There are many ways that you can use popups to your advantage this year. Whether you’re looking to build your list before the big day or to encourage people through the checkout process.

Here are five popups that you can use with HollerBox that will help increase your conversion rate this holiday season.

1. Pre-Black Friday Opt-in

It’s no secret that when the month of November rolls around, potential customers are on the lookout for some deals. Customers will hold tight to their wallets until sales begin.

Creating a pre-Black Friday opt-in popup is a super effective way to build your list ahead of the sale, giving subscribers an opportunity to subscribe so they can be notified when the deal starts.

This ensures that when they are doing their sleuthing, they won’t forget about you when the time comes.

You’ll want to make sure your popup includes:

• An email opt-in field
• A graphic including dates and some details about the deal

Then, you can send emails to this list to inform them of your sales/promotions throughout the month of November.

2. Checkout Abandonment Notification

A HUGE problem companies have while trying to sell a product is checkout/cart abandonment. A user can make it all the way to the checkout page, only to get cold feet and back out last minute.

A popup can help encourage your users to move forward with the checkout process during their moment of doubt. If a user tries to leave the page, you can set up a popup with information that is targeted toward helping them complete the sale.

Your popup can offer another incentive that will make the user rethink purchasing such as free shipping or a free gift with purchase.

Trigger this popup when someone attempts to exit the checkout page or if they are inactive for more than 5 seconds.

3. Promotional Banner

When potential buyers enter your site during Black Friday, the first thing they want to see is your sale. Having a promotional banner on your homepage is a really easy and simple way to direct users to your deals ASAP.

In HollerBox’s pro library, there is already a Black Friday Banner available that you can just drop into your site. Tweak the numbers to highlight your sale and you’re ready to go!

4. First-Time Visitor Incentive

Oftentimes, it can be harder to convince first-time visitors to purchase your products than a returning customer who has already had a good experience.

Giving the newbies a little bit of extra love during the chaotic sale season could be all they need to commit to the purchase. One way to do this is to create a pop-up targeted towards first-time visitors that will give them an additional discount if they purchase during the sale.

You can place this popup on the sales page, homepage or even checkout page to give them an extra nudge.

5. Highlight Your Big Deal

Do you have a specific deal that you know is going to see great results? Don’t make people hunt for it! You can use a popup on your homepage to filter users directly to that sales page.

You can use a yes/no popup for this one, with the yes button taking them to the deal, and the no button keeping them on the homepage. Make sure to highlight exactly what deal this popup will be leading people to.

You can trigger it immediately, or set a delayed timer for a few seconds, depending on what experience you’re looking for.

Ready to start your Black Friday popups campaign?

To get started with HollerBox you can view our features and pricing page!

You can also read Groundhogg’s latest article on Black Friday strategies you need to implement this year that are more than just popups.

The post 5 Popups You Need To Use For Your Black Friday Sale appeared first on HollerBox.

While there are a variety of popups that can be used to grab your readers’ attention, this article will focus on gated content popups for WordPress and the best ways to use them with HollerBox.

What is a gated content popup?

Typically used by publications, these popups are implemented when you want to have a user complete a specific action before they are able to read an article or access other content on your website.

Before viewing protected contact, you may want readers to…

• Subscribe to your newsletter
• Upgrade to a premium plan
• Login to their account
• Make a purchase
• And more!

Now that you know what a gated content popup is, how is it put into action? Here are four different ways to utilize HollerBox to gain more subscribers.

1. Basic Content Gate

When it comes to gated popups for your WordPress site, this one is pretty straightforward. It is meant to collect the name and email of users and subscribe them to your content. It should appear for anyone who is not yet a subscriber on your site.

It can have a simple message such as “Oops, not a subscriber” that users cannot close until they fill out the desired information. 

How to implement:

1. Start off by creating a new popup with HollerBox or choosing one of the many templates to edit.
2. Choose a title- it should highlight why the user is seeing this message such as “Oops! Not a subscriber”
3. Next, fill out the body of the popup and choose what information you want to be collected. For our example, the body reads “Only subscribers can read this content. But don’t worry, it’s FREE! Subscribe with your email below and start reading now!” The user is then prompted to share both their name and email. The button reads “Subscribe & Start Reading!”
4. To ensure that people have to fill out the form, you are then going to disable the close button. Click on the Close Button and then toggle the Disable Closing to on.

5. Make sure that the display conditions are configured to ensure the popup will show where you want it. Let’s say for this example you have premium content you want to protect. Go to Display Conditions to tags and select the proper one in which the popup should be displayed, like Premium Content. Or, you can have your popup show on all posts.

6. Staying in the Display Conditions you also want to toggle on the Hide if previously converted button. This will ensure that people who have already filled out your form will not see this popup again.

7. Go to Triggers to select when you want your popup to show. For this example, we are going to select On Page Load after zero seconds. This means a user will see it as soon as they land on the page.

8. Hit that Publish button and your popup is ready to go! 

2. Gated Content Popup for Logged-in/out Users

If you require your users to be logged in to your site before accessing your content, this is the popup that you will want to use. You can use this popup for your entire site or certain content.

For example, if users need to be subscribed to your site to read a specific column, this log-in process can ensure only those members can read the article.

How to implement:

1. Start off by creating a new popup with HollerBox or choosing one of the many templates to edit. We are using a Yes & No Button template, there are many options for this template in HollerBox Pro.
2. Choose a title- it should highlight why the user is seeing this message such as “Log in to see this content!”
3. Next, fill out the body of the popup. For our example, the body reads “This content is for subscribers only. Log in now to see this content!” The user is then prompted to either click the “Login Now” button or the “Not a user? Create an account” button.
4. Next, you are going to choose where both buttons will be redirected once clicked. Click on the Yes Button settings and put the Login Page URL in the redirection box. Then, click on the No Button settings and put the Create Account Page URL in the redirection box.

5. To ensure that people have to login or create an account before viewing the content, you are then going to disable the close button. Click on the Close Button and then toggle the Disable Closing to on.

6. Make sure that the display conditions are configured to ensure the popup will show where you want it. Let’s say for this example you have premium content you want to protect. Go to Display Conditions to tags and select the proper one in which the popup should be displayed, like Premium Content. Or, you can have your popup show on all posts.

7. Staying in the Display Conditions you also want to toggle on the Show for X Visitors button and set it to “logged-out-only”. This will ensure that people who are already logged in to your website will not see this popup.

8. Go to Triggers to select when you want your popup to show. For this example, we are going to select On Page Load after zero seconds. This means a user will see it as soon as they land on the page.

9. Hit that Publish button and your popup is ready to go! 

3. Popup Gate using Groundhogg Display Conditions

If you’re looking for your readers to sign up for a paid subscription to read your content, this is one of the gated popups that you are going to want to use on your WordPress site.

You are able to use Groundhogg’s tags and conditions to completely customize who and who will not see this popup while visiting your site.

How to implement:

1. Start off by creating a new popup with HollerBox or choosing one of the many templates to edit. We are using a Yes & No Button template, there are many options for this template in HollerBox Pro.
2. Choose a title- it should highlight why the user is seeing this message such as “Premium Content!”
3. Next, fill out the body of the popup. For our example, the body reads “This content is for premium subscribers only. Premium subscribers get, unlimited premium articles, personalized experience etc.” The user is then prompted to either click the “Get Premium!” button or the “No thanks…” button.
4. Next, you are going to choose where both buttons will be redirected once clicked. Click on the Yes Button settings and put in the link to the pricing page, which could be run through WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Groundhogg etc.
5. Then, click on the No Button settings and put a link that will send them away from premium content, such as a page of free articles, a homepage, etc.

6. Make sure that the display conditions are configured to ensure the popup will show where you want it. Let’s say for this example you have premium content you want to protect. Go to Display Conditions to tags and select the proper one in which the popup should be displayed, like Premium Content. Or, you can have your popup show on all posts.

7. Staying in the Display Conditions you also want to toggle on the Hide for X contacts button. This will allow you to choose who you don’t want to see this popup. Click Edit Filters and select the Groundhogg conditions that you don’t want to see the popup, such as “paywall” for those who have already paid or “birthday” if users get a free article on their birthday etc.

8. Go to Triggers to select when you want your popup to show. For this example, we are going to select On Page Load after zero seconds. This means a user will see it as soon as they land on the page.

9. Hit that Publish button and your popup is ready to go! 

4. Delayed Popup Gate for # of Free Articles

These gated popups are something you see all the time in the publication industry. The main goal is to allow readers to have access to a certain number of articles before they have to subscribe.

You can use this if you want your readers to get hooked on your content and see the value you are offering before they have to pay.

How to implement:

1. Start off by creating a new popup with HollerBox or choosing one of the many templates to edit. We are using a Yes & No Button template, there are many options for this template in HollerBox Pro.
2. Choose a title- it should highlight why the user is seeing this message such as “No more free articles!”
3. Next, fill out the body of the popup. For our example, the body reads “You’ve used your allotment of 5 free articles. To unlock unlimited articles, log in or subscribe now!” The user is then prompted to either click the “Login Now” button or the “Create an account” button.
4. Next, you are going to choose where both buttons will be redirected once clicked. Click on the Yes Button settings and put in the link to the login page. Click on the No Button settings and put in the link that will redirect users to the create an account page.

5. Make sure that the display conditions are configured to ensure the popup will show where you want it. Let’s say for this example you have premium content you want to protect. Go to Display Conditions to tags and select the proper one in which the popup should be displayed, like Premium Content. Or, you can have your popup show on all posts.

6. Staying in the Display Conditions you also want to toggle on the Show After X Pageviews button. This will allow you to have the popup appear after a user has viewed your content a certain amount of time. Set the number to your desired outcome, in this example, we will do 5.

7. In the Displayed Conditions, you also want to toggle on the Show For X Visitors and select “logged-out-only” This will ensure that readers who are already subscribed to your premium content will not see this popup.

8. Go to Triggers to select when you want your popup to show. For this example, we are going to select On Page Load after zero seconds. This means a user will see it as soon as they land on the page.

9. Hit that Publish button and your popup is ready to go! 

Now that you know how to create some gated popups in WordPress…

You can get started with HollerBox and Groundhogg!

To get started with HollerBox you can view our features and pricing page!

To get started with Groundhogg, you can:

• Start a 14-day demo.
• Purchase a plan.
• Take the free quickstart course.
• Keep reading!

Have questions? Don’t hesitate to shoot us a message!

PS: This article was a video first! To view the full video on YouTube click here.

The post Gated content popups for WordPress: how to get more subscribers appeared first on HollerBox.

1. Checkout Abandonment Notification

A HUGE problem companies have while trying to sell a product is checkout/cart abandonment. A user can make it all the way to the checkout page, only to get cold feet and back out last minute.

A popup can help encourage your users to move forward with the checkout process during their moment of doubt. If a user tries to leave the page, you can set up a popup with information that is targeted toward helping them complete the sale.

Pro tip: We (HollerBox) implement this on our checkout page.

One main example of this is to offer a discount code. If a user doesn’t complete the sale, the popup can offer 10-15% off the purchase.

Where to display:

• Checkout page
• Cart page

When to trigger:

• On page exit intent
• After 5 seconds of inactivity

2. List-Building Slide-In

Have lots of readers visiting your blog daily but your email list isn’t growing? You need to have a slide in to prompt readers to subscribe to your email list.

We don’t want to get in the way of readers actually reading the blog, so you’ll want to disable any scroll prevention or overlay so that the popup doesn’t block the whole screen.

If you have any promise-benerfits, like special offers for subscribers, list them in the content!

Where to display:

• All Blog Posts
• Hide after close/convert

When to trigger:

• After 50% Scroll
• After 5 seconds of inactivity

3. Promotional Banner

Have a big sale coming up but not sure how to get all your users excited for it? You can try a promotional banner!

You can do this in two ways. Firstly, you can create a banner that tells your users about a sale that is happening right now (or in the future) and have it take them to the a landing page or post with the details.

Or, you can also grow your email list at the same time and have users subscribe to receive details about the deal via email, and receive notifactions for the deal in the near future.

Pro tip: Use popup scheduling to schedule the popup for the exact dates of your promotion!

Where to display:

• Entire site
• Within date range (optional)

When to trigger:

• On page load

4. Exit-Intent popup

Site creators want to maximize time on page and visitor engagement at every opportunity. One way we can do that is by interrupting their intention to leave a web page with an exit-intent popup.

These popups are flashy attention grabbers that might make a visitor rethink their decision to go elsewhere.

You can use the opportunity to offer the visitor a promotion, or send them on an alternative customer journey.

Some good examples of an exit-intent call-to-action might be:

• “Not ready to commit? Try a 14-day trial!”
• “Before you go, 15% off all merch!”

Where to display:

Pages that are part of your customer journey or any signup page

• Product pages
• Pricing page
• Checkout page (sometimes)
• Etc…

When to trigger:

• On exit-intent

5. First-Time Visitor Incentive Popup

Start off your relationship with first-time visitors on the right foot! You can use a popup to greet new visitors with offers or content specifically for them.

The call to action of this popup should be to set them on the customer journey that best benefits new visitors.

• Free shipping discount
• Cart value discount
• Provide a lead magnet
• Start a trial
• Answer frequently asked questions
• Send to a “start here” post
• Etc…

From that initial call-to-action, the visitor should have clear steps on how to continue their customer journey.

Pro tip: Avoid opt-ins or high commitment call-to-actions, and keep the barrier to entry very low.

Where to display:

Display on the entire site except for

• Checkout
• Pricing
• Cart
• Sign up pages

We don’t want to distract the visitor from spending money or taking some other conversion action.

When to trigger:

• On page load after 3-5 seconds
• After 50% scroll.

The post 5 Popups You Absolutely Need To Have On Your Website! appeared first on HollerBox.

New Popup Editor/Designer

The world has adopted live editing in pretty much every aspect of web design, and editing popups should be no different. So we have built an all-new editor that gives you a real-time preview of how your popup looks on your site.

Edits made in the controls area will instantly reflect in the preview, making for a seamless design experience. Plus, it’s a true live preview, meaning all the styles from the front-end of your site are accurately reflected in the preview.

You’ll also be able to test the popup within the preview, so you can test integrations without ever leaving the admin.

Reports & Dashboard

Before, you could only see the all-time stats for impressions and conversions for your popups in the HollerBox list view.

Now what you have is a full dashboard where you can see period-based analytics for all popups and specific popups!

A conversion is tracked when a lead submits a form or clicks a call to action button!

Updated/More Templates

Next on our list was to revamp all the existing templates to be in line with modern design techniques and standards. Then, we added some new templates as well.

Our new template selection makes it much clearer what kind of popup you are designing, whereas before it was kind of a guessing game.

All the templates are now rendered completely in JavaScript, there is no server-side rendering that will decrease the load speed of your site.

All templates are also compatible with new positioning options as well, allowing you to place your popup exactly where you want it.

Improved Triggers & Display Conditions

The display rules and triggers have also received a major overhaul, giving you way more control and flexibility to display your popups where they are needed most, and disabling them where they are not.

The triggers are mostly the same, however with some notable improvements.

The Click trigger can now be associated with a CSS selector so you can target specific elements of your page.

The Scroll Trigger now accepts a specific percentage of scrolling rather than just 50%.

The Display Conditions are now rule-based, meaning you can add as many rules to fine-tune where your popup is displayed.

You can add inclusion or exclusion rules. The new rules allow you to target special pages like the search page or posts page, target specific URLs with custom regex rules, target archive pages, and custom post types as well!

The advanced rules can be toggled to further fine-tune who sees your popup.

New Integrations

Integrations are the biggest bottleneck in any software development, and HollerBox’s lack of integrations for leading CRM platforms and other lead capture methods was definitely holding it back.

We’ve added new integrations for Groundhogg, Webhooks, Zapier, Keap, and HubSpot. Each of these integrations will add a contact to the CRM and apply tags (or add them to a list depending).

But that’s not all, before, you could only define one integration per popup, but now you’ll be able to add multiple integrations!

We’ve overhauled the Email integration as well! you can send multiple emails to different recipients and design the email content as well.

Changes to pricing & features

Upgrading to HollerBox 2.0

The post Improvements are coming with HollerBox 2.0! New editor, new features, reporting, and more! appeared first on HollerBox.

I know a lot of agencies and developers that work with WooCommerce on a regular basis, so the replies are based on experience with hundreds of projects.

The 5 themes that came up the most were:

• Astra
• GeneratePress
• Hello
• Kadence
• Storefront

Are these the best themes for WooCommerce in 2021? I decided to test them in several categories and see, so you can decide for yourself. In this post you’ll find how each theme looks for standard WooCommerce pages like shop, product detail, cart, and checkout, as well as a speed test.

Some other themes mentioned were OceanWP, StudioPress, and the Beaver Builder theme. I didn’t test these, but they are worth a look.

Before we dive in, what should you be looking for in a WooCommerce theme?

What Makes a Good WooCommerce theme?

A couple of people I respect a lot when it comes to WooCommerce are Patrick Garman and Zach Stepek. They’ve worked extensively with Woo on sites that do big revenue numbers.

Their recommendations boiled down to keeping things simple and lightweight.

Patrick Rauland has written extensively about WooCommerce, and he focuses on speed.

The best theme for your store is going to be one that looks good and performs even better, allowing your customers to purchase easily.

With that, let’s dive into the theme tests.

Astra

The Astra theme got a lot of mentions on Twitter, and for good reason. This is a great looking theme with WooCommerce, and with a free version, there is no reason not to try it out.

On their website, Astra boasts that they are the “most popular theme of all time.” They have over 1 million active installs, and over 4700 5 star reviews, so they might be right. Astra also integrates with popular plugins such as Elementor, WooCommerce, and LearnDash.

Astra was my personal favorite in this review.

Pricing

Free version ✅
Pro version: $47 – $249

Download Astra Free

Installation

Since Astra is free and in the WordPress.org theme directory, you can visit your WordPress admin and go to Themes => Add New. Search for Astra, install and activate.

Shop Page

Product Detail

Cart

Checkout

Speed Test

I ran the pingdom.com speed test with only WooCommerce plugin active on a WP Engine website. I wouldn’t put too much weight on these speed tests, because the hosting, caching, and resource optimization will affect your site speed more than the theme itself. However, if the theme really sucks, it will slow down your site.

Performance Grade 83

GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a popular theme with 300K (and counting) installation. This huge number comes as no surprise because the theme is well known for its lightweight architecture and the emphasis on usability. The theme is fully compatible with the Guttenburg editor and you can leverage the power of custom blocks to extend the usability of the WooCommerce store pages. 

With customizable headers and footers, optimized JS and CSS handling, and a fully responsive design, you have a very extensible and visually pleasing theme for your WooCommerce store.

Pricing

• Free version ✅
• Annual License: $59
• Lifetime License: $249

You can buy a premium version from the official store.

Theme Installation

The process of installing the theme is pretty standard and you could check out the details above. After activating the theme, you would see the GeneratePress option under the Appearance tab.

Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t offer any starter template. However, I am going to add dummy data so that I could demonstrate how the pages look and have an adequate base for the speed test. 

The Home Page

The Shop Page

The Product Detail Page

The Cart Page

The Checkout Page

My Account Page

As you can see, even the free version offers some great aesthetics and a clean design with lots of room for customization. Let’s see how the theme performs in the speed test. 

GeneratePress Speed Test

I have used Pingdom and here are the results:

Performance Grade: 86

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Kadence Theme

Kadence is a popular theme with a reputation for flexible design and high performance. The theme has more than 50K active installations, a great indication of trust by the users. The latest version of the theme has a couple of prebuilt demos that act as stater templates for entire business websites, including WooCommerce, membership websites, and learning platforms.

Other features include an emphasis on performance (especially on JS and CSS), choice of typography, drag-and-drop header and footer builders, and support for Guttenberg editor. 

Pricing

• Free version ✅
• Annual License: $69
• Lifetime License: $169

You can buy a premium version from the official website.

Theme Installation

For installation of the theme, I am going to the WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Themes. Next, click Add New.

Now, you have two choices; either you can download the theme from the Kadence website and upload it here, or search for the theme here and activate it.

The theme has been installed successfully.

Install the Kadence Starter Template 

Now I am going to install a Kadence starter template and show you how the pages look when the theme is active. At the same time, I will do a quick speed test to benchmark this theme.

Once you have activated the theme, you will see the Install Kadence Starter Template on your screen.

You will be asked to choose between Gutenberg or Elementor. I personally prefer Elementor, but you can opt for your own preferred editor. 

At this point, you might notice that there are several demos to choose from. For the purpose of this exercise, I am importing the Print Shop template.

You could either import the entire demo or specific page(s). I will import the entire demo so that I have a good starting point for the speed check. 

As you could see, the popup offers a choice of plugins and the option for starting the import process. 

In a few minutes, the store will be imported successfully and you will see the message Finished! View your site.

Now, let’s see how the home page and other major pages look with this theme.

The Home Page

The Shop Page

The Product Detail Page

The Cart Page

The Checkout Page

My Account Page

As you can see Kadence has a clean and somewhat minimalistic design that emphasizes performance over flash design. Now let’s go to the speed test. 

Kadence Speed Test

Let’s see what pingdom.com says about the speed.

Performance Grade: 85

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Storefront

Storefront has been developed and maintained by the WooCommerce team and as such is considered the benchmark against which all other themes for WooCommerce are compared. When you opt for Storefront, you know that the theme offers excellent compatibility with the popular extensions and plugins.

For many developers, Storefront is a popular choice because it is considered a great lightweight theme with a huge capacity for customizing the theme to fit the requirements of almost any business. Add the responsive design, multiple options for page design, and a lightweight codebase, and you have a great theme built for the success of any WooCommerce business.

Storefront Pricing

Free, no paid option.

Theme Installation

If you wish to try the theme out, simply opt for Storefront when installing WooCommerce. 

After activating this theme you can see the Storefront option available under the Appearance tab.

You will see the option for creating a home page using Storefront’s home page template.

Click Let’s go if you want to add example products. After a couple of minutes, the demo has been imported. 

The Shop Page

The Product Detail Page

The Cart Page

The Checkout Page

Storefront Speed Test

To test the performance of the theme, I used the same Pingdom tool.

Performance Grade: 87

Hello Elementor

If you are an Elementor fan, you would opt for the starter theme Elementor’s Hello for your WooCommerce store because you are already familiar with it. It is a great theme and Elemenrtor users often use it to experiment and try out design ideas.

In addition to being a great starter theme, it is also a highly functional theme in its own right.  It has a simple and clean interface and allows for customized page design for WooCommerce stores.

Hello Elementor Pricing

Hello Elementor is a free theme.

Theme Installation

Follow the standard theme installation process for installing and activating the theme.

After activating this theme, you will be prompted to download the Elementor page builder.

The Starter Template

Depending upon how you see it, it is a good or a bad thing that there is no starter template for this theme. Hence you get a blank slate that you can use to build the page design you want for your business.

To demonstrate the theme’s performance, I will import dummy data so that I have a baseline similar to the other three themes on this list. 

The Home Page

The Shop Page

The Product Detail Page

The Cart Page

The Checkout Page

Hello Elementor Speed Test

I used Pingdom to test the theme

Performance grade: 85

The Final Verdict

In this article, I presented five themes that in my opinion, are a great fit for your WooCommerce store. What is common among these themes is an emphasis on performance, lightweight codebase, and a focus on extensibility to include features and capabilities that are not present in the core theme. 

I also discussed the parameters that you should use to evaluate WooCommerce themes so that you have a clear understanding of what makes a good WooCommerce theme. 

To make things easier for you, I included a Pingdom speed test that clearly highlights the theme’s performance, a crucial factor in selecting a WooCommerce theme. Note that this performance data is dummy data, and the real-world performance depends upon the number of inventory items and users on the website. 

I hope that this article proves helpful in your search for a WooCommerce theme and that you find a good match on the list. Let me know in the comments how your search for a theme is turning out. 

The post The 5 Best Themes for WooCommerce in 2021, According to WooCommerce Developers appeared first on HollerBox.

The largest eCommerce retailer in the world, Amazon, does not offer guest checkout. Here’s what you see when you try to checkout without being signed in:

Amazon has learned that making the checkout process a little harder the first time is worth it to encourage customers to come back. This may or may not be true for you. We don’t all have stores like Amazon, so we shouldn’t always imitate them.

Clearly we need to make it easy for customers to checkout, even if they do not already have an account. According to Baymard Institute user tests, when account creation was difficult “14% of users were unable to figure out the checkout step and ended up abandoning the site.”

What is more important, reducing abandonment, or encouraging return business by forcing account creation? That’s for you to decide. We may be able to get the best of both worlds by automating or delaying account creation, or we can choose to enable guest checkout.

Enable Guest Checkout in WooCommerce

Allowing customers to order without creating an account is easy and free with WooCommerce.

Go to WooCommerce => Settings => Accounts and Privacy and review your settings there. Make sure “Allow customers to place orders without an account” is checked, as long as your store works without an account.

This works great if you don’t need any customer information, but what if they need to login to their account page to download a file or view confidential order information? They will need to create an account.

We don’t want to force customers to create an account during checkout, because that leads to cart abandonment. That leads us to our next option.

Automatic Account Creation

Instead of making customers create their own account information, WooCommerce can automatically create an account for them. This is a great option if you need customers to have an account, but you also want to make it easy for them to purchase.

To enable automatic account create, go to WooCommerce => Settings => Accounts and Privacy, and check the two boxes below.

Under Account creation, check “When creating an account, automatically generate an account username for the customer based on their name, surname, or email” and “When creating an account, automatically generate an account password.”

Your customer will receive an email with their account information after their purchase. They will not be able to change their username, but they can change their password.

If you want to let customers choose their username and password, this won’t be the best option. Instead, you should allow them to create their account after they checkout.

Post Checkout Registration

Another option is to allow customers to create their account after purchase. This is called delayed account creation, or post checkout registration.

To do this with WooCommerce, go to WooCommerce => Settings => Accounts and Privacy, and check the box below.

Check “Allow customers to create an account on the My Account page.” You also need to enable guest checkout, as described earlier in this article. Now your customers can checkout without creating an account, and create an account on the My account page after their purchase.

Tip: No matter when you require account creation, keep password requirements simple at first. Baymard Institute says that “extensive and strict password rules can cause up to an 18.75% checkout-abandonment rate.” If security is a concern, force users to change their passwords to something stronger within 48 hours.WordPress does not require strong passwords by default, so if you have a security plugin just make sure you don’t get too crazy with the password requirements.

Optimize Account Creation to Improve Checkout Conversion Rates

The point of the these account registration options is to make it easier for customers to checkout, which should improve your checkout conversion rate.

Enabling guest checkout, automating, or delaying account creation does a couple of things. It removes 2 fields from your checkout page, which makes your payment process less intimidating. It also removes the mental effort required to think of a username and a password, which reduces frustration levels.

It may not seem like much, but it’s easy to fix, and every little bit helps.

The post Should You Enable Guest Checkout in WooCommerce? appeared first on HollerBox.

For a WooCommerce based business, upselling is made easy by a WooCommerce upselling plugin that takes care of all the nuts-and-bolts of the process and takes advantage of custom funnels to make sure every customer is presented with options that help them enjoy their purchase more and eventually add to the store revenues.

So even if upselling is a new thing for you, in this guide, I will make sure that you have a clear idea of how to set up a proper upselling process for your WooCommerce store.

Table of Contents

• What Is WooCommerce One-Click Upsell?
• Why Should You Use A One-Click Upsell?
  • The Retention Factor
  • Increased Buyer Satisfaction
  • Maximizes Average Order Value
  • Increased Revenue
• How to Set Up Your One-Click Upsell
  • Install The Plugin
  • Create The Funnel
  • Add The Upsell Offer
  • Test & Evaluate
• Final Words

What Is WooCommerce One-Click Upsell?

Let’s start with the basic definition of upsell. In very simple terms, upselling is the sales tactic where you offer a related product or service in addition to the main product(s) the customer is buying from your store.

Upselling is considered an “easy” tactic because it takes advantage of the fact that the customer is already buying from you and could be easily persuaded to buy an additional product during the transaction. 

Since these products and services are related to the main purchase, customers often add them to the cart because of the bundle’s value advantage.

The challenge in setting up a successful WooCommerce upsell funnel is timing – the upsell offer should come at the right time. If it is too early, the customer might not be interested, and if too late, the customer has already closed the transaction and the moment is lost. 

This is why you need a WooCommerce post purchase upsell plugin that manages the process and makes sure that the customer does not have to go through the checkout again to buy the upsell offer.

Now that you know the fundamentals of upsell, let’s discuss the idea of one-click WooCommerce upsell. Since upsell works the best near the close of the transaction, a WooComemerce upsell plugin shows the offers at the checkout page to conveniently add the offers to the cart without having to enter their details again. 

Also, in effect the trust is already there, there is a huge chance that the customer would click through and increase the size of the order. In effect, it is a win-win for both the customer and the business.

Why Use a One-Click Upsell?

Good question!

Here are four reasons why you should set up a one-click upsell process for your WooCommerce store.

The Retention Factor

Retention is an important business metric for a good reason – it is easier to sell again to a customer rather than find new customers. Upsell helps build the store image as the place where customers can find everything they need at a great price. An upsell offer builds customers’ trust and greatly increases the chances of a repeat sale. 

Increased Buyer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction in this age of choice is very tricky for online businesses. It isn’t easy to meet customer expectations and win them over as fans. With one-click upsell offers, customers get great bargains right when they are most receptive to the deals. Since the upsell deals often complement the main purchase, the user experience is enhanced, resulting in increased customer satisfaction.

Maximizes Average Order Value

You must have seen the candies at the store checkout counters. That’s the great thing about upsell offers – they present products that the customers were not planning to buy in the first place. As a result, when they opt for an offer, the overall cart size increases(directly impacting the revenue). This also increases customer satisfaction as the buy decision adds to the value the customer associates with the overall purchase.

Increased Revenue

The above three factors come together to add directly to the store revenues. Research suggests that upsell offers could increase the revenue by as much as 20%. Since these offers add to the user experience and increase the customers’ trust, this kicks off a generally positive trend for revenue as more and more customers come back for repeat purchases from the store.

Here’s How to Set Up Your One-Click Upsell

Now that you know the essentials of one-click upsell, I will now go into the details of implementing the idea for your WooCommerce store. 

Like everything else, I would use a WooCommerce upsell plugin to take care of the actual work to focus on setting up and optimizing the funnels and suggestions. There are a couple of great choices, but I will go with WooCommerce One Click Upsells & Downsells by BogdanFix. 

This plugin offers several tools that allow me to set up and manage to upsell funnels and create offers with a good conversion rate. In particular, the plugin offers funnel builder, detailed reporting on funnel performance, and Facebook Pixel integration. 

I will start with setting up the plugin and then go into the process of setting up the funnels and offers. 

Install The Plugin

Use your preferred method of installing and activating the plugin. I recommend doing it through the Plugins page. After that, the plugin could be found at Plugins > Installed Plugins.

Create The Funnel

Now that the plugin has been installed, the next step is the setting up of a funnel. One-Click Upsells allows you to set up multiple funnels to cater to various sales scenarios. To set up a funnel, go to the plugin’s dashboard (WooCommerce > One-Click Upsells).

The dashboard displays information about the existing funnels, shortcodes, and settings. To set up a funnel, go to the first tab, “Create Checkout Funnel”.

You can see several fields that take the relevant information about the funnel in the funnel setup form. The first field is the funnel’s name, an important consideration because this is how you could identify a certain funnel from the list of funnels.

As you can see, I have used “40 OFF Tshirts” as the funnel name. This identifies this funnel as a part of the campaign where the customers could get a t-shirt for a 40% discount). The next important setting is the trigger that activates the funnel.

Now, this trigger can be a broad product (such as t-shirts), price range, or similar attributes. To demonstrate this, I will apply the funnel to the entire “t-shirts” category.

Add The Upsell Offer

Now that the funnel has been created, the next step is adding the offers for the funnel.

A great feature of the plugin is the ability to cascade offers. This allows you to “improve” the offer if the buyer skips/rejects the first offer a good example is to increase the discount percentage if the first offer is rejected).

I will now demonstrate how to add a basic offer to the funnel. The option is located right below the funnel settings.

Click “Add New Offer” to add the new offer. 

In the form that opens, you can see the options for when the buyer accepts the offer (Buy Now) and reject them (No Thanks). If the buyer accepts the offer, the funnel directs them to the Order Confirmation page. However, if they reject the offer, you have the offer to show the next offer in the line. You can do this by selecting the next offer in the No Thanks dropdown menu.

For this guide’s purpose, I will leave the default settings that direct the buyers to the Order Confirmation page in both cases.

There are times when you might wish to cancel the original order because the offer upgrades the products and cannot be accommodated in the pre-checkout process. This is rather uncommon, and I recommend keeping the box unchecked to keep things simple.

The next important step is choosing the product(s) that would form the part of the offer. The good thing is that you can search for any product in the store’s inventory. Select the target product, and it will be added to the offer.

For this, go to the next “Product Options” section, where you can add the discount and/or additional benefits.  In almost all cases, this could take three forms:

• A percentage reduction of the price
• An additional quantity of the product
• Changes to shipping charges (either waived off, flat rate, or reduction as the order size increases)

To demonstrate this, I will offer a combination of all three benefits:

• Price reduction (40% OFF on the product price)
• Additional product (a single long-sleeve t-shirt)
• Changes to shipping charges (free)

Now that you have set up the funnel and the offer(s), you can move on to the final section, where you have additional settings for the funnel. I would like to highlight a couple of options here:

You can create a tracking code for the funnel. However, this is unnecessary because the plugin tracks the buyer and displays the information on the dashboard.

An interesting option is the “Skip Offer” checkbox that skips the offer if a buyer places the order for the product included in the offer.

The final option of allowing the buyer to change the quantity of the product they can buy at the discounted terms. Allowing this is a business decision, but in general, this could be considered a good thing because it could potentially move the inventory faster. For this demo, I will leave it unchecked.

Test & Evaluate

At this point, the funnel is good to go. It is time to take it live and check out how it performs (and contributes to the store performance metrics).

Finalize the process by clicking “Save Changes.” This will save the configuration and redirect you to the dashboard, where you can see the funnel.

In the “My Funnels” tab, you can see all the active funnels. On the left, under the Funnel targets, you can see the funnel’s statistics and performance. On the right, you have several actions (edit, disable, duplicate, reset stats, delete) that affect the funnel. 

Here is how you can test the funnel operation:

Click “quick test” to visit the Cart page with a product already in the checkout process. 

Click “Proceed to Checkout” to initiate the checkout process. Since I am testing funnel, this essentially simulates the user experience of going through the checkout process. During this, the offer is triggered right after the Billing Details and Payment Information. 

Once the order has been placed, the offer is triggered and you will see the “special offer” page. 

As you can see, the price discount and the free shipping are displayed as per the funnel offer. At this point, I suggest you accept the offer and check if the transaction parameters (price, order size, and shipping rates) change to reflect the success of the offer on the Order Summary page. 

Next, do a quick test again, and this time refuse the offer, just to see the impact on the final order. 

Final Words

Upselling is a powerful tactic that could significantly contribute to the business revenues and store reputation. One-Click Upsell plugin is a very powerful option for setting up, testing, and monitoring upsell funnels that present great bargains to the buyers. 

The post How to Create A One-Click Upsell For WooCommerce appeared first on HollerBox.

I recently caught up with him to ask more about his journey, and the future of WooCommerce. One of the big takeaways I got from talking with Mike is that Woo is very interested in headless eCommerce, and there are exciting things in that area coming soon. One of those things being the WooCommerce Store API, which sounds really cool, but is still under development.

How has your work life changed since the acquisition of WooCommerce by Automattic? Are you still writing code and fixing bugs on a daily basis?

Definitely, yes. I’m still coding daily. My role has however changed dramatically over the years!

When we came over from WooThemes this was indeed my role, and I did lead a team of developers working on WooCommerce Core for several years. But as we grew, responsibilities were divided, more teams were spawned handling various aspects of the WooCommerce ecosystem, we added business and product leads, more developers, designers, and so on. It’s all so much larger than any one person!

Three years ago I started a new project; becoming a father. After returning from parental leave, I decided to step back from team leadership and go back to an IC position to reduce some of my responsibilities. Maybe it was a bit of a mid-life crisis too 🙂 I moved away from primarily doing PHP work to JavaScript and React by switching to a team working on WooCommerce Blocks. It’s been a huge learning experience for me. Overwhelming at the beginning.

What is the coolest or weirdest way you’ve seen WooCommerce used by a customer?

I’ve definitely seen a lot of weird stores in my time haha. I wish I could unsee some of them!

Coolest…To be honest what appeals to me most are stores just making the most out of the core product, using just the essentials. I think it’s way too easy to go over the top and install all kinds of plugins on top of WooCommerce that is decremental to the core experience.

I will add, shopping online and randomly coming across WooCommerce stores gives me a very strange feeling inside that is difficult to describe. It happens a lot more often these days. The last one I came across by accident was Venus Optics who sell camera lenses. That’s cool.

“Lots of talk about “headless commerce” at Shopify and BigCommerce. Also, there are a ton startups that have raised money to provide headless commerce solutions. What is the future of headless commerce with Woo?”
— @hashim_warren

The work we’re doing with React on the frontend in Blocks, powered by APIs on the server-side, proves that headless commerce is definitely within reach. As those APIs are improved and optimised I certainly think it will become more commonplace. I think there will still many advantages to using Woo as the backend for headless stores; extensibility, flexibility, owning and controlling your data. It will be fun to see how solutions evolve, with WordPress in general too. Whether or not this is the future though, I don’t know. Headless is the latest buzzword to describe this, but API driven apps have been around for a long time.

“What are some early product decisions they got right, what are some they got wrong, and what are some that may have been right at the time but are now technical debt?”
— @devinsays

WooCommerce was lucky; it was made close to when Custom Post Types were first introduced in WordPress which not only made initial development easier but gave it advantages over the other plugins such as WP eCommerce which were yet to make the switch. For the most part, this was a good decision. Even though it has led to some scaling pains over the years, the benefits have outweighed the drawbacks in my opinion, giving us a lot of functionality “for free”.

Another good decision early on to make things as extensible as possible through hooks and PHP templates. This was definitely a huge part of the success and adoption of WooCommerce. The flexibility it gave plugin and theme developers led to an ecosystem growing rapidly.

This is however a double-edged sword. Hooks need to be maintained to avoid breakage, which makes it more difficult to refactor things over time and leads to technical debt. Deprecation only helps to a point. In hindsight, some of those hooks should not have been introduced without more careful planning for the future.

I think the approach we’re trying to take now, where we have more curated extensibility points is much more sensible. This allows for extensibility, but through more controlled APIs so any changes can be rolled out in a more controlled manner.

“Does want to wade into the fork drama? What persuaded him that WooThemes would be a better place to continue development of what is now WooCommerce?”
— @devinsays

I could mention the market WooThemes had already captured or their experience in the WordPress space, but the biggest reason for me was the focus on product.

At that time, 90% of my day job (as a developer) was client work. We worked mostly with business sites, WP Ecommerce, Shopp, and Magento stores. I don’t remember exactly when the idea for Jigoshop came, but it was largely out of frustration with the solutions we were forced to use at the time.

After its inception, client work was still the primary focus of the business, and Jigoshop felt more like a side-hustle than anything. You can imagine the time-investment involved to keep on top of development, issues, and support. It was enjoyable, but mentally draining on top of everything else.

Around the time Jigoshop launched, WooThemes was trying to create their own eCommerce platform to build into their themes. Naturally, we pitched Jigoshop as a potential solution for them to integrate with instead, and things spiralled from there. Rather than just using it as a third party, WooThemes wanted to hire us to build something with them and they were keen to acquire what had already been built.

You say on your website that WooThemes was not able to acquire Jigoshop, so they forked it. Why couldn’t they acquire it?

I wasn’t involved in the business side of things at all, and I had no shares or vested interests beyond my salary. To my understanding, an offer was made, but for whatever reason, it was rejected. Maybe the sudden interest from a major player influenced that decision.

Either way, I think my move to WooThemes was inevitable. I’m just grateful I was able to continue working on and shaping something I was passionate about.

“What is he is most excited about on the future product roadmap?”
— @devinsays

This is a tough one. The range of things being worked on is so vast! I can probably best comment on the things within our team’s space, and that would have to be the Cart and Checkout Blocks.

This project started at the end of 2019 and not only is this a total reimagining of the cart and checkout flow using a modern stack (using React), it’s built on top of a new public REST API (named the Store API) which I’m really proud to have worked on. This API provides access to the WooCommerce cart amongst other things, and could even enable checkouts in a headless context.

Our usage of React in the Checkout block is exciting in itself. Unlike regular Gutenberg blocks which save HTML to the post, or dynamic blocks which use Server Side Rendering, we’re actually using React Components directly on the frontend. It’s really powerful stuff.

Hopefully, more people find out about the Checkout Block and start playing with it. I’ve been noticing a few 3rd party solutions popping up doing similar things, but I don’t think any of them are thinking about integrations with other plugins as much as we are. This is one of our main focuses going into 2021.

Can you tell me more about the Store API?

Not much has been said about it publicly because it’s still in active development 🙂 Hoping to change that soon!

Essentially the store API is a public Rest API that does not require authentication. It provides access to non-sensitive product information, Cart data (with the ability to add/edit/delete from the cart), and Checkout. It’s what powers the majority of the Gutenberg Blocks in WooCommerce, including the new Cart and Checkout Blocks.

So in the case of Checkout for instance, it converts a cart to a draft order, then accepts customer address data, and finally facilitates payment via a payment gateway before sending the result back to the client.

You can think of the Store API as the API for clients, and the core Rest API as the api for store management. Keeping them separate like this makes it clear that one exposes data in a public context.

Will it be an API on a WordPress site or something hosted on Automattic’s servers?

This one will be self-hosted like the Rest API in WooCommerce core.

Are public docs available?

The docs can be found on GitHub. Again, I should stress, it’s in active development and a state of flux, so it’s not yet versioned and may change to meet the needs of the checkout project.

I’m building headless WooCommerce apps over at AppPresser, and the cart/checkout situation is the hardest part. It’s cool to hear you guys are working on that!

We’re hearing this more and more. There are a few small gotchas currently, but you can actually create a cart, and checkout from a rest client like Postman or Insomnia using the Store API right now, no frontend required. For me thats incredibly useful.

If you have more questions for Mike, leave them in the comments and I might be able to persuade him to drop by and answer a few. You can see more about what Mike is up to personally and professionally on his personal website mikejolley.com.

The post Catching Up with Mike Jolley – Jigoshop, Headless WooCommerce, and more appeared first on HollerBox.

No plugin, no redirect, and no onclick events in your link tags. No complex setup with Google Analytics, just a simple list of outbound urls in your events.

Click here to skip to the script.

Why is this so hard?

This sounds simple, but it took a while to figure this out.

I wanted a simple way to see what links people were clicking the most, and to list those out in Google Analytics. All of the articles I found on Google were using a paid plugin, or a complex script with redirects. Even Google’s own documentation says to change every link on your site using an onclick event:

You'll also need to add (or modify) the onclick attribute to your links. Use this example as a model for your own links:

<a href="http://www.example.com" onclick="captureOutboundLink('http://www.example.com'); return false;">Check out example.com</a>

Change every single link tag on my whole site? No thank you.

Other articles said you have to use Google Tag Manager, but it requires a bunch of steps to setup. I’m too lazy for that, just give me something I can copy/paste!

The Solution: A Simple Script

I wrote a script that is copy/paste and will track outbound links in Google Analytics events with no other setup or changes.

This script can be inserted between script tags in your site footer. It tracks all clicks on anything, then if it’s a link with an href that does not match your domain, it sends the event to GA.

You could make this script a bit better by only tracking clicks on a certain container, or only links with target=”_blank”.

Make it a plugin!

I created a very simple plugin that loads the script above in your site footer if you want something that doesn’t require coding.

Download the plugin here. Add it to your site under Plugins => Add New => Upload.

You must already be adding your GA tracking script somewhere else.

After adding the tracking code, wait 24 hours, then you can see all your links under Behavior => Events => Event Label in Google Analytics.

The post Track Outbound Links in WordPress with Google Analytics (no plugin, no redirect, no markup changes) appeared first on HollerBox.