10 WooCommerce Plugins To Drive More Sales This Holiday Season

This is a guest post from Alec Wines, Head of Growth at WP Buffs, a WordPress website management and support services company.

By now, you’re most likely preparing your eCommerce store for the holiday season (especially since all signs point to a much earlier start this year).  However, you still have plenty of time to add a new feature or two (or more!) to your store as you get ready for the holiday rush.

There are quite a few WooCommerce plugins you can use to add customer-friendly, sales-driving features to your store — and, in many cases, the setup process isn’t overly complex or time-consuming.  These plugins will serve you well through this year’s unique holiday season, through (let’s hope) more normal holiday seasons in the future, and through all of the months in between.

We researched and tested several dozen WooCommerce plugins to put together this list of the top 10 that can be a huge asset for you this holiday season (and beyond).

If you offer any scheduled services through your business, whether in-person or virtual, WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments is a great way for clients to book and manage times through your site.  The plugin offers quite a bit of flexibility to make sure your needs are covered, including features like recurring bookings, dynamic cost calculation, Google Calendar sync, custom form fields, and robust back-end management.

You might want to encourage customers who are considering giving your services as a gift to schedule them early.  They’ll be able to cross holiday shopping off their lists, and you can start the new year with a full calendar.

Key features:

• Offer bookings of various durations
• Allow multiple appointments in the same time slot
• Enable users to book simultaneous appointments

Price: $99 for a single site.  If you’d like to see how the plugin in action works, a demo is available.

WooCommerce Store Credit offers a simple system for quick gift cards.  But the feature we like the most is: you can also use the plugin to offer store credit on returns, rather than (or in addition to) standard refunds.  If you’re worried about a large number of returns, as many stores are during the holidays, the store credit option can help you keep some of the revenue you’d normally wind up refunding. (Just make it abundantly clear in your return policy you’ll be offering store credit as an option.)

Key features:

• Restrict coupons by product or category
• Apply credit to shipping
• Accept store credit codes over multiple transactions until their value is exhausted

Price: $79 per year.

Donation for WooCommerce gives shoppers the option to donate money to charity alongside their purchases.  Customers are becoming increasingly focused on shopping with businesses that share their values, so this plugin is a great way to show just how aligned your values and a customer’s values really are — while raising money for good causes in the process.

With this plugin, you can also put a “round up for charity” option in your checkout, so rather than specifying a donation amount, the customer can easily give their change to a good cause.

Key features:

• Enable shoppers to round up their totals and donate the difference
• Let customers choose their donation amount or select from predefined options
• Place an optional donation widget in your sidebar or footer

Price: $49 per year.  You can try some of this plugin’s options in the demo.

Customers can choose the amount they pay with the Name Your Price plugin.

There are a few real benefits to allowing customers to name their own price.  One, it’s a simple way to discount products you haven’t been able to sell.  You might not get the amount you want for them, but at least they’ll be out of your warehouse and in your customers’ hands.  And two, not only could the Name Your Price plugin lead to more sales, but you’ll learn how much shoppers think your products are worth, which can help with your pricing strategy going forward.

You can also use this plugin as a charity or fundraising tool by setting it up to collect name-your-own donations.

Key features:

• Set minimum prices
• Collect money for fundraisers
• Provide suggested prices

Price: $49 per year.

WooCommerce PDF Product Vouchers enables you to sell attractive downloadable gift cards that can be used online or at a physical store. (Editor’s note: This plugin is made by Jilt’s parent company SkyVerge, but Alec selected it on his own!) The product vouchers are highly customizable on your end — but also the customer’s end, as you can allow them to select their own background images and personalization options.

PDF Product Vouchers can be used in tandem with the Name Your Price plugin to create custom gift certificates as well.

You could also make use of the free add-on to add support for Google Fonts.  The option to use a holiday typeface and design could make your gift certificates even more attractive to customers.

Key features:

• Fully customizable
• Unique numbering to avoid duplicates
• Redeemable in-store or online

Price: $129 per year

Product Bundles is a plugin that allows you to group items that are often bought together.  You can use it to upsell related products to customers, to curate unique holiday gift boxes, to let customers to curate their own bundles, or to offer a group of products at a discount.

The Product Bundles plugin is also an excellent tool for selling subscription boxes thanks to its integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions.

Key features:

• Bulk discount rules
• Minimum and maximum item quantities
• “Frequently bought together” recommendations

Price: $49 per year.

Cart Upsell promotes related and/or upgraded products to customers during the checkout process.  When you hit customers with smart recommendations as they’re checking out, you can increase your average order value and overall profits.

You can use Cart Upsell to make targeted recommendations based on specific products, categories, or cart totals to ensure you’re showing customers the products they’re most likely to add on to their purchase. (A good tip for this is the 60×60 rule of cross-selling, which can help you figure out which products to promote.)

Key features:

• Multiple upsell conditions
• Customizable color scheme
• Fully responsive displays

Price: $29 per year.

Shipping deadlines are always a concern around the holidays — and this year, with even more uncertainty surrounding shipping and logistics worldwide, they’re going to be an even bigger area of focus.  The Order Delivery plugin can help manage shoppers’ expectations as well as keep your shipping schedule more organized and manageable.

This plugin lets customers choose their delivery date and time (and pick a corresponding carrier and shipping speed option to facilitate that timeline).

With front door package theft spiking around the holidays, you can protect both your brand and your shoppers’ purchases by letting them choose windows during which they’ll be home to receive their orders.  Providing your customers with peace of mind about when to expect their shipments can give you an edge over your competition.

Plus, it can be a big assistance to your business — when your customers are picking specific shipping dates, you can better predict the number of orders you’ll be sending out every day and avoid getting overwhelmed or falling behind.

Key features:

• Display a delivery date picker
• Limit the number of orders deliverable in a particular window
• Specify dates when deliveries are not available

Price: $129 per year.

Richpanel enables you to provide complete customer service to your shoppers.  At this time of year, you’ll likely be fielding more questions than usual. This plugin provides a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and ticketing system that can help take some of the strain off your customer service team.

If you tend to get the same requests repeatedly, it may be worth setting up the Richpanel chatbot before the holiday season really ramps up.  The bot can handle a lot of repetitive tasks and help to triage requests.

Key features:

• Manage all customer messages from one dashboard
• Collaborate with team members by adding private notes to tickets
• Use live chat to answer customer questions and encourage conversion

Price: $299 per year.

Gift Wrapper is a plugin that enables you to offer wrapping services to customers (and, optionally, charge for it).  This is an excellent service to offer all year, but it can be especially popular around the holidays.  If you offer the service for free, it’s a great touch that can help build customer loyalty.  If you charge for wrapping, it can bring in a nice extra boost in revenue and increase average order values.

As a bonus, gift wrap can double as an advertising opportunity if you include your logo on the paper or tag.

Key features:

• Display gift wrap options on product and checkout pages
• Add gift messages
• Offer unlimited wrapping designs

Price: $49 per year.

The holiday season is approaching fast and it never hurts to figure out a few last-minute strategies — especially since everyone’s offering sales and specials, which can make it hard to compete.

Fortunately, there are some great WooCommerce plugins out there that can help you quickly add features to better serve your customers and increase your sales for these holidays and beyond.

• WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments: Enable users to book and schedule in-person or virtual services.
• WooCommerce Store Credit: Create quick gift cards and/or grant customers credit towards your products in exchange for holiday returns.
• Donation for WooCommerce: Let buyers give donations at checkout.
• Name Your Price: Allow your customers to name their prices for your services or products.
• WooCommerce PDF Product Vouchers: Enable customers to create great looking PDF gift cards for use online or in person.
• Product Bundles: Offer gift bundles or allow shoppers to create their own.
• Cart Upsell for WooCommerce: Present additional or upgraded products to customers during the checkout process.
• Order Delivery: Let customers pick a shipping date and time to help regulate shipping and delivery amidst the holiday chaos.
• Richpanel: Provide swift support to your customers through a variety of channels.
• Gift Wrapper for WooCommerce: Handle gift wrapping for your customers as either a complementary or paid service.

 

About the Author:  Alec Wines is the Head of Growth at WP Buffs, which provides maintenance services for serious website owners and white-label site management for agencies and freelancers.  They also focus on speeding up websites and are the team behind the WPMRR WordPress podcast for WordPress professionals.