WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It’s also the most popular eCommerce solution, powering nearly 30% of all online stores on any platform in 2020! The incredibly robust ecosystem of essential WooCommerce extensions explains much of this success. 🏆
What are WooCommerce Extensions?
Although WooCommerce is extremely powerful, it may not have all the features you want. For example, you might need extra shipping integrations, payment providers, or subscriptions.
That’s where WooCommerce extensions come in.
WooCommerce extensions are add-on software that modifies and extends WooCommerce. They are like plugins for the WooCommerce plugin. 🔌
And many of them are FREE! 🙂
In this post, we’re going to look at eight of the most useful WooCommerce extensions we consider essential to the success of any store.
Let’s get started.
🎱 Eight Essential WooCommerce Extensions
1: Jilt for WooCommerce
Email marketing is critical to running a successful eCommerce business. Jilt provides this essential marketing automation service by connecting to your WooCommerce store through an extension. 📧
Jilt makes email marketing easy by adding some real superpowers to your store:
- All your transactional emails for WooCommerce get sent through Jilt for high deliverability
- Jilt helps you craft and send beautiful custom newsletters to your buyers.
- Customers with abandoned shopping carts are re-engaged by email automatically.
- Former customers can be brought back with automated re-engagement email campaigns.
If you aren’t set up to automatically engage your customers and potential customers by email the right way, you are leaving money on the table — without a doubt. 💸
Jilt — Pricing
There’s a limited free plan for 300 customers. The paid plans start at $29/month for 1,000 customers.
2: WooCommerce Wishlists
Would you like to give your store an Amazon.com vibe with wishlists? If so, this is the plugin for you! In order to increase revenue for your store, you need high customer engagement.
Wishlists allow people to plan and organize the products they want. Then they can share their list with friends. Wishes and sharing turn into purchases, increasing sales by as much as 20%!
Wishlists are great to promote when the holiday shopping season begins. 🎁
WooCommerce Wishlists — Pricing
The WooCommerce Wishlists extension is available on the official WooCommerce marketplace. A single annual license for Wishlists costs $79. Each license is good for one storefront, and there are no multi-site discounts.
3: WooCommerce Customizer
Also from the makers of Jilt, Customizer for WooCommerce is an essential extension if you want to easily change visual details on your store pages.
The Customizer gives you simple settings to change sales badges and the text on cart buttons for different products. (They don’t have to be the same everywhere in your shop.)
If you want more control over checkout page buttons and text — and who doesn’t? — then the Customizer is for you.
WooCommerce Customizer — Pricing
The best part? This extension is completely free!
4: WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips
Packing slips make it quicker and easier to organize your customers’ orders. For customers, PDF invoices make all the important information about their purchase clear.
In some cases, like business-to-business transactions, a PDF invoice is expected or required. 🧾
Although WooCommerce doesn’t generate PDF invoices or packing slips for your customers’ orders by default, you can easily add this functionality with WooCommerce PDF Invoices and Packing Slips.
WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips — Pricing
The core plugin is free! It provides all the functionality you’ll need, but if you want premium support and extra features, consider buying the premium version for €59.
5: WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor
Optimizing the user experience for your customers means converting more and churning less. Unfortunately, the checkout experience in WooCommerce is fairly complicated. Because there are many fields to complete, and not all of them are necessary for every store, you might want to trim some fields to reduce friction. Also, some field types you need may not be included in WooCommerce by default.
Checkout Field Editor lets you shape the checkout process. You can add, edit, delete, and rearrange form fields with it. Once you’ve optimized the checkout experience, you can expect results in your sales.
WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor — Pricing
While there’s no free version of the plugin, there are free alternatives on WordPress.org available. The version on the WooCommerce marketplace costs $49 for a single site license.
6: Variation Swatches for WooCommerce
If you are selling different color versions of a single product, you need a way to display them to customers. WooCommerce has basic dropdowns for this feature, but Variation Swatches are easy to set up and much more attractive.
For example, if you are selling multiple color versions of a single piece of clothing, a colorful grid of options beats a dropdown list of color names.
Giving some images instead of just words, people are more likely to make a purchase.
Variation Swatches for WooCommerce — Pricing
This is a freemium plugin. That means there’s a free version available on WordPress.org. Then there’s a premium version starting at $49 for a single site license with dedicated support.
7: WooCommerce Currency Switcher
In the world of international eCommerce, having clear pricing for your potential customers is vital. The easiest way to do that is to let customers see prices and pay in their own currency. That’s what the WooCommerce currency does.
Using a currency switcher is a great way to smooth the path for international sales, partly because it builds trust. When you offer currency switching, your customers know you’re taking their perspective into account.
They also know exactly what they’ll be paying, so there are no surprises later! ❤️
WooCommerce Currency Switcher Pricing
The free version of this plugin is available on WordPress.org. The premium version starts at $34 for a single site license that includes premium support.
8: WooCommerce Multilingual
If you have an international reach, it’s a great idea to present your store in multiple languages for visitors around the globe. Once again, as with currency switching, localization and internationalization build trust and optimize the customer experience.
WPML combined with WooCommerce makes it possible to reach more customers in their primary language. While you do have to produce your own translations, it’s worth it in the long run.
⚠️ This is actually not a WooCommerce extension — it’s a WordPress plugin. Consequently, you must install it with the WPML plugin to make WPML work with WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Multilingual — Pricing
The Multilingual Pricing plugin is free, but WPML itself costs $79 for a 3 site license. There is a cheaper version available for $29 for a single site license, but it doesn’t support WooCommerce stores.
📦 Wrapping Up
Planning a new eCommerce store is exciting! You’re anticipating what’s to come and the day when you go viral and sell out your inventory.
It may not be an easy path, but the essential extensions for WooCommerce will make your work easier, build trust, and grease the sales funnel, you’ll make your way to eCommerce success a lot more easily. 🛍️
What are your picks for essential WooCommerce extensions? Have you ever used any of the ones we mentioned in our guide? Let us know in the Commerce Journey Facebook Group.