Launching an eCommerce store is a strategic process too, unlike what people think. There are some things you need to do to guarantee a non-bumpy ride into the market and earning customer trust. It includes product imagery, navigation, security certifications, website copy, and more.

Building an eCommerce store would require an eye-to-detail and not missing out on anything that can make and break the experience on the site. To help you in the course, here is a list of things you would be required to give attention to while launching an eCommerce store with WooCommerce. So, let’s first start with WooCommerce and how you can create a store over it.

WooCommerce – What is it?

WooCommerce is a very popular software that makes selling products and services easy. It is a trusted platform that provides you amazing tools to build a robust eCommerce store and offers you maximum flexibility to better manage your business.

While launching an eCommerce store over WooCommerce, you may miss out on the following things. So, here is detailed information and the WooCommerce Store Checklist that you can use to plan your launch better.

1. Review the Brand Colors and Imagery

Website design is one of the most crucial things for an eCommerce store. It is because the more easeful the browsing is, the more people spend time on it to search for the products they would like to purchase. It ensures customer retention; you must make sure things that you put on your store other than the product, such as the buttons and features, should be functional, straightforward, and should add value to the experience. So, before you launch:

• Make sure the brand colors are consistent on every page of your eCommerce store.
• Use good quality images without burdening your site; read our blog on how you can optimize photos without compromising on quality.
• Add a favicon; this would allow your users to save your site and come back anytime they want to buy any product. You can use a plugin like WP Retina 2X too.

2. Easy navigation and site search

Once your potential buyers land at your store, it is essential that they must spend time browsing through the product. This requires you to make sure the overall navigation and functionality are up to the modern standards of an eCommerce store.

• Utilize the homepage to attract their attention, use the best product images, videos, and catchy text to hold them.
• Display your best-selling products.
• Provide information on the latest discounts and offers.
• Make communication easy with accurate information about the address, email address, and phone number.
• Add 404 pages so that they can head back to the store in case they clicked on a bad link.
• Make checkout and accessibility to cart easy. Provide useful information to the customers for minimizing distractions and allowing customers to easily purchase from you.
• Reduce the loading time by optimizing your website down to two seconds.

Related Reading: Reduce Customer Waiting Time [Actionable Tips]

3. Store functionality

The overall functioning of the WooCommerce store is important. Navigation helps people to reach pages, but if the store isn’t functional, people might face problems placing the orders from your store. You must map your customer journey to make sure every touchpoint is well-functioning in the store.

• Check all your links on the page, including the ones in headers and footers that should function properly (including external site links).
• Fill the contact form and see if the submission process is working smoothly.
• Use call to action buttons for evoking the desired action from your potential buyers. (Read our blog: Ecommerce Call To Actions – Tips To Make The Most Of CTAs In 2021)
• Offer multiple payment gateways; people use various ways to pay for the products.
• COD, credit/debit cards, e-wallets, UPI, PayPal, Stripe, etc., are useful to make shopping easy with you.

4. Ensure site accessibility

Ensure your website is accessible to people with disabilities. Technology is making it so much easier for specially challenged people to become more independent. There are global initiatives running along to make sure the digital environment becomes more welcoming and accepting of disabilities.

There are some free plugins such as Accessible that you can use. Start with the WordPress Accessibility test to check for WCAG and ADA compatibility. Once approved, you can add an accessible element and optimize your website by adjusting the following elements.

• Make page titles and headings clear.
• Add alt text to the image and make link text more descriptive.
• Choose easy-to-read fonts such as Arial, San Serif, Calibri, etc.

5. Sort out specific eCommerce tasks

Here are some important considerations you cannot miss out on while launching an eCommerce store.

• Review the checkout process: Make sure it is error-free. Checkout multiple times before the launch using various payment modes and ensure the messages are displayed in case of any error. Also, test the coupon code.
• Check your inventory: The store should be stocked up at launch; go through each product to check for inventory levels each time someone makes a purchase. Use an inventory management plugin for easy business management.
• Manage order communication: Ensure that you send an order confirmation email to your customers. You can use the same mechanism to communicate with the users in case they experience any error or failure while placing an order or paying. Also, provide those messages and information at each stage of the order processing until delivered.
• Review customer dashboard: For higher retention, you must make sure the user dashboard is easy to navigate and as wholesome as it can be. Include all the things necessary for the user, right from profile management to order management, to payment history to return history, etc.

6. Optimize for SEO

SEO is one of the most important things for the current environment. Plugins like Yoast WooCommerce are easy to integrate and provide you with some of the best suggestions to optimize your store for SEO. The tools provide you information such as:

• Optimizing the meta description
• Adding Alt text for the images
• Customizing the URL structure
• Creating a sitemap
• and many more…

7. Store Security

It is important for your store to be secure. Test the website for any security threats and hacking. For more information, you must head over to this detailed guide on WooCommerce Security.

• Set up a firewall to protect your store from any malicious attacks; you can use the solutions such as Imperva or CDN.
• Obtain an SSL certificate to ensure people see your store as secure; also, Google takes an SSL certificate into account while crawling through your store.
• Remove the data that is not necessary from the WordPress backend. Remove unused themes, plugins, pages, and posts that can become a target by hackers.

8. Put legalities in place

Protect your business and outline your store policies through a legal framework. Here is how you can proceed.

• Engage a law firm to develop the terms and conditions for your product and checkout pages. You can also use the pre-built templates that match your business; however, read them thoroughly.
• Privacy policy ensures customer information and data are handled with care on your website. You can create the privacy policy for WordPress easily with this process:

Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce > Privacy Policy Page

Optimizing the store with AI for conversions

The more you understand your customers individually, the more you can optimize their experience in your store. With personalization, you can completely change their experience over your store. You can convey the messages that are relevant to them, you can suggest products that are of use to them, and you can guide their way through the purchase.

You can use the eCommerce personalization platform like Dialogue AI to analyze the shopping behavior of your customers in real-time. It would help you convert your one-time buyers into regular shoppers.

Useful Read: 5 Quick Tips To Boost Your WooCommerce Sales

Wrapping Up

These were some of the highly necessary things for you to checkout and optimize before launching the Woocommerce store in the market. The checklist would give you time to plan your launch better and not go wrong anywhere in the process.

Test your site thoroughly and identify any glitches, errors, etc. Reach out to employees, friends, family, etc., to help with the navigation test. It would allow you to gain more perspective about your eCommerce store’s overall experience.