately think of reducing some steps involved. Let’s try!
Shop on the Homepage
Instead of creating a different ‘Shop Page’, you could add the shop right on the homepage. Customers are not interested in fluff, they want the goods. That’s why they are on your website. If that’s a big change for you, consider adding featured or, popular products on the homepage.
Add to Cart on the Shop Page
What’s the difference between buying a product for the first time? And buying the product for the 10th time? You’re not interested in the product details. Works the same way for repeat customers, or sell familiar products, customers aren’t interested in seeing product details. Instead they would prefer a quick ‘Add to Cart’ button, right on the shop page itself.
Checkout on Product Page
Does the process have to be Product->Cart->Checkout? Here’s an idea. Add a Quick Checkout option right on the Product page. A ‘Buy Now’ instead of or along with, an ‘Add to Cart’ option. Of course it depends on the type of products you sell. But if the trend in your store is to purchase a single product in an order, you can just skip the ‘Add to Cart’ and use a ‘Buy Now’.
And what is the one solution that beats all of these methods? A possibility to order multiple products in just one click! A fair warning: this solution would benefit those of you who sell less than 20 products in your WooCommerce store. Let’s explore!
The All-In-One Solution: Order Multiple Products in One-Click
Have you seen ‘Onepage’ themes? The content on the site, is present on a single page. The one-click checkout idea, is similar to Onepage theme, but the ‘one-page’ is for your store, not the entire site.
What we could do, is customize WooCommerce templates, to display the shop, products and the checkout option, all on a single page. Here’s how.
- We display the products as usual on the shop page.
- Each product will have a title small description and price: This can be provided by changing the archive-product.php template
- We can add filtering options, right on top of the page: These filters would display results using AJAX calls, so that a new page is not loaded.
- A customer has to select a product (or products) he is interested in: This can be done using a ‘Select’ option added to every product.
- There will be a single ‘Order Now’ option, using which all selected products will be added to the cart
- The customer then has to just fill in payment details and then make the purchase!
A single checkout option for multiple products, works well in stores which sell regular-use products, or in cases where buyers are looking for quick checkouts. Instead of revamping your entire store, you could remodel the ‘Featured Products’ or ‘Offers Page’, to create a one-page shop and checkout option. What do you think about this solution? Is it something you’re looking to add in your WooCommerce store? I’d like to hear your views and thoughts in the comment section below!
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marc :
Yes – this sounds great! Is this a plugin I can download somewhere? Can you send me more information?
Thanks!