There is a lot to think about when you’re launching a WooCommerce store. Most of your time will be spent sourcing products, writing copy and creating images, building marketing campaigns, and all of the administrative work that goes into starting a new business venture.
There may not be much time left over to focus on the technological aspects of ecommerce. That’s one of the reasons so many new online retailers choose WooCommerce. They can install WordPress, install the WooCommerce plugin, and get to work on what matters, adding products and building out the product pages.
However, there are questions new WooCommerce retailers should ask themselves before going live. Some focus on WooCommerce itself, some on the retail experience, and some on the legal implications of running an online retail store.
In this article, we’re going to highlight four questions that, in our experience, are often missed in the rush to start selling.
Is Your WooCommerce Store Fast Enough?
Store performance plays a critical role in the success of an ecommerce business. A slow store will sell fewer products than a fast store, all else being equal. Latency and long load times create a frustrating user experience, especially on mobile devices. Making people wait when they’re trying to give you money is a bad idea.
Pre-launch performance checks will help store owners to identify potential problems before customers have to deal with them. Performance optimization is a complex topic, but a few basic precautions will help to guarantee that customers have a positive experience.
- Use a performance monitoring tool such as Google’s Lighthouse or Pingdom Tools to identify performance bottlenecks. Address the issues raised by your preferred performance monitoring tools before going live.
- Ensure all images are properly optimized. Images often consume the most bandwidth on ecommerce pages, and correctly optimizing and compressing images is an easy performance win. A plugin such as Smush Image Compression and Optimisation can fix many image optimization problems.
- Consider using a content distribution network (CDN) with your store. A CDN distributes the store’s static assets, including images, to a global network of servers. The assets are served from the CDN rather than your WooCommerce hosting server, reducing latency and server load.
These pre-launch checks don’t guarantee that the store will perform well under load. WooCommerce consumes more server resources and bandwidth as the number of shoppers increases. A store that is blazingly fast when no one is using it can slow to a crawl with a handful of concurrent users.
To ensure that your WooCommerce store doesn’t perform poorly on launch day, choose a hosting platform that offers adequate resources or a cloud platform that can scale according to demand. Low-cost WordPress hosting is not a good choice for even a moderately busy ecommerce store.
Does the Store Offer a Convenient Return Policy?
No retailer likes returns and refunds, but every ecommerce store has to deal with them. Shoppers return products because they ordered the wrong thing, they changed their minds, the product wasn’t what they thought, or it was broken. Some shoppers order the same item of clothing in several sizes and colors and return the ones they don’t want.
Every WooCommerce store should have a clear and convenient return policy. A policy that makes it difficult to return products is off-putting to shoppers. Many will refrain from buying if they aren’t sure they can return unsuitable products. Studies have shown that over 60 percent of shoppers check return policies before buying and that a convenient return process can boost sales by up to 25 percent.
The terms of a store’s return policy depend on the nature of the products and the retailer, but, whatever policy you decide on, it should be easy to find and written in clear and concise language without legal jargon.
Is the Store GDPR Compliant?
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to any organization that does business in the EU, including selling products to EU citizens. If your ecommerce store sells products in the EU, you should ensure that it is compliant; the fines for non-compliance are harsh.
The primary goal of the GDPR is to give consumers control of how organizations use their and who has access to it. Where WooCommerce store owners are concerned, GDPR compliance involves obtaining valid consent for data collection, clearly specifying why the data is being collected, and providing a mechanism for data subjects to see and request the deletion of their data.
Before launching their WooCommerce store, retailers should familiarize themselves with the requirements of the GDPR and ensure that their store is compliant. A WordPress plugin such as WP GDPR Compliance can help to make a store compliant, but no plugin can guarantee compliance. New WooCommerce store owners may want to consider seeking legal advice to minimize risk.
Retailers who don’t intend to sell in the EU aren’t obligated to conform to the GDPR, but many parts of the world already have or are adopting similar frameworks, including the California Consumer Privacy Act, Canada’s PIPEDA, and Brazil’s General Data Privacy Law.
Does the Check-Out Work Properly?
The checkout process is the most complex component of an ecommerce store. To complete a sale, a combination of server-side and client-side code, the database, and external payment processors have to work together flawlessly.
WooCommerce is a sophisticated and highly polished ecommerce application, and the chances of the checkout process failing are slim, but plugins, themes, and customizations can introduce problems.
To ensure that the checkout will do its job on launch day, run through the complete process several times, from putting items in the cart to entering details to making a payment. Don’t test only the “happy path” — the shopping experience when everything goes right. Try inputting incorrect credit card information or an invalid email address. Does the checkout return error messages a shopper will find useful?
Asking and answering these questions is a small part of building and growing an ecommerce business. But each is important to ask because it plays a role in putting your WooCommerce store on a solid foundation for future success.
