# Tribe Interactive — Full Content Export > WooCommerce optimization & development agency. Generated: 2026-05-14 This document contains the full markdown content of the primary service pages on madebytribe.com, intended for LLM ingestion. --- ## WooCommerce Development Service URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/ Trusted by 4000+ WooCommerce-powered brands We Make WooCommerce Sites Run Faster, Work Smoother, and Sell More Products Get reliable custom WooCommerce development and maintenance services from a senior-level dev team. Pay as you go, pause or cancel anytime. Browse Our Services View Our Plugins Get senior, high-quality Woo dev partners you can depend on Unlock the full potential of your store with our team of seasoned WordPress & WooCommerce developers. We prioritize clear communication, timely delivery, and stringent quality checks to ensure your store is built and running to the highest standards. Get peace of mind, knowing that your store is in safe, capable hands. Certified Woo + Klaviyo experts seasoned 10+ years building with Woo Trusted By over 4000 Woo stores Our expertise We focus on the key services needed to build, optimize and scale your store. Precision-engineered Version controlled QA tested Full-stack WordPress & WooCommerce development If you can imagine it, we can probably build it. Get full-stack WordPress + WooCommerce expertise whenever you need. WooCommerce Subscriptions Development Years of expertise working with WooCommerce Subscriptions and building custom subscription integrations. Klaviyo Development & optimization Custom Klaviyo integrations, full Klaviyo account setup, audits and optimization. Analytics & pixel setups Full setup and optimization of your analytics and pixels across Meta (Facebook) ads, Google ads, TikTok ads, Pinterest ads and more. Blazing fast site speed optimization Deep performance optimization across your theme, plugins, server and database plus. Deep site technical, UX & conversion audits Thorough site reviews analyzing usability, technical setup, performance, security & best practices. Debugging & bug fixing Deep expertise and experience in identifying those pesky bugs and quickly fixing them. Plugin setups, API integrations & migrations We can help you build any custom integration, integrate with any api or migrate content between sites. Technical & growth consulting, strategy & more All your technical questions answered, new features spec’d out, plus working with 3rd-party vendors and ensure you’re making the best technical decisions for your site. Klaviyo WooCommerce Subscriptions WooCommerce Memberships Learndash Yotpo Gravity Forms Yoast WooFunnels Elementor Gutenberg WP Engine Kinsta Flywheel CloudWays Stripe PayPal ACF Divi Beaver Builder GeneratePress From simple page tweaks to complex custom WooCommerce plugins ─ We can build it all Full-stack WordPress & WooCommerce development expertise. From custom landing pages to optimized Klaviyo flows, we can handle all technical & growth aspects of your store. The Tribe difference Working with us has it’s perks… Certified expertise Official experts in WooCommerce, Klaviyo, Google Ads, Meta Ads and more. Quality code standards We follow the strictest code standards keeping everything properly formatted, documented and version controlled. Personalized slack support We make communication easy through direct Slack chat access, email requests and frequent updates. Laser focused on YOUR ROI In everything we do, from development to marketing, our primary goal is to help you generate revenue and grow your store. Flexible and scalable Add time, scale up or down as needed, pause or cancel at anytime. Premium plugin access Every monthly subscriber gets access to our premium plugin license to use at no extra cost. “Tribe knows WordPress and WooCommerce. I hand them projects with confidence that they will complete them quickly, efficiently, and well.”​ Melissa Moore, Well Trained Mind Press “Mike Valera and his team took a proactive lead after analyzing our situation and suggested immediate courses of action that took us back into the rarefied atmosphere of positive net margins in our industry in less than 30 days.”​ Jan Wellmann, Honey Colony How we’ll work together Subscribe and start getting requests done in just a few days. 1 Submit Your Request Fill out our short quote request form and give us a few details about your project. We’ll send you a quote within 24 hours. 2 We Build & Test After accepting the quote and paying your invoice we start working and complete your project within a few business days on average. 3 Review & Launch Once our work is approved, we launch it live and give a 30-day window to fix any bugs. Hi! 👋 We’re Tribe, your new WooCommerce technical partner Tribe Interactive, is a premier WooCommerce site development and optimization micro-agency headquartered in San Diego, CA.  Established in 2014, we’ve spent a decade working solely to build, grow and optimize WooCommerce-powered brands around the world. From bootstrapped solopreneurs to multi-national luxury brands, we’ve seen and done it all. Over the years we’ve polished our processes and perfected the methods to grow 8+ figure stores. When you work with us, we treat you as our partner and treat your business as our business, your customers as our customers. So if you win, we win. As such, our aim is to create the best possible experience for your customers and slingshot your revenue to new heights. Let’s take your store to the next level Get a quote for a single fixed development, optimization, bug fix or setup project. Receive a quote within 24 hours. Get a Free Quote Or Book a call 1000s of Successful Projects Certified Expertise No long term contracts 30-day code quality guarantee We take pride in our work strive to make every piece of code we write bug free and working as designed. But, if for some strange reason you run into issues with something we’ve built, we’ll fix within 30 days for free. Frequently Asked Questions Your commonly asked questions answered below. Have a question not on this list? Contact Us. Is there a contract I need to sign?No long term contracts needed. Simple agree to our Terms & Conditions and privacy policy when you signup and we’re good to go. How soon can you start working on my project?We can begin working on your projects within 48 hours of signup and onboarding. Do you know how to work with my plugins and setup?While it would be impossible to be an expert on the 50,000+ WordPress plugins available across the web. However, over the last 10 years we have worked with thousands of different plugins, all major Woo extensions and a multitude of different setups. It’s rare we come across a site setup we haven’t seen before. Chances are we’ve already worked with all the plugins you’re already using. If you’d like to ask about your specific setup, please contact us. Do you offer bulk pricing for multiple sites or multiple projects?Yes we do. Please contact us for more info. Do you offer agency white-label services?We love working with other agencies and consultants. While we don’t offer white-labeling in the traditional sense, we can set up an arrangement where you manage all client communication and we do the work. Discounts are also available. Please contact us for more information. Do you offer a money-back guarantees?For our services, due to the nature of our work and the commitment involved in getting your project up and running, we do not offer money-back guarantees. If you should become dissatisfied with our work you are free to cancel at any time. However if any of our code produces bugs, we will fix it at no additional charge for up to 30 days. For plugins purchased on this site, we do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. Do you work with Shopify?Our core focus and expertise is WooCommerce but we are also heavily versed in Shopify. We can work with you on your Shopify project. Please contact us for more information. Where are you located?We are headquartered in sunny Carlsbad, California (San Diego) and also have team members world wide. What development tools do you use?We use Local by Flywheel for local development, GIT for version control, Bitbucket for code repository, Bitbucket Pipelines for CI/CD and we host on Digital Ocean/Google Cloud droplets. For more specific questions feel free to contact us. Get actionable WooCommerce growth tips delivered weekly Get a weekly delivery of practical and strategic tips that can help you increase site conversions, improve your emails, grow your revenue and expand your empire. Your First Name(Required) First Your Email(Required) Consent(Required) I agree to Tribe’s policy policy & I wish to join the Tribe newsletter.(Required)NameThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. --- ## WooCommerce Audit Service URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/woocommerce-audit-service/ strategic growth blueprint Uncover your store’s hidden sale blockers & get a tailored growth Blueprint to help scale your Ecommerce revenue We perform a comprehensive analysis of your store’s conversion funnel and utilize sophisticated machine learning models to create a strategic optimization action plan to scale your revenue. Order Your Blueprint woo Certified Woo Expertise 4X average ROI Delivered in 14 days There’s a pretty good chance your store is leaking revenue right now… In fact, an estimated 68% of people who make it to checkout will abandon their purchases, and only 2.5-3% of all your site visitors will convert into a sale. Potential sales will slip through the cracks when the customer’s purchase journey has bugs, lack of information, or inconsistencies—be it in ad experience, untrustworthiness, irrelevant emails, or a clunky checkout process. Resulting in… Decreasing sales Higher acquisition costs Increasing churn Increasing Ad Saturation Ignoring these issues are burning your profit and limiting your customer LTV To get the most impact for your store, you must fully understand how visitors interact with your site, what issues prevent them from purchasing, and how you can maximize every step of their journey. To take your store to the next level, you need to find & demolish the blockers that are limiting your revenue. We help you pinpoint what’s stunting your store’s growth & Build a masterplan to 2x your revenue within the next 90 days Uncover funnel conversion blockers Find out where users drop off at each stage of your customer journey and why. Identify reasons for churn Understand why people aren’t returning for repeat purchases & canceling subscriptions. Find technical & performance bottlenecks Find your speed bottlenecks and hidden errors that are blocking purchases. Discover site usability issues Find out which areas are confusing, frustrating or distracting shoppers. Find new growth opportunities Identify new ways to maximize revenue from shoppers through smarter upselling, cross-selling & more. Get a strategic plan to optimize your store We build you a strategic roadmap to scale your sales and retention efforts. The result massive savings & gains across your funnel On average, every client receives a lift in multiple business areas. 78% Email Revenue CBD Brand 192K Revenue Pet Accessory Brand 21X ROAS Health & Wellness Brand Our Process 1 Setup & Collection First, we collect hundreds of data points on purchase and customer shopping behavioral analytics using Google Analytics, WooCommerce, Metorik, and Hotjar. Your data is handled with utmost confidentiality and is only used for the purpose of improving your store’s performance. Conversion Rate Average Order Value Email Open Rate ROAS Click-through Rate Purchase Frequency Bounce Rate Time to Purchase TTFB Opt-in Rate Unsubscribe Rate Customer Acquisition Cost Customer Lifetime Value Repeat Customer Rate Net Promoter Score Churn Rate New User Purchases Recurring Revenue Cart Abandonment Rate Average Items Per Order 2 Data Analysis & Testing We run several in-depth tests across multiple areas of your store and poll customers to get feedback. We then manually analyze your data and customer shopping activity to identify key problem areas. We run the data through our proprietary software utilizing cutting-edge machine learning models to identify trends and opportunities. 3 Report & Strategic Action Blueprint We’ll build you a detailed strategic blueprint outlining our findings and a custom growth workbook with a list of optimization tasks prioritized by what’s most impactful for your store. You’ll get access to all the data we’ve captured, including poll results, heat maps, click maps, recordings, and more. We then jump on a call where we’ll break everything down to discuss our findings, answer any questions, and walk you through the next steps. Data & analysis breakdown Recommended solutions Problems identified & graded Upsell & cross-sell opportunities Growth opportunities Task workbook Funnel map Click maps & heatmaps 4 Optional: Implementation & Testing As an optional service, we can advise you on implementing solutions or bring our team on to optimize everything for you. We’d work closely over the next 90 days to track, implement, A/B test, and optimize your store. Or, you can take your report and hand it off to your existing dev & growth team. Who we are Hi, we’re Tribe Interactive 👋, a seasoned growth and optimization agency specializing in helping build, grow, and scale WooCommerce-powered brands. We’ve spent the last 10 years dissecting thousands of ecom stores, analyzing what makes shoppers tick and their buying habits, digging through mountains of data to uncover nuggets of conversion gold, and managing millions in ad spend. When you work with us, we treat you as our partner and treat your business as our business, your customers as our customers. So if you win, we win. As such, our aim is to create the best possible experience for your customers and slingshot your revenue to new heights. Unlock your store’s growth potential today Our clients typically see a 4X ROI on average after working with us. Ready to take your store’s revenue to the next level? Let’s work. Alarm Clock Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comLimited Availability We only work with 3-5 brands per month. Order now to get on the list. Starter Deep data audit of your site’s technical stack & issues. $1,995 $1,995 Sale – Save 20% Order Starter or – Book a call Includes: Code analysis Performance analysis Security analysis Technical SEO analysis Audit report Optimization workbook 1-hour walkthrough call Delivered in 7 business days Fire Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com MOST POPULAR Standard Full site analysis to identify revenue blockers. $4,995 $4,995 Sale – Save 20% Order Standard or – Book a call Includes: Everything in Starter Analytics research User experience analysis Conversion funnel analysis Order analysis Retention analysis Click maps & heat maps Funnel map 2-hour walkthrough call Delivered in 14 business days Advanced Full site analysis, plus ads and email analysis (Full Funnel). $7,995 $7,995 Sale – Save 20% Order Advanced or – Book a call Includes: Everything in Starter + Standard Meta ads analysis Google ads analysis Email / Klaviyo analysis Funnel map Free licenses to Tribe’s premium plugins Direct Slack communication 2-hour walkthrough call Delivered in 30 business days 30-day money-back guarantee If we don’t uncover any insights during out analysis that can help improve your store, we’ll refund your money back—no questions asked. Questions? How soon can you start working on my site?We can begin working on your project within 1-3 business days of signup and onboarding. Is there a contract I need to sign?We provide a simple contracting agreement when we start. How many sites can you work with on a single plan?Each plan applies to only one site. If you want to cover multiple sites you’ll need to purchase multiple plans. We do offer bulk pricing. Please contact us for more info. Do you offer bulk pricing for multiple sites?Yes we do. Please contact us for more info. Do you offer agency white-label services?You are free to purchase one of our plans and resell it to your clients. For agencies and resellers, we do offer a discount for multiple sites. Please contact us for more information. Do you work with Shopify?Our core focus and expertise is in WooCommerce, however we do work occasionally with Shopify projects. Please contact us for more info. Where are you located?We are headquartered in sunny San Diego, California. --- ## WooCommerce Site Optimization Service URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/woocommerce-site-optimization-service/ Trusted by 4000+ WooCommerce-powered brands We optimize & fine-tune WooCommerce Sites for Peak sales Performance Transforming WooCommerce stores into profit machines by eliminating bugs, boosting site speed, and refactoring code for maximum efficiency in 30 days, or your money back. Get your store optimized Browse our plugins site bugs & slow load times are crushing your Revenue Bugs and slow load times on your WooCommerce site can drastically reduce your conversion rates, leading to significant revenue loss. Studies show that a one-second delay in page load time can decrease conversions by 7%, and unresolved bugs can drive frustrated customers away, costing you thousands each month. We transform slow, buggy Woo sites into high-Performing sales engines With our expert optimization, we take your WooCommerce site from slow and buggy to fast and efficient. By streamlining performance and resolving issues, we ensure your site operates at peak efficiency, driving higher conversions and increased sales. supersonic load times Get your store loading at < 1.2 seconds. Improved UX Optimize your customer’s shopping experience. Increased conversions Amplify your conversions and increase revenue. “Tribe knows WordPress and WooCommerce. I hand them projects with confidence that they will complete them quickly, efficiently, and well.”​ Melissa Moore, Well Trained Mind Press “Mike Valera and his team took a proactive lead after analyzing our situation and suggested immediate courses of action that took us back into the rarefied atmosphere of positive net margins in our industry in less than 30 days.”​ Jan Wellmann, Honey Colony Resulting in massive gains for our clients Our work has lead to significant improvements in site performance, conversions, revenue, and overall success for our clients. <1.2s AVG. load time On average our partner’s sites load at or faster than 1.2 seconds. $100M+ Increased Revenue Our work has attributed to over $100 million dollars in additional revenue for our partners. 4X Avg. return on investment Our work has created an average 4X ROI for our partners. how we’ll help you win Focusing on the key services needed to optimize and scale your store. Precision-engineered Version controlled Everything QA tested turbocharge your site speed Supercharge your site speed to deliver a lightning-fast experience that keeps visitors engaged and boosts conversions. beef up your site security Strengthen your WooCommerce site’s defenses to protect against cyber threats and secure your customer data. fix pesky, hard-to-find bugs Eliminate those elusive, hard-to-detect bugs that disrupt user experience and cost you sales. fix your analytics & tracking Ensure your analytics and tracking are accurate and reliable, providing you with clear insights to drive informed decisions. Optimize your Klaviyo setup Enhance your Klaviyo setup for maximum deliverability, engagement, and revenue growth through targeted email campaigns. Clean up spaghetti theme code Streamline and clean up tangled theme code to improve site performance, maintainability, and speed. uncover hidden technical site issues Identify and resolve hidden technical issues that are silently undermining your site’s performance and user experience. Full-stack WooCommerce development If you can imagine it, we can probably build it. Get full-stack WordPress + WooCommerce expertise whenever you need. Technical consulting, strategy & more All your technical questions answered, new features spec’d out, plus working with 3rd-party vendors and ensure you’re making the best technical decisions for your site. Our Process We follow a proven, step-by-step approach to transform your WooCommerce site, ensuring it runs at optimal performance for maximum impact. Qa Engineer Streamline Illustration: https://streamlinehq.com 1 We audit your site We thoroughly examine your WooCommerce site, analyzing over 200 data points to identify performance bottlenecks and issues. Modular Coding Of Application Streamline Illustration: https://streamlinehq.com 2 We optimize your site We then implement targeted improvements to enhance speed, security, usability, conversions and overall functionality. High Five Streamline Illustration: https://streamlinehq.com 3 you win, we win Your optimized site drives higher conversions and revenue, creating a win for you and long-term relationship for us. Let’s Get Started Why we’re different Here’s why we’re different than your average dev agency. Seasoned expertise We’ve been working with and optimizing WooCommerce stores for 10+ years. Certified + verified Certified experts in and official partners with WooCommerce, Klaviyo, Google Ads, Meta Ads and more. Quality code standards We follow the strictest code standards keeping everything properly formatted, documented and version controlled. Async communication We make communication easy through direct Slack chat access, email requests and frequent updates. Laser focused on YOUR ROI In everything we do, our primary goal is to help you generate more revenue and grow your store. Flexible and scalable Work with us on a per project basis or keep us on every month to keep your site is safe, capable hands. Pause or cancel at anytime. Hi! 👋 We’re Tribe, your new WooCommerce optimization partner Tribe Interactive, is a premier WooCommerce site development and optimization micro-agency headquartered in San Diego, CA.  Established in 2014, we’ve spent a decade working solely to build, grow and optimize WooCommerce-powered brands around the world. From bootstrapped solopreneurs to multi-national luxury brands, we’ve seen and done it all. Over the years we’ve polished our processes and perfected the methods to grow 8+ figure stores. When you work with us, we treat you as our partner and treat your business as our business, your customers as our customers. So if you win, we win. As such, our aim is to create the best possible experience for your customers and slingshot your revenue to new heights. Let’s take your store to the moon Together, we’ll elevate your WooCommerce store to new heights, maximizing performance, driving sales, and setting you apart from the competition. 1000s of Successful Projects Certified Expertise No long term contracts Chat Bubble Video Call Oval Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.comSchedule a free Optimization call A quick call to meet, discuss optimization tips for your store and answer any questions you may have. Schedule Free Call no pressure, no obligations 30-day Optimization guarantee We guarantee to fully optimize your site’s tech, code, and performance within 30 days, or you’ll get your money back—no questions asked. Frequently Asked Questions Your commonly asked questions answered below. Have a question not on this list? Contact Us. Is there a contract I need to sign?No long term contracts needed. Simply agree to our Terms & Conditions and privacy policy when you signup and we’re good to go. How soon can you start working on my project?We can begin working on your projects within 48 hours of signup and onboarding. Do you know how to work with my plugins and setup?While it would be impossible to be an expert on the 50,000+ WordPress plugins available across the web. However, over the last 10 years we have worked with thousands of different plugins, all major Woo extensions and a multitude of different setups. It’s rare we come across a site setup we haven’t seen before. Chances are we’ve already worked with all the plugins you’re already using. If you’d like to ask about your specific setup, please contact us. Do you offer bulk pricing for multiple sites or multiple projects?Yes we do. Please contact us for more info. Do you offer agency white-label services?We love working with other agencies and consultants. While we don’t offer white-labeling in the traditional sense, we can set up an arrangement where you manage all client communication and we do the work. Discounts are also available. Please contact us for more information. Do you work with Shopify?Our core focus and expertise is WooCommerce but we are also heavily versed in Shopify. We can work with you on your Shopify project. Please contact us for more information. Where are you located?We are headquartered in sunny Carlsbad, California (San Diego) and also have team members world wide. What development tools do you use?We use Local by Flywheel for local development, GIT for version control, Bitbucket for code repository, Bitbucket Pipelines for CI/CD and we host on Digital Ocean/Google Cloud droplets. For more specific questions feel free to contact us. Get actionable WooCommerce growth tips delivered weekly Get a weekly delivery of practical and strategic tips that can help you increase site conversions, improve your emails, grow your revenue and expand your empire. Your First Name(Required) First Your Email(Required) Consent(Required) I agree to Tribe’s policy policy & I wish to join the Tribe newsletter.(Required)EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. --- ## Free Technical Site Audit URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/free-technical-site-audit/ Get your free technical site audit & report Discover critical issues and opportunities for improvement with a comprehensive, no-cost audit of your WooCommerce site. 1234 What issues are you currently experiencing with your site?Select all that apply(Required) Site Bugs or Technical Issues Slow Admin Performance Slow Front-End Performance Security Issues Poor User Experience Low Conversions Tell us about your store.What's your website URL?(Required) What's your company name?(Required) How much revenue is your store making per month on average?(Required) Under $50,000 $50,000 – $100,000 $100,000 – $150,000 $200,000+ Tell us about your team.Who currently maintains your site?(Required) I maintain my site I have a single developer I work with an agency How happy are you with your current developer/agency?UnhappyFrustratedNeutralSatisfiedHappy Lastly, tell us about you.Your Name(Required) First Last Your Email Address(Required) CommentsThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. --- ## Services URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/services/ woocommerce growth as a service Seasoned WooCommerce Engineering Services to optimize Your Store Get senior-level development, performance tuning, plugin support, and maintenance without the agency bloat or freelancer risk. Request a Free quote We code, polish and fine-tune WooCommerce sites into conversion engines WooExpert Certified Premium Code Quality 10+ Years Experience Premium Support WooCommerce VIP Care Plan Top-tier support and maintenance for your WooCommerce store from our elite team of WooCommerce-specialized engineers. Starting at $ 299.00 Get it free View Details Custom WooCommerce Development Service Our hand picked team of WooCommerce expert developers are highly seasoned in building and customizing WooCommerce sites. Starting at $ 800.00 Order Now View Details Klaviyo Audit Service Get a detailed audit of your Klaviyo account from content and design to deliverability and conversion rates. We’ll identify areas for improvement and put together a comprehensive report that outlines our findings. Starting at $ 1200.00 Get it free View Details Klaviyo Toolkit Pro Setup Service Get professional help getting your Klaviyo Toolkit plugin correctly integrated and configured. We work with you and your team to create an integration strategy then get to work implementing your new Klaviyo Toolkit plugin. Starting at $ 500.00 Get it free View Details --- ## How to Optimize WooCommerce Product Images for Site Speed URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/how-to-optimize-woocommerce-product-images-for-site-speed/ Your product images are an integral part of your WooCommerce website. They serve as visual aids to showcase your products, draw attention, and entice potential customers. But if your images aren’t optimized, they can slow down your website’s loading speed, causing user frustration and potentially losing sales. A study by Portent found that the highest e-commerce conversion rates occur between 1 and 2 seconds, with an average of 3.05% e-commerce conversion rate at 1 second, while the conversion rate declines as the load time increases. Another study by Google shows the probability of a customer bouncing from your site increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. These statistics highlight how important it is to keep your images optimized for speed. So today, we’ll walk through our tips for optimizing your WooCommerce images for maximum performance. 1. Choose the proper image format: JPEGs are commonly used to balance file size and image quality for product images. Your product and most site images should be primarily in JPG format. PNGs are best for transparent images but are more significant in file size, so you should avoid them when possible. SVG images are perfect for vector content and offer smaller file sizes than JPEGs and PNGs. Your logos, icons, and illustrator content should be in SVG format. Consider using modern image formats like AVIF and WebP, which provide superior image quality with smaller file sizes to take it up a notch. 2. Set image dimensions restrictions: Large images take longer to load, so limiting the image dimensions to the space they will occupy is crucial. For example, using a 1000×1000 pixel image in a 100×100 pixel space is unnecessary and will slow down your website. You can check or set your theme’s set product dimensions by visiting Appearance > Customize > WooCommerce > Product Images. You’ll see the following options: Main image width – Image size used for the main image on single product pages. These images will remain uncropped. Thumbnail width – Image size used for products in the catalog. Thumbnail cropping 1:1 – Images will be cropped into a square Custom – Images will be cropped to a custom aspect ratio Uncropped – Images will display using the aspect ratio in which they were uploaded We recommend using a maximum image dimension of 1800×1800 pixels for all other site images. 3. File size matters: Images with large file sizes take longer to load, affecting your website’s loading speed. You can mitigate this by compressing your images before uploading them. Tools like TinyPNG compress images without compromising quality, speeding up the load times. Aim to keep your product images to around 70 KB – 140 KB. 4. Use an image optimization plugin: To optimize your images further, we recommend using an automated image optimization service & plugin like Imagify. This plugin has features like bulk optimization, automatic resizing, and optimization on upload. By automating the optimization process, you can save time and ensure that all your images are optimized for performance. Additional image tips & best practices In addition to these best practices, there are a few other things to keep in mind when optimizing your images: 1. Maintain consistency: Ensure that product image dimensions are consistent in shape to look uniform in your shop catalog. This consistency helps create a professional and polished appearance that helps build trust with potential customers. 2. Use alt text: WordPress allows you to add alt text after uploading images. Alt text is a description of an image that is displayed if the image cannot be loaded for any reason. Alt text helps visually impaired users understand the content of the image, and it also helps search engines understand the image’s content. Ensure that you include descriptive and relevant alt text for all your images. 3. Keep image file names descriptive: Use descriptive file names for your images instead of generic ones like “image1.jpg” or “photo.jpg.” A descriptive file name helps search engines understand the image’s content and can improve your website’s search engine visibility. 4. Use image sitemaps: An image sitemap is a file that lists all the images on your website. Submitting an image sitemap to search engines like Google can help them understand the content of your images and improve your website’s search engine visibility. Yoast and Rankmath are two popular SEO plugins that automatically generate an image sitemap for you. 5. Implement Lazy Loading: Delay the loading of images until needed using a lazy loading technique. This technique helps reduce the initial page load time, improving website performance. Use a plugin like WP Rocket to implement lazy loading on your website. In conclusion, optimizing your images for your WooCommerce site is essential for improving its performance, user experience, and search engine visibility. Remember to monitor your website’s loading speed regularly and take steps to improve it as needed. By implementing these best practices and paying attention to the additional details, you can significantly improve your website’s speed, user experience, and search engine visibility. In addition, a fast and user-friendly WooCommerce site will attract and retain more customers, helping you grow your business in the long run. --- ## How to dynamically generate single-use coupon codes for Klaviyo with WooCommerce URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/how-to-dynamically-generate-single-use-coupon-codes-for-klaviyo-with-woocommerce/ Frustrated by not being able to offer dynamic coupons in your Klaviyo abandoned cart or welcome flow emails? After working with many ecommerce Klaviyo setups and optimization projects as a Klaviyo expert partner, we were too. Klaviyo, by far, is the best email marketing platform for WooCommerce. But the biggest drawback of Klaviyo’s WooCommerce integration is that it does not natively support dynamic WooCommerce coupon generation (like it does for Shopify).  As a workaround, the best you can do now is import coupons in bulk or use a fixed coupon that can be shared by everyone.  This means your coupons can (potentially) get plastered all over coupon sites and get repeatedly used, or you spend time generating, importing, and deleting bulk coupons every few months. Who’s got time for that? Yes, these methods can get the job done, but they aren’t ideal.  The most significant loss with these methods is you miss out on the ability to set expiration dates, spark a sense of urgency around your coupon offers, and, in turn, possibly lower your email conversion rates.  But that all ends today. Today we’ve released a new feature for our Klaviyo Toolkit plugin that solves the dynamic coupon issue between WooCommerce and Klaviyo – once and for all. How it works We’ve worked to make the process as simple and painless for you as possible. It goes a little something like this… 1. A shopper initiates the checkout process & we generate a coupon First, when an existing customer starts checkout, the Klaviyo Toolkit plugin will automatically create a coupon code and limit the use of that code only to this person’s email address. If they aren’t logged in or are a new shopper, we’ll generate a coupon when they enter their email address in the email field on checkout.  2. We pass the coupon details to Klaviyo. The plugin then connects to Klaviyo’s API and adds this coupon info to your shopper’s profile as custom profile properties.  3. The coupon is shown in flow emails. In your flow’s emails, you can then populate this info directly into the email with template tags.  How to set it up Before we begin, you’ll need the Klaviyo Toolkit plugin installed and activated on your site. If you don’t have it yet, you can purchase it here.  1. First, you’ll want to set the coupon generation settings. These pretty much mirror the default WooCommerce coupon settings. Enable Abandoned Cart Coupons – This turns the option on/off. Coupon amount – We support only fixed or percentage cart discounts now but will add support for others in future versions. (required)Coupon expiration – How many days from coupon generation do you want this coupon to expire? (optional)Custom coupon prefix – Add a prefix text to your coupon code (optional)Can it be used with other coupons? – Yes = people can stack coupons. No = Can’t use with other coupons.Allow free shipping – Sets the “allow free shipping” option in the generated coupon. 2. Next, you’ll want to add the appropriate Klaviyo template tags in your flow emails to pull the codes in: Coupon code – This tag looks up the coupon code in the customer’s Klaviyo profile. Replace the “ac” portion with the prefix you set in step 1. {{ person|lookup:'ac-coupon'|default:'' }} Coupon expiration date – This tag looks up the coupon expiration date in the customer’s Klaviyo profile and formats it to something human readable. Again, replace the “ac” portion with the prefix you set in step 1. {{ person|lookup:'ac-coupon-expiration'|default:''|format_date_string|date }} Coupon amount – This tag looks up the coupon amount in the customer’s Klaviyo profile. Again, replace the “ac” portion with the prefix you set in step 1. {{ person|lookup:'ac-coupon-amount'|default:'' }} When your customers receive their email, assuming they’ve already gone through checkout and generated a coupon code, they’ll see something like: Final thoughts Congrats, you’ve now set up automatic dynamic email addresses with Klaviyo and WooCommerce. 🎉 We’ve built this functionality primarily for abandoned checkout email flows but there’s no stopping you from using these codes in your welcome / onboarding flows. We’ve already begun setting this up for our clients, and it’s been working wonderfully.  Have questions? Feel free to reach out to us. Get your Klaviyo Toolkit plugin here. Need help getting flows set up or optimizing your Klaviyo account for WooCommerce?  As a Klaviyo Expert Partner and WooCommerce verified expert, we’d be happy to help. You’d have a hard time finding another company that knows WooCommerce and Klaviyo as well as we do, and we do these projects daily. Reach out to us for a free strategy call to see how we can help. --- ## 4 Strategies to Reduce Your Cart Abandonment Rate This Holiday Season URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/4-strategies-to-reduce-your-cart-abandonment-rate-in-the-holiday-season/ With the holiday season quickly approaching, online retailers are gearing up for massive online traffic to their sites. However, while this may sound pleasing to the ears, it isn’t something you should celebrate just yet. Here’s why. Cart abandonment bottlenecks are common during the holiday season. Shoppers fill up their carts with different items and then disappear without buying anything. Though it’s a year-round problem for online retailers, it’s remarkably high during the holiday season. According to Barilliance, the cart abandonment rates for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2020 were 77.79% and 80.69%, respectively. Furthermore, Barclaycard has identified December as the month with the highest online cart abandonment rate, followed by November and January. That’s because customers spend a significant amount of time looking for Christmas gift ideas, as well as Black Friday and January sales. In addition, people do a lot of window shopping during holiday seasons without the intention to buy. The ones who want to buy usually hop from store to store, searching for the best available deals and seamless shopping experiences. As an e-commerce store owner, you’d agree that there’s nothing as disappointing as losing hundreds or perhaps thousands of potential sales to aborted transactions. Also, knowing that over 70% of your visitors abandon their carts and never return is a bit scary. However, even though it’s something you really can’t control, you can still make the most of the traffic surge with the right strategies in place. How to Reduce Cart Abandonment This Holiday Season To help online retailers generate the most purchases this holiday season, we’ve made a list of our top four techniques for lowering their cart abandonment rates. Although these can be applied to many email marketing platforms, Klaviyo is our preferred one for any ecommerce out there that’s looking to grow its revenue in a short period of time. It offers deep integrations with ecommerce platforms, rich data and analytics, and next level personalization. Ready? Let’s get started. 1. Use an Exit-intent Popup An exit-intent popup, also known as ‘on-exit overlay,’ is a type of website overlay that allows you to maximize your conversions. According to OptinMonster, exit-intent technology is a behavioural technology that tracks and monitors website visitors’ activities and detects when they’re about to leave your site without making a purchase or leaving their information. It’s intended to reduce cart abandonment and increase lead generation. Exit-intent popups are customizable, allowing you to leave tailor-made messages for users based on the page they’re viewing. Sometimes, all you need to get your shoppers to complete a purchase is a special offer, discount code, coupon, or a simple reminder to complete their purchase. Exit-intent popups with well-crafted messages can save up to 15% of lost visitors. That’s because they’re customer-friendly and less intrusive. They do not interrupt your visitors while browsing or scanning your site; instead, they appear when those visitors begin to leave your site or navigate to another window. Additionally, you should consider adding these popups to your cart and checkout pages to make the process more effective. Image Credit: Omniconvert The above image is an example of a rich media popup. It’s the kind of image that appears on the product page the moment a prospective buyer makes a move to leave. It improves user experience and produces a higher interaction rate. Image Credit: OptinMonster A simple reminder to have customers complete their order, coupled with a personalized deal for shoppers, can help secure the sale. Also, findings show that rich media popups have about 90% exit-intent accuracy. So it’s pretty essential to use eye-catching images and clear call-to-actions on your popups to increase your chances of more conversion. 2. Set-Up Cart Abandonment Flow A cart abandonment flow is a series of follow-up email messages automatically sent to potential customers who have abandoned their carts. They help you re-engage your warm leads who are just a few clicks from completing their orders. Many experts agree that sending a personalized abandoned cart email is a great way to grab some low-hanging fruits since you can get upwards of 10% of them back through abandoned cart emails. Therefore, you’d be leaving money on the table by not using a checkout flow in your overall sales conversion strategy. To conceptualize this idea, here are a few relevant stats from Zembula. Approximately half of all abandoned cart emails get opened. An estimated 20% of opened emails receive click-throughs. Just over half of those who respond to the abandoned cart email go on to complete their purchase. These are excellent proof of the effectiveness of using a cart abandonment flow. There’s no gainsaying that every eCommerce retailer has experienced financial loss from cart abandonment, thus improving your e-commerce checkout flow is essential. For a cart abandonment flow to be effective, it should address all questions and concerns a buyer might have. Here are some of the elements your cart flow should have if you want to drive more revenue this holiday season. 1. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) The lack of clarity regarding elements of the purchase process like shipping costs and return policies is why some customers fail to complete their checkouts. Such customers would prefer to abandon their carts if something is unclear to them than contact customer support. Therefore, your cart abandonment flow presents an excellent opportunity to address common questions your customers might have, thus helping you win more buyers. Having an existing FAQ page makes it easy to incorporate the common questions in your email follow-ups. If you don’t have one, you can start by compiling a list of the most common complaints you’ve received from existing clients. Additionally, you could also ask your customers to state their biggest challenges shopping on your website. 2. Add social proof Social proof, according to Buffer, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situation. Thus, it makes sense to leverage the power of positive influence that social proof adds to your brand as you grow your customer base. In other words, a customer is more likely to buy from you if they believe that others are buying from you. Including social proof in abandoned cart messages will help you build trust and influence. It also reminds your customers that your products are popular.  There are various ways to build social proof, including testimonials, reviews, and ratings. Video testimonials and social media clips are also powerful ways to strengthen your social proof. To make this a walk in the park, you should form the habit of collecting reviews and testimonials from your customers. Also, placing reviews and testimonials throughout your site increases your chances of getting more sales conversion. 3. Add recommended product alternatives As a retailer, there are times you would run out of stock for specific items. Unfortunately, it happens pretty often, and even the most proactive sellers experience it. However, instead of leaving your buyers to shop with your competitors and lose revenue as a result or abandon the purchase altogether, recommending product alternatives would be the intelligent thing to do. Suggesting product alternatives eases the stress of searching through multiple pages for products that don’t exist. Aside from helping your customers save time, reaching out to them via email (cart abandonment flow) creates the impression that you have their best interest at heart. For example, if you’re using Klaviyo’s email builder you can simply drag a product block to the template and choose the products you’d like to show. These will be directly fetched from your catalog feed so you’ll be saving time instead of building and linking each product individually. Product alternatives don’t have to be about similar products or close substitutes alone. It could also be supplementary products that serve an entirely different purpose but make the desired product complete. To get this right, make sure the products you’re suggesting are available. If not, clients might get upset and walk away. What’s the Perfect Timing for Abandoned Cart Emails? There are no hard and fast rules regarding the timing of abandoned cart emails. Choosing the right time to activate your cart flow will depend on the nature of your product and your target market. Also, running an A/B split test to determine what works best for you and then tweaking your campaigns based on available analytics will help you get the perfect timing. However, sending the first email within the first three hours of an open cart is generally recommended. Also, you can set a 24 to 48 hours interval between the first and second email. The third email can come after a week, and it’s usually the last one in the sequence. However, if you find that increasing the email follow-up count works for you, it makes sense to add a few more. But the rule of thumb is not to overdo it. 3. Run Retargeting Ads to Bring Abandoned Shoppers Back We’ve all seen them before – ads that follow you everywhere, including your smartphone apps, web pages, and social media pages. That’s the power of retargeting. Ad retargeting is another effective cart recovery strategy as it allows you to show up on your prospects’ timelines subtly.  Retargeting works by utilizing cookies, a small piece of data stored by the web browser that remembers users who clicked your ads or visited your webpage. You can then use this cookie data to serve ads to the users again.  Retargeting allows you to keep your brand in front of your potential customers after they have left your website. Showing relevant, targeted ads to users interested in your brand increases brand awareness and often total conversions. Retargeting allows you to stay on top of your customer’s minds while they’re browsing the web. And they don’t even need to enter their details. Statistics show that using retargeted ads can send 26 percent of shoppers back to your site. Also, personalizing retargeted ads can lead to ROIs of over 1,300 percent. Retargeting is also a lot less expensive than other forms of advertising, and it still produces impressive results. Retargeting Best Practices It’s crucial to understand what makes retargeting campaigns successful before you start creating your own. Regardless of your audience or the retargeting channel you choose, it’s always good to stick to the best practices for optimum results. Here are two incredible ways to build a successful retargeting campaign: 1. Segment your audience Segmentation helps marketers to be more prudent with time, money, and other resources. In addition, it allows e-commerce retailers to gain a better understanding of customers’ wants and needs, allowing them to tailor campaigns to the customer segments most likely to buy products. You can create segments based on purchase behaviour, how long a user has been away from your site, and the types of pages a customer visits. These factors would help you create personalized retargeted ads. 2. Use cross-selling and upselling Cross-selling and upselling are two powerful e-commerce strategies that allow you to improve your average order value per customer. Cross-selling allows retailers to offer additional products that complement those the user has already purchased or is about to purchase. On the other hand, upselling lets you suggest more expensive or upgraded products to a user. According to McKinsey, cross-selling can boost sales by 20% and profits by 30%. Also, upselling increases sales revenue by 10-30% on average, and they’re 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer. That’s why including them in your retargeting strategy would be a game-changer. You can serve retargeted upselling and cross-selling ads by installing a burn code on your checkout pages, product pages, and carts. This notifies your visitors about additional products or more expensive/upgraded products, thus increasing your earning potential. 4. Improve the Cart Experience Poor shopping experience is one of the top reasons people abandon their carts. It manifests in many different ways, including complicated checkout processes, lack of customer support, slow website, and unclear communication. Therefore, a simple way to turn this situation around is by improving your customers’ cart experience. Not only will this enhance cart recovery, but it will also create a better brand perception and increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. We all know that cart abandonment is inevitable. However, as a retailer looking to increase sales volumes this holiday season, the last thing you want to do is drive away your customers through avoidable errors. A plugin like Caddy WooCommerce Side Cart can help elevate your store’s shopping experience by reducing your cart abandonment, boosting your conversions, and growing your sales in the process. Touted as WooCommerce Store’s new assistant, Caddy lets you turn your shoppers into loyal fans by providing you with unique features that create outstanding shopping experiences. Here’s a rundown of all the great features that will take your sales to the next level during the holiday season and beyond. Seven different cart icons: This adds flexibility to your store by allowing you to choose from the available custom icons. Customizable colours: You can modify 20+ different colour options to match your brand’s look and feel. Cart notices: Caddy notifies you whenever someone adds products to carts or their saved list. In-cart coupon offers: Buyers don’t have to leave their carts before getting the special coupons because Caddy lets them display coupons within the cart.  Save for later buttons: By adding save-for-later buttons to your shop and single product pages, it’s easy for shoppers to come back and shop more. Advanced customizations: You can customize the location of the floating cart icon and exclude products from upsells, thus giving room for more control and flexibility. Free shipping meter: It’s a cool feature that encourages larger order sizes by showing the amount a customer needs to qualify for free shipping. Up-sell recommendations: Helps you increase order sizes by providing targeted product recommendations right in the cart. Built-in wishlist: This feature allows shoppers to save products to their wishlist and view them directly within Caddy. Sticky side cart: Shoppers have access to their cart on every page they visit, increasing their chances to checkout. Optimized for speed: Caddy accelerates the shopping process from the moment shoppers land on your page to when they checkout. Mobile optimized: Caddy isn’t only great for desktop devices, but it is optimized for mobile devices and tablets. Translation ready: Caddy is available in English and Spanish, with more languages to be added soon. To cap it all, Caddy is backed by WooCommerce growth experts, safe to use, and looks good on all themes, making it one of the best Woocommerce Cart plugins. Wrapping Up With the holiday season nearing, it’s critical to keep your cart abandonment rate as low as possible. Interestingly, you just learnt our best-kept secrets when it comes to cart recovery. Seeing your shoppers leave their carts infinitely open doesn’t surprise many retailers these days. However, what is most painful is knowing that you could do something to save the situation, but you aren’t taking the necessary steps. So don’t be a slacker this holiday. We can assure you that you’ll see improvements in your sales experience and overall revenue by using the tips we’ve shared here. --- ## How to get your WooCommerce Site Ready for the Holiday Shopping Season (2022 Updated) URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/getting-your-ecommerce-site-holiday-ready-the-ultimate-guide-2020/ Holidays sales are continuing to grow each year at an astounding pace with each consecutive year breaking new records. In fact, 2020’s Cyber Monday became the biggest U.S. online shopping day ever with 10.8 billion dollars in online spending. Followed by 2021’s Cyber Monday with 10.7 billion dollars in sales. In total, holiday e-commerce sales during November and December amounted to 211 billion dollars. With the holiday shopping season starting as early as late October, it’s crucial to get all your ducks in a row before it begins. Hopefully, you’ve been preparing for it and are ready for the onslaught of sales, traffic and competition. If not, don’t stress! We’ve put together this short guide to get your store ready just in time. From making sure you have all the necessary tools & services ready to go, having the bandwidth to handle the extra traffic, to verifying you’re protected from hackers.  Let’s take a look at what you’ll need to do to get prepared before the holiday season hits. 1. Get your site’s technical issues in order Increase your hosting resources If you’re doing your holiday promotions right, you’ll likely see a peak in site traffic and transactions.  When this happens and you aren’t prepared for it, your website becomes vulnerable to crashes, hosting cost spikes, security issues and more.  Can your web host handle a spike in traffic during the holidays? If you happen to hit your hosting plan’s traffic peak, some hosts simply block access to the site, leaving you offline until the next cycle starts or until you upgrade your plan.  Others will allow the overage but charge extra on your renewal date. Talk with your host and find out how they handle overages and see if you can purchase additional bandwidth or upgrade your plan for the next couple of months to cover the resources needed for extra traffic. If you haven’t been happy with your current host and are looking to move to a better one, now’s the time to do it. If you’re using WooCommerce and looking for a great host with fantastic support, check out WP Engine. If you prefer to have a bit more control and/or are more budget-conscious, check out Cloudways. Improve site security How secure is your site? How do you handle fraudulent transactions? With the increase of traffic, comes the extra attention from those looking to make fraudulent purchases or exploit weaknesses in your site.   Here are a few ways you can improve your site’s security: Run a malware scan. Scan your site to ensure you’re not running any malware.  Malware is malicious code inserted into your site through a plugin, theme or vulnerabilities on your server. Sucuri, a WordPress security platform, provides a free malware scanner tool. Set up a firewall. A firewall is a frontline software or hardware that protects your site from unauthorized access. We recommended checking out Sucuri and Wordfence as possible options. Add fraud prevention mechanisms. Credit card fraud is unfortunately a frequent issue with ecommerce brands. It’s important to put in place some tools to help combat it. We recommend WooCommerce Fraud protection or check out these 10 ecommerce fraud prevention tools. Ensure SSL is active. Double-check that your SSL certificate is active across your whole site, without any mixed content errors, and make sure it’s expiration date is well into the future. You can use this free tool to check if your site has any mixed-content SSL issues. Limit administrative access. As a good general rule, administrative roles should only be reserved for a chosen few people who will be performing administrative tasks. Look through your admin accounts and remove people who are no longer with the company or downgrade people who no longer need admin access.  Change admin passwords. It’s also a good time to reset passwords for all active admins. WordPress has a great password generator built-in – use it! Here’s more info on selecting and managing your passwords from WordPress. Ensure all plugins and themes are up to date. Within the WordPress ecosystem, it seems like plugins and themes are updated almost on a daily basis. These updates help improve bugs and fix security vulnerabilities. Be sure to perform any critical updates before the holiday season rolls in. Optimize loading speeds Is your site a little sluggish?  Any page that takes more than 3 seconds to load may frustrate visitors, and cause them to click off of the page before it even finishes loading.  In fact, according to some statistics, up to 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes three seconds or more to load. You can run a performance test to see which elements on your page are hurting your performance the most. You can also check out free speed tests from pingdom tools or google pagespeed insights. The most common things you’ll need to improve are: Reducing image sizes. Typically the majority of speed issues we see with clients are related to larger-than-necessary images. You have to make sure to always reduce image sizes BEFORE you upload them to WordPress. You can use tools like Pngyu to help reduce sizes before uploading them to your site or use an online optimization tool like Kraken or Imagify if you want to optimize images already on your site. Disabling unused plugins. You’d be surprised how much bloat can sit on your site from third-party plugins and scripts. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t need it now, disable it. Plugins that aren’t crucial to the day to day workings of your site can and should be disabled and can always be reactivated later. This helps to reduce the number of assets and resources these plugins use, thereby helping to improve performance. Removing third-party scripts. Third-party tools can also bog your site down because your website has to fetch their resources on another server. You can use the Builtwith chrome extension to see which scripts are running on your site. Remove anything that you no longer need or use.  Setup caching. Caching is a way for your webserver to deliver your website to your visitors fast, without having to load all your site resources over and over again. Some (good) hosts nowadays provide caching services as part of your hosting plan. If your host doesn’t provide caching, check out WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache. Setup a CDN. A CDN is a geographically distributed group of servers that will serve copies of your website to a visitor using the closest possible server. This helps to reduce the amount of time it takes your visitors to reach your server. So for example, if I’m located in San Diego and I attempt to access the Tribe site, CloudFlare (who is our CDN provider) will use a server that’s geographically closest to me to deliver my site. If someone tries to access the Tribe site in Japan, CloudFlare will use a server (most likely) in Japan to deliver my site. We definitely recommend CloudFlare as our CDN provider of choice. They have a free plan you can use to get started, but highly recommend the pro plan for it’s added speed optimization features. Minify scripts and styles. With all the files your website needs to run, it’s important that any scripts or styles be as compressed as possible to keep a low footprint. There are several plugins you can use to help do this, but our top picks are WP Rocket or Fast Velocity Minify. Choose a better web host. If all the things below still don’t seem to move the needle, then you should seriously consider divorcing your hosting provider. We recommend WP Engine as our host of choice. If you’d rather have a professional get it done for you, check out our LightSpeedWP service. We will optimize your entire site for you and ensure your site is performing at its peak before the holiday. Set a development freeze Making development, plugin updates, or design changes to your site can lead to other unforeseen issues that can break or takedown areas of your site. That’s the last thing you want during peak holiday traffic. So we typically recommend our clients to freeze all development, plugin & theme updates, or design work on the site from mid-November until after the new year. So if you need to get your technical issues in order, it’s best to do so before then. Of course, if there is an emergency issue or major security update that needs to be done during this time they should always be addressed. 2. Ensure inventory is stocked Do you have enough products to meet demand?  It can be hard to judge how much you’ll need to have on hand, but you can use your sales from last year along with the past year’s sales to get a rough idea.  Make sure your popular items are well-stocked so you don’t run out. If you do run out, don’t sweat it. Just make sure you have the tools and apps in place to collect shopper emails to notify them when your product is back in stock.  The Advanced Notifications extension is one of the most popular plugins to use for this.  It will automatically send an email to customers who have purchased an item that is out of stock.  It also sends out emails pertaining to backorders and can be used to send email receipts. The WooCommerce Waitlist extension is another useful plugin to have around the holidays.  If you have an item that’s out of stock, customers can request that they be notified when it’s available again.  They enter their email address and will automatically be sent an email with a link to the product page when that product is available for purchase. 3. Update Your Return policies If you’re planning on extending your return policies for the holidays, make sure this is reflected on your website. Returns policies are an important part of a shopper’s purchasing decision, especially if they are shopping for gifts. A UPS consumer survey revealed that 88 percent of shoppers review a retailer’s return policy, with 66% doing so before making a purchase. It also showed 15% of shoppers will abandon a cart if the return policy isn’t clear. If you don’t have a fully documented return policy, Shopify provides a free tool to generate one for here. Just be sure to update the specifics so it reflects your site policies. 4. Prepare for shipping deadlines Below are the shipping deadlines for all major delivery services in the US. Be sure you’re aware of their cut-off dates. Also, make sure to make shoppers aware of these shipping deadlines so their packages can get to their destinations on time. UPS Christmas Shipping Deadlines (within the U.S.) Dec 21 – Deadline for UPS 3 Day Select shipments (delivery on Dec 24). Dec 22 – Deadline for UPS 2nd Day Air (delivery on Dec 24). Dec 23 – Next Day Air shipments (delivery on Dec 24). See the UPS holiday shipping resources here. USPS Christmas Shipping Deadlines (within the U.S.) The Postal Service recommends the following mailing and shipping deadlines for expected delivery by Dec. 25: Nov. 5 – APO/FPO/DPO (all ZIP Codes) USPS Retail Ground® Dec. 9 – APO/FPO/DPO (all other ZIP Codes) Priority Mail and First-Class Mail Dec. 16 – APO/FPO/DPO (except ZIP Code 093) USPS Priority Mail Express Military service Dec. 17 – USPS Retail Ground Dec. 17 – First-Class Mail (including greeting cards) Dec. 17 – Hawaii to mainland Priority Mail and First-Class Mail Dec. 17 – Alaska to mainland Priority Mail and First-Class Mail Dec. 17 – First-class packages (up to 15.99 ounces) Dec. 19 – Priority Mail Dec. 21 – Alaska to mainland Priority Mail Express Dec. 21 – Hawaii to mainland Priority Mail Express Dec. 23 – Priority Mail Express FedEx Christmas Shipping Deadlines (within the U.S.) Dec 15 – Deadline for FedEx Ground shipments. Dec 15 – Deadline for FedEx Home Delivery shipments. Dec 21 – Deadline for FedEx Express Saver shipments. Dec 22 – Deadline for FedEx 2-Day and 2-Day A.M. shipments. Dec 23 – Deadline for FedEx Standard Overnight, Priority Overnight, First Overnight shipments. For international customers and more information check the full holiday shipping schedules. 5. Test your site’s usability Is your site easy for people to navigate and find products? When’s the last time you’ve tested your entire site across multiple devices and browsers? We often see when we do our usability and conversion audits that simple fixes can cause a major improvement in user experience and sales.   Is important to test your site’s mobile experience too. In fact, Adobe reported that through early December 2016, half of the web traffic and 30% of retail sales came from mobile sites. Test your site on multiple devices and screen resolutions Check your site from an iPhone and an Android device…is it mobile friendly? Does it look and function correctly on an iPad? Can you click all CTA buttons and do they go to the right destination? Is the checkout process easy? Are filling out forms difficult? Is the site easy to navigate? Easy your site easy to use on smaller screens? On larger screens? Test your site on multiple browsers Does your site function the same on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari? Test your funnels and checkout process Are you easily able to progress in your funnel? Is it easy for users to add products to cart? Is it clear how to checkout when at the cart page? Is there anything that makes your checkout process more cumbersome than it needs to be? Can users checkout without having to create an account? Do you provide multiple payment options? 6. Get conversions optimized Perform a conversion audit Conversion optimization is about improving aspects of your website that helps get people to convert into buyers. While conversion optimization is typically a longer, much more data-driven process, there are a few best practices for ecommerce sites you can consider testing.  Interested in having us to a full professional audit of your store? Click here to schedule a free strategy call.  Simplify your checkout. Remove any distractions from your checkout navigation menus and remove any unnecessary forms from the checkout itself. Provide multiple shipping options. Some people may want to pay more for expedited shipping, while others may want the cheapest option available. Offer free shipping for orders over a specific amount. Doing so often gets shoppers to purchase one more item just to receive free shipping. Provide multiple payment options. Give the shopper more than one way to make a purchase. WooCommerce has a number of payment gateways available, including Amazon Payments, PayPal, Stripe, and more. For mobile, make sure your site supports ApplePay.  Add a gift wrapping option. Gift wrapping can help improve both conversions and increase average order value if you decide to charge for it. It’s easy to implement it into your store, with the help of this guide. Add trust seals to your cart and checkout. If you work with a security company such as Verisign or McAfee be sure to display their logos across your site and especially on your checkout page.  It will help those who aren’t sure about online shopping feel confident in your system. Add live chat. Try to replicate the same level of attention they would receive in-store by implementing a live chat feature. Live Chat for WooCommerce, a plugin that lets customers talk with you using several different Live Chat widgets Make your contact details prominent. Make sure your contact details are always visible across your site. Shoppers want to know they are dealing with a real company with real people. Adding a customer service phone number and contact email gives shoppers peace of mind and helps answer any pre-sale questions. Add expected delivery dates. Let shoppers know when they can expect their item, especially during the holidays as transit times can often differ and can delay. Create abandoned cart offers. With an average of 69% of your website visitors abandoning the shopping cart, this should be a top priority for you to fix in your store. Displaying a timely offer in an exit intent pop-up, which will show only when a user attempts to leave the site, are a good option for desktops visitors. An abandoned cart email drip campaign works extremely well after they leave the site. Finally, running retargeting ads on both Facebook and Google can help to bring back shoppers as well. Remember to make any feature additions to your website early enough that you have time to fully test them and correct any issues! 7. Prepare your marketing Run an SEO audit While SEO is more of a longer-term strategy, it’s still important to make sure your site plays nice with search engines. You wouldn’t want a de-indexing to happen right in the middle of the holidays. Prepare promotions ahead of time You should have a clear plan about which discounts and offers you plan to give your customers. Make sure to create and configure promotional coupons and sales products way ahead of time and test them. Also, check any existing coupons to ensure you aren’t allowing people to stack promotions. Set up your marketing calendar With the days moving fast, you want to be sure you have promotional dates locked down and planned. We recommend a tool called CoSchedule to create an online marketing calendar that integrates perfectly with WordPress. Here are some important dates to keep in mind: Halloween (10/31) Thanksgiving Day (US 11/24) Black Friday (11/25) Small Business Saturday (11/26) Cyber Monday (11/28) December ecommerce holiday shopping days: Green Monday (12/12) Free Shipping Day (12/14) Super Saturday (12/17) Christmas Eve & Christmas Day (12/24-12/25) Prepare your copy & creatives Do you have special holiday images on your website?  You should! Changing up the pictures on your main page is a great way of highlighting your holiday specials, sales, and new products.  You can even change up these photos several times throughout the season. Doing so often gets customers to notice the images once more. Look at Amazon—they routinely change the banner at the top of their page to advertise new items. Wrapping up With everything we’ve looked at so far, you may be wondering what’s left!  We’ve hit all of the points that are common to most ecommerce businesses, but there may be something specific to your industry that you have to be sure to take into account.  Drop a comment and let us know what area is most important for you during the holidays. --- ## How to Create the Perfect Holiday Gift Guide for Your WooCommerce Store URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/how-to-create-the-perfect-holiday-gift-guide-woocommerce/ Holiday gift guides can be one of the best revenue drivers during the gift-giving season. They give you a chance to showcase and promote your best products at a time when people everywhere are looking for the perfect gift. But how to build the best guide for your ecommerce site?  Remember that the holiday season brings with it a lot of stress. There are rarely enough hours in the day for work, family, and fun during the year. Add in holiday shopping, and that time becomes even more precious.  So get into the spirit of the season: give your customers the gift of a guide that makes their holiday buying more manageable, efficient, and fun. Here now, from both the naughty and nice list, are online shoppers’ greatest wishes. Is your guide the perfect gift? 1. Understand how people search for gifts “I need to find the perfect gift quickly.” Time is one of the most common issues for shoppers, in real life, or online. Finding a great gift—especially when you have a long list—can take a lot of joy out of the season. So start by gifting your customers clear and simple choices. Source: nytimes.com Create categories. Your customer has a list in front of them with the names, ages, genders, tastes of their loved ones. Start your holiday gift guide with clear, logical gift categories that will help them quickly match their names to potential gifts.  Limit Products. Too many choices can be maddening, especially during the silly season—so have a select number of products for each category that showcases the best of your site. You’ll have a chance to show off your entire product line with themed lists and additions later. Lead with a curated list designed to appeal to your customers. Label Categories Clearly. This season is not the time to try out overly detailed categories. Start with the basics and then work downwards to your to themed lists. When a customer lands on your page and can quickly and cleanly start shopping for the gifts they need, it’s like a virtual snack of cookies and milk. “I want to find multiple items in one place.” Shoppers, both online and in brick and mortar stores, love getting everything they need in one spot. It’s a holiday miracle! So use your gift guide to help them find more than one present at a time. Source: goop.com Create Themed Lists. After you’ve created your basic categories, make themed lists based on the best of your product line and the season. Comfy and Cozy, Romantic, Family Fun, choose what suits your product line the bets. Themes can result in simple multiple purchases, which allows the shopper to check a lot of boxes at once and still give thoughtful and connected gifts. Source: apple.com Make Additions Easy to Find. We’ve all been running through the checkout lane on a wintry night and found the last “add-on” that rounded out our gift buying. Perhaps it was just a stocking stuffer. Maybe it was a perfect match. Ecommerce is different and far better because you can present relevant add-ons to each product the customer buys. Give them a chance to buy accessories that enhance the primary gift. The practice can bring in more revenue and allow you to show off some products that might otherwise go unnoticed.  “I need to stay within my budget.” Price Range Lists! Everyone has a total shopping budget; they also have a price range in mind for each person on their list. A subcategory of price ranges within each major category will go a long way towards creating a full and fulfilling “basket” for your customer. Source: cnet.com “I don’t want to do this all alone.” Some customers talk about losing the “social” aspect of shopping. They don’t mean the mad crushes or long lines; they miss the chance to share and shop with friends. So help them connect in the virtual world. Source: plugins.yithemes.com Encourage Wish Lists. Before the holidays begin, take a look at your site. Do you have simple, attractive methods for shoppers to make their wish lists based on your products? Those are also easily shared, and as you well know, word of mouth and user-generated content is still the most effective marketing. We suggest you use a WooCommerce Wishlist plugin or, even better, upgrade your store’s shopping cart to one with a built-in wishlist functionality as Caddy has. Sharing Is Social. Also, make sure that customers can easily share on social media and message boards.  Connecting is one of the more rewarding parts of the holidays. Help your loyal customers stay social even when browsing the virtual world. “I want to have fun!” Online shopping is an incredibly convenient, usually less expensive way to get holiday shopping done. Your perfect holiday gift guide will make shopping even more accessible. But while holiday shopping in brick and mortar stores can be stressful, it’s also filled with the sight and sounds that many customers will always associate with gift buying. So make your gift guide a fun experience! Source: crateandbarrel.com Beautiful product photos go a long way to brightening up the page and attracting customer attention. Holiday-specific graphics and other seasonal touches will help your customers shop happy. To facilitate this, there are services like Soona that help you create your dream product photos and videos in only 24 hours. Source: theverge.com Great product deceptions appeal to customers who want to know the features and benefits; at gift-buying time, spending extra time with those descriptions to show how your products fit into the season will make buying even more fun. Finally, be authentic and let the personality of your products shine through. Your site will get a lot more traffic during this time of the year. Take a moment to show your customers your voice and your brand story. 2. How to create a simple gift guide with WooCommerce Here’s a quick and easy way to create a simple gift guide in under 5 minutes. Obviously you’d want to spend more time to define the design, but these instructions can act as a starting point. 1. Create a parent “Gift Guides” category. Make sure to set “Display Type” as “sub-categories”. 2. Create new sub-categories for each gift guide type, IE: Gifts for him, Gifts for her, Gifts for mom, etc. Make sure the first “Guide Guides” category you created is the parent of these new sub-categories. 3. For each sub-category, make sure to set a thumbnail image that corresponds to the category name. 4. Assign all the products you’d like under each sub-category. 5. Now visit the the parent category page URL. It should look like https://www.yoursite.com/product-category/gift-guides/ Bonus: If you’re a little code savvy, you could also add the following snippet to your theme’s functions.php and show the category description under the title: add_action( 'woocommerce_after_subcategory_title', 'tribe_add_subcat_description'); function tribe_add_subcat_description ($category) { $cat_id = $category->term_id; $prod_term = get_term($cat_id,'product_cat'); $description = $prod_term->description; echo '<div class="term-description">' .$description. '</div>'; } 3. Get inspired by other brand gift guides Samsung Source: samsung.com Anthropologie Source: anthropologie.com Macy’s Source: macys.com Bose Source: bose.com Uncommon Goods uncommongoods.com Follow these steps to creating a holiday gift guide, and you’ll find the presents flow both ways. There’ll be more revenue for you and a tailored, efficient experience for your shoppers.  The holidays are all about giving—give your customers the best gifts, and they’ll reward you! --- ## 15 Spooky and Creative Halloween Marketing Campaigns for Inspiration URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/15-spooky-and-creative-halloween-marketing-campaigns-for-inspiration/ The spookiest time of the year is a few days away. For many, this means the start of the Holiday season. Even though more profitable dates, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday are coming up, Halloween is an opportunity to position your brand and target the early-bird shoppers. During this time, you might be facing the challenge of developing fun, engaging and, successful ad campaigns. It’s not always easy to achieve this so, we’ve collected some of the most spooky and creative Halloween advertising campaigns for inspiration. From Facebook Ads to experiential marketing, you’ll see that all the strategies are valid when it comes to captivate and entertain your customers. 1. Lyft x Stranger Things: Strange Mode 2. Tesco: Spookermarket 3. Svedka Vodka: Banner Ad Curse 4. M&M’s: Ghosted 5. Burger King: #ScaryClownNight 6. Fanta: Taking Over Halloween 7. Lush: #LushHalloween 8. Skoda: Awaken Your Inner Child 9. McDonald’s: Trick o Cheese 10. Snickers: Horseless Headsman 11. Mars Candy: ‘Bite Size Horror’ Films 12. LG: So Real It’s Scary 13. Jägermeister: “Divine the Darke”  We see ice kühl shots in your future. pic.twitter.com/xSVtjtW13t — Jägermeister USA (@JagermeisterUSA) October 6, 2018 14. Starbucks: #ZombieFrappuccino Sharing is scaring. 🙀 #ZombieFrappuccino(U.S. & Canada, while supplies last) pic.twitter.com/1n9nJEBEpb — Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks) October 26, 2017 15. WD40: Creaky Door App --- ## 5 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Sales Overnight URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/5-marketing-strategies-boost-ecommerce-sales-overnight/ Today there are so many different tools and tactics available to grow your ecommerce sales. Where do you start? What’s the best bang for your buck to increase your sales within the next 24-48 hours? Assuming you have the right team and tools in place, here’s an overview of our top 5 recommended strategies that are both time and cost effective. 1. Start Running Facebook & Instagram Ads Immediately Many ecommerce success stories from around the web stem from the use and mastering of Facebook ads. With a minimal investment up front and over 1 billion active Facebook users around the world, Facebook advertising is the best tool available to drive targeted traffic to your site TODAY. Facebook’s advertising tools are primed for ecommerce brands, giving the ability to: Retarget people who’ve visited your site but didn’t buy and show them the exact product they were looking at. Up-sell existing customers after they leave your site. Tag your products within your Facebook and instagram posts. Target people who are most likely to make a purchase. Import your highest spending customers and Identify new people across the world to reach who have the same online purchase activity as them. And much more… Here’s an example of the return on ad spend we produced for a client with a minimal budget: You can see the overall spend was $512 which resulted in $11,860 in revenue with a ROAS (return on ad spend) of 23.14! Can see the potential here? There are 4 keys to becoming successful with Facebook ads: Ensure you’re targeting the right people. Ensure you have the right messaging and creative. Ensure you’re sending them to the right place on your site. Test EVERYTHING (messaging, creative, audience, placement, landing page) and test often. Don’t expect it to be a walk in the park though. If you don’t have enough data for Facebook to learn from, it may take a bit longer to build our your audience data. If you have a healthy email list, decent traffic coming to your site, or exist in a niche with super passionate customers, you can started bringing in sales quickly. In any case, it’s important you get started on some basic facebook ad campaigns to get your feet wet. While getting started is relatively inexpensive, it can take time and money to perfect your ads. Be patient and pay attention to Facebook’s reporting to learn, optimize and grow. Check out our done-for-you Facebook ad management services if you’re looking to hit the ground running right. 2. Start retargeting on multiple ad networks Alongside Facebook & Instagram Ad retargeting, you need to have a larger retargeting plan in place and think about reaching on other networks.  What is retargeting? Have you ever seen those ads that follow you around the web after you visit a website? How did they know you were just looking at backpacks? The magic is in ad retargeting. SOURCE Ad retargeting involves placing a pixel on your website that tracks users who take specific actions on your site. When that action is triggered, and the customer leaves your site, retargeting software kicks and a displays a highly targeted ad based on the information in that pixel. So if we take the backpack example again. When I reached the backpack landing page after clicking the Google Shopping Ad, that site would have saved a cookie on my computer recording my visit to this page. Now, when I go view other sites around the web that earn money from advertising, those sites can read that cookie and return a specific ads that corresponds to it. It’s a bit creepy and genius all in one. How powerful is retargeting? Check out a few stats: Customers who see retargeted ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. [source] The average CTR for retargeted ads is 10x that of display ads. [source] Website visitors who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert by 70%. [Source] 3 of 5 online viewers notice and consider ads showing products they viewed from another page. [Source] Retargeting has huge benefits for ecommerce brands: It gives you a second chance to recapture a lost customer. Visitors who were interested in your product but didn’t have the time to immediately make a purchase can be reminded of that product as they browse the web days or weeks later. It gives your brand a larger than life appearance. A visitor seeing your brand everywhere could give you the appearance of a large, reputable brand and provide more trust in completing a purchase. It gives you the ability to cross-sell & up-sell. By showing ads with comparable or add on products to the original product they were viewing allows you to potentially capture additional sales. We recommend all our clients to get started on some retargeting campaigns, and you can easily use a service like AdRoll to start inexpensively. What other retargeting networks are available? There are at least 200 other ad networks you can use to retarget your customers. Some of the most notable are Google Ads, Bing Ads, Criteo, and Outreach. SOURCE AdRoll is a service we recommend that aggregates all of these networks into a single management platform. The service is pay as you go and you can started instantly. If you’re interested getting Adroll set up for your site, feel free to reach out to us and we’d be happy to help. 3. Audit your website for usability and conversion issues It’s not just about getting people to your site, it’s about getting them to convert once they get there. While getting traffic to your site should be a major focus for you, there are many more pieces to the puzzle.   Where are users landing once they reach your site? Does that page convert or deter users from purchasing? Is your copy convincing or confusing? Are you providing high quality images your products? Is your navigation confusing? Is your checkout cumbersome? All of these questions and more can be answered through an ecommerce site audit. Our audit service is like an x-ray into your site, identifying problems that could be costing you thousands of dollars. Sadly, a lot of brands think they can design a site once and that’s enough to last them the next 10-15 years. Your website should be considered a living, breathing document that constantly must be improved and optimized. There are many things you can do to improve conversions and sales on your site instantly once an audit has identified any problems. From improving your site’s speed, fixing your navigation to making copy adjustments that resonate better with your target customers. Ultimately, you should be thinking about constantly evolving and improving your store through conversion optimization and an audit is the first step in the right direction. Check out our ecommerce audit report service if you’re looking to get an evaluation on your store.  4. Step up your email marketing with automation With the sophistication of the email marketing tools now available on the market, sending only promotional email campaigns are soon to be a thing of the past. Consumers are getting less and less attracted to blanket email promotional campaigns. Instead, they crave personalized emails that communicate exactly what they are looking for or need. This is where email marketing automation comes into play.  Email marketing automation allows you to send emails based on behaviors or characteristics of your customers. This gives your store the automated ability to up-sell, cross-sell and recover potentially lost revenue.  There are many different automation campaigns you can create to help boost your stores revenue beyond this and which is why we highly recommend this a top revenue driver for stores.  Here are some email automation flows you can set up today: The Cart Abandonment Flow Abandoned cart emails are a prime example of email marketing automation at it’s best. With 66% of consumers abandoning their carts, abandoned cart emails give you the ability to retrieve back some of that lost revenue by reminding people of their lost purchase. We like to set these up as a series of 3 emails. The first to remind the shopper of their cart, the second to provide a promo code to entice the sale and the last to stress urgency in losing the promo and product(s). This is the one with the biggest bang for your buck, so if you were to set up any of these, this is the very least to do. The Welcome Flow This flow is essential to introducing the shopper to your brand. You can send a series of emails showcasing your best products, top blog posts or encourage them to engage with your brand on social media. We like to give first time shoppers a promo code for their next purchase and it almost always results in repeat business. The repeat purchase flow With a repeat purchase automation flow, you can send requests for product reviews, referrals, up-sells, cross-sells, etc. The win-back flow Some customers will come to your store, purchase something and never come back. If you’re running subscriptions, what do you do when someone cancels? Do you send them anything to try and win them back? The win-back flow is the perfect remedy to revive those dormant customers or cancelled subscribers. The browse abandonment flow Sometimes people will window shop, browsing products over and over without pulling the trigger. This flow is perfect for engaging them to make the buy. The replenishment flow Do you have products that are bought repeatedly by the same customers? This flow is perfect to help remind shoppers to “re-up” on products on a regular basis. The failed payments flow What do you do when payments fail or credit cards expire? Do you reach out to your customers manually to fix their cards? The failed payment flow helps automate this. Tools for email automation We use and recommend Klaviyo for all our email automation needs. Klaviyo is unique in that it’s much more than email software. It’s almost it’s own CRM platform, where you can track individual customer website and shopping activity.  Some other notable solutions worth checking out are AutomateWoo for WooCommerce, ActiveCampaign and Conversio. 5. Run Google Shopping Ads If you have a medium to large catalog of products, consider submitting it to Google Merchant Center and creating some Google Shopping Ads. Google Shopping Ads are great way to leverage searches from Google and drive some traffic to your store based on what people are actually searching for. Because you’re targeting people based on what they’re searching for, their buying intent is usually higher than other channels. These ads differ from standard AdWords, in that they show your actual products within the Google Shopping section of Google search. They allow you to present a catalog like searching experience for customers who are searching for products online. For example, the following image represents a search for “Nike Jordans”. Each of these products are really an ad, created within the AdWords interface. The ad displays your product information as, provided from your store, and displays it in Google’s preferred shopping experience format. Once users click the purchase buttons, they are then redirected to your site and product page to buy. Google Shopping Ads require a bit of technical steps to set up a product feed that you submit to Google. But once completed, you can have make the process automated to submit your products every night. If you need help setting up your product catalog and getting your campaigns started, give us a ping. Conclusion In summary there are many other things you can do to give your store a boost but we’ve found and recommend these top 5 to get started the fastest. Leave a comment if you feel there are other strategies worth mentioning. --- ## Top 19 Marketing Plugins to Grow Your WooCommerce Store URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/top-18-plugins-grow-your-woocommerce-store/ We are often asked which WooCommerce plugins are best for growing a WooCommerce store. With all the plugins available out there it can be tricky to decide which is the best one for you. Some plugins can work for only one thing while others serve multiple purposes. Some of them are free and others require a monthly payment, so which one should you choose? Not to worry! We’re going to show you the Top 19 WooCommerce Marketing Plugins that we use help to our clients grow and definitely recommend you also give these a try. 1. AffiliateWP What if, in addition to your advertising campaigns, you have a group of people recommending your product directly to your target audience? As you know, influencer marketing is going to continue being a trend through all 2018, and if it is part of your strategy the Affiliate WP plugin might come in handy. AffiliateWP allows you to manage and track commission sales for your affiliates and influencers such as bloggers, celebrities, industry experts, micro-influencers, etc.  It integrates perfectly with your WooCommerce store, allowing you tie purchases back to affiliates. The AffiliateWP plugin is a self-hosted and less expensive alternative to the popular shareasale.com service. Among its features you can find coupon tracking, recurring referrals and setting per-product referral rates which are only some of the perks of this plugin. Price: $99 Get This Plugin 2. Upsell Order Bump Offer for WooCommerce Did you know that by implementing marketing tactics like order bumps you can increase your revenue by 20% on average? Ecommerce order bumps show the customer complementary or add-on products before completing their purchase. This provides the opportunity to increase the order size. Upsell order bump offer is an upselling plugin that facilitates store owners to make special offers exclusively on their checkout page, enabling them to increase their conversions and Average Order Value. The offer gets added to the customer’s existing Order in just a single click. One of the advantages is that they have both, a free version and a premium version available.  This plugin also allows you to: Create special offers on the checkout page. Customize Offer Layouts specifically according to your products. Grow your average order value and customer satisfaction rate. Schedule your bump offers for specific days. Edit your offers in Sandbox mode. Skip bump offers if the offer product is already added to the cart. Offer simple, variable, and subscription products as order bump offers. This review contains affiliate links. This means that if you click on the link and purchase the item, we’ll receive an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All our opinions remain our own. Price: $69/single site Get This Plugin 3. Recart Recart has more than 10 special features integrated into a single tool. Including an add to cart pop-up, abandoned cart push notifications, checkout tracking, cross-device cart rebuilding, and track and trigger technology. However, what stands out are their unique Facebook Messenger Marketing features. For instance, the abandoned cart feature sends automated reminders to the customer’s Messenger inbox. Have in mind that Facebook Messenger has an open rate of 85% and a click rate of more than 50%. On top of this, you’ll be using a direct channel to the customer removing the high competition for attention that happens on any email’s inbox. With the automated Facebook Messenger campaign feature, you’ll be able to send receipts, coupon codes, and send follow-up messages. As in email marketing, you will need a subscribers list. The advantage of Messenger is that the customer’s email is not needed. By approving a checkbox they’ll get subscribed automatically. Once you’ve built your subscribers list, you can start a conversation with them. This communication channel can be useful to remind them of your latest sales, new arrivals, and other content. It will be just like email newsletters but with better open rates. Price: $29 per month Get This Plugin  4. CM Commerce Created by one of the WooCommerce founders, this tool integrates seamlessly with the WooCommerce platform. CM Commerce is a very simple but powerful marketing automation tool. As everything in life it has its pros and cons. Its simplicity makes it easy to set up and get started with automation campaigns. But it doesn’t allow much customization in template designs and it doesn’t allow custom automation flows. CM Commerce offers useful other features too. You can create receipts, newsletters, recover abandoned carts, add product recommendations, product reviews and get your customers’ feedback on your online store. This plugin also offers a 30 day free trial where you can try all their Premium Tools for free. Price: $19/month Get This Plugin 5. Google Product Feed When users look for a specific product on Google they will find in their search results a product image carousel with the best possible products matches for their search. Allowing them to compare prices, brands and offers in an easier and faster way. This extension will allow you to easily setup and format your product feed to submit to Google, helping increase your product visibility and boosting your traffic. It is a necessity for anyone running Google Shopping campaigns with AdWords and it is also a required step prior to starting any campaigns. How to use it? Set up your Google Merchant account, add the required product information, define the category levels for your products and you’ll be ready to go. Price: $79.00/single site Get This Plugin  6. Klaviyo The #1 email marketing automation platform we recommend. Klaviyo integrates tightly with WooCommerce and has some powerful automation features that allows you to create advanced automations based on user actions or behavior on the site. Klaviyo tracks site activity, email activity, purchase activity and more from all your subscribers and customers. It acts as a CRM + email marketing automation platform. It integrates with MailChimp too, so you can easily sync your lists from there. Plus it integrates with Facebook Custom Audiences, so you can push subscriber and customer data to create these custom audiences for Facebook Ads. At Tribe, we’ve created a plugin that allows you to sync WooCommerce subscription data with Klaviyo. If you want more information about this, get in touch with us. Price: Free up to 250 contacts Get This Plugin 7. AutomateWoo Improve your eCommerce workflow from day one. AutomateWoo offers automated marketing that will help you convert and retain customers in an efficient and powerful way. Tools like personalized coupons, SMS notifications, subscriptions automation and abandoned cart reminders are one of the favorites of the plugin users. Something that makes AutomateWoo different from other automation tools is that it integrates smoothly with the WooCommerce Subscriptions and Memberships plugins. Also, instead of being third party tool like most automation tools, it is a self-hosted plugin. AutomateWoo integrates with Mailchimp, Stripe, ActiveCampaign and others. Among its add-ons you’ll find a cool referral upgrade feature that can help you boost your organic sales. And the best part is that you pay for a single license not a monthly fee. Price: $99/ Single Site Get This Plugin 8. ActiveWoo ActiveWoo connects your store to ActiveCampaign, one of the most powerful and complete marketing and CRM tools available. We recommend ActiveCampaign for users who want advanced marketing automation with emails, SMS, popups, and more. After setting up a welcome email you’ll be able to start making up-sells and cross sells. A great way to do that is making product recommendations or personalized coupons using Product Categories and Product Tags features.  Also you can increase your engagement and conversion rate by winning back inactive customers and following up on customers that have cancelled orders. If you want to try it out, ActiveWoo comes with a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee. Price: $79 / Year Get This Plugin  9. Pixelyoursite PRO If Facebook Ads makes part of your strategy this plugin might interest you. This is the best integration of the Facebook pixel for WooCommerce that we’ve seen until now. It goes without saying that we use it and recommend it to our clients. With PixelYourSite PRO you’ll be able to install your pixel on your website with just one click, no coding required, track conversion value for Easy Digital Downloads, and set up, track and delay events. You’ll also be able to export a LTV customers file to make a Lookalike and optimize your Facebook audiences. PixelYourSite PRO allows you to add and manage your Facebook Pixel Event. With this you can establish actions that define when your events will be fired. For example if a particular page is loaded or if mouse is moved over a certain element of the page the event will fire, an ideal feature for custom conversions. The plugin also supports advance matching which can help you increase your retargeting results. Price: $80 /Single Site Get This Plugin 10. Product Catalog Feed PRO A great tool for those who want to make the most of Facebook Dynamic Ads. Besides tagging products in your posts and generating Facebook Ads collections, after creating and uploading your product catalog, you’ll be able to create Dynamic Product Ads campaigns for the people who left abandoned carts or clicked on products on your site. This is one of the retargeting strategies that has the highest conversions among our clients. You can also generate feeds for Google Merchant or Google Adwords Remarketing. Price: $50 /single Site Get This Plugin  11. Recommendation Engine If amazon has taught us something is that product recommendations work. With the WooCommerce Recommendation Engine you can suggest products to users based on their view history, purchase history and products that are frequently purchased together. It also has a 30 day money back guarantee in case you’re unhappy with the plugin, but I assure you that after seeing the results you’ll be happier than ever. Price: $79/ Single Site Get This Plugin 12. WooCommerce AdWords Conversion Tracking If you aren’t a developer setting up conversion tracking is usually complicated. Tools like WooCommerce AdWords Conversion Tracking can help you ease that. As the name suggest, this free, easy to use plugin tracks the value of WooCommerce orders in Google AdWords. It can prevent duplicate reporting by excluding shop managers from tracking and not counting failed payments. This plugin was also updated to deal with the Apple cookie tracking prevention. Price: Free Get This Plugin 13. Thrive Ultimatum Mix a created sense of urgency with a powerful call to action and you’ll get the bases of scarcity marketing. When you offer a product or service for a limited time its perceived value increases. This kind of strategy is ideal when you’re looking to boost conversions. It can be applied on a Cyber-Monday or Black Friday offer, also on limited edition products and especial sales. Thrive Ultimatum will let you exploit every aspect of scarcity marketing. Taking advantage of the current traffic of your website, optimizing conversions by giving your visitors an ultimatum and making them take a decision faster. This plugin allows you to create a sense of urgency among your users with personalized limited time offers, countdown widgets and promotions. It has campaign tracking tools, customisable templates, dynamic redirect links and its 100% translatable. One of its best features is the evergreen system, which will allow each of your visitors to have their own countdown with their own time limit. This system can be combined with the Lockdown feature making sure that the countdown stays true even if your visitor switches devices, uses different browsers or clears their cookies. This plugin has everything to help you develop scarcity marketing campaigns, but it’s important to note that when scarcity marketing is used in the wrong way it can seem deceitful and deeply deteriorate your brand image. Having a good strategy is the key when it comes to this plugin. Price: $97/ Single Site Get This Plugin 14. Proof Social proof can come in many different ways such as case studies, testimonials and reviews. It is a key factor when persuading and easing the customers mind.  Most of us have relied, at some point of our lives, on the “social proof”. We’ve all looked for reviews and recommendations before buying a product we are interested in. This tool helps you take advantage of this phenomenon. Proof shows the stream of people who have recently purchased, the total number of signups in the past 7 days, your live visitor count or the number of people who have recently register for an event. It’s simple, identify your visitors and turn them into customers. Proof has hundreds of successful case studies related with webinar registrations, checkouts and landing pages. For instance, the coaching and courses business called Design Dream Lifestyle achieved a conversion rate of 75.75% on their landing page by using Proof to show their visitors the people who recently opted in and purchased. Price: $79/Month Get This Plugin  15. WP Optin Wheel This a unique tool that can help grow your email list. Invite your visitors to try their luck by spinning the wheel of fortune. They’ll get a chance to win a coupon while you increase your signup rate by the minute. While with standard pop-ups a regular business can get an opt-in rate of 1.95%, with the wheel of fortune they can obtain a 14% opt-in rate. The WP Optin Wheel offers a disruptive way to engage users and even increase sales. Price: Free Get This Plugin 16. Metrilo Get all your WooCommmerce customer data in one place and send targeted email campaigns to customer segments with Metrilo. Also recover lost customers and identify acquisition channels that are valuable to your business. This plugin helps you engage with your customers and integrates perfectly with your WooCommerce store. While other CRM and analytics tools might give you tons of number without insights, Metrilo builds complete behavior profiles on your visitors and customers. Allowing you to develop and execute action strategies, all in the same platform. It offers features such as email automation, product performance, retention analysis, revenue analysis and more. Price: $119/month Get This Plugin 17. WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro Google Analytics is a great tool to track and gather data from your website’s visitors. With this analytics you’re able to take actions in order to improve your business. Unlike other WordPress GA plugins, WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro plugin helps you pass unique eCommerce tracking data from your website to GA. You can track coupon usage, conversion rate, product reviews, average order value, order cancellation among other valuable data. A nice feature from this plugin is that you can customize all your event names so they match your existing data. When analyzing the correct information from your visitors’ behavior you’ll be able to get an exact picture of your store’s performance. You can also opt for the free version, which depending on your needs, might offer more than enough features. Price: $29/ single site Get This Plugin 18. Zapier Save time and speed up process with Zapier.  Integrate your store with the apps you’re using to be able to start workflows from any app. Finish routine tasks automatically, make changes across multiple apps and automate processes without having to code. With Zapier you can save new WooCommerce orders to Google Sheets rows, add new WooCommerce orders to a MailChimp list, create QuickBooks Online sales receipts from new WooCommerce orders and create a 100 more automations that will optimize your business. Price: $59/single site Get This Plugin 19. Yoast SEO for WooCommerce The Yoast SEO for WooCommerce is a must for your online shop. Optimize your site structure, have full control over site breadcrumbs, obtain amazing tools to write SEO-friendly texts, get automatic internal linking suggestions and more. One of its biggest benefits is the Rich Pins from Pinterest. Rich Pins show metadata right on the Pin itself (an app, article, product or recipe Pin). You’ll just have to enable Facebook OpenGraph and validate your site. Yoast SEO is definitely a great platform that will help you get the ranking you want. Price: $49/month Get This Plugin We’ve showed you several plugins and how they can benefit your eCommerce. From affiliate marketing and automation to discount coupons and data analytics, now you know some of the tools that can help improve your WooCommerce store. There are many others out there that might be useful for your business, but obviously you don’t need them all. Just remember to identify your needs and objectives first and pick a tool that matches them. Which plugins are you using in your WooCommerce store? Is there any other plugin that you would include in this list? Need any help setting this plugins in your store? Contact us and schedule a free call. --- ## 6 Reasons Why You Should Hire a WooCommerce Expert for Your Store. URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/6-reasons-to-hire-a-dedicated-woocommerce-expert/ As an ecommerce entrepreneur you’ve taken the bold step in starting a lucrative retail business online. You’ve managed to get to where you’re at without much help, and things may be moving along slowly but surely for you. You’ve probably got your store up, picked a theme, and maybe even made some sales. Or maybe you’re an already established store, bringing in thousands of dollars in revenue each week. Either way you’re a rockstar, and I congratulate you for getting where you’re at! But to get to your next level in growth, you’re going to need a dedicated team with WooCommerce expertise to handle the technical aspects of your store. At the very least, have someone you can regularly call and rely on for their expertise. Here are 6 reasons why every WooCommerce store should hire an expert (in your time zone) to manage the technical aspects of your store. 1. It’ll save you money and lessen the headaches If you’re anything like you me, you’re all about saving money. You’re not afraid of rolling up your sleeves and do the work yourself if it’ll save you a few bucks. But there comes a point when you realize that going it alone is costing you more time and effort than you’d care to spend. Or worse, you’ve gotten yourself into a dilemma that’s beyond your expertise and you’re now scrambling to get professional help. I’m sure you’ve been there before; stuck trying to sift through developers on Upwork while your site is sitting there broken, losing money. As with many areas of business, taking shortcuts can only hurt you in the long run. Working with shoddy developers or trying to wing it yourself may be saving you pennies now, but cost you much more in the future. Especially when you’re talking about such a critical area of your business as your website, where having even a small error on your site can cost you thousands of dollars in revenue. On the other hand, by bringing on an expert who understands the intricacies of WooCommerce, and can troubleshoot and fix any issues fast, you can save yourself a lot of headache and money. That’s the best investment you could ever make for your ecommerce business. 2. You’ll have free time to focus on other important aspects of your business Wouldn’t your time and effort be better spent on growing the business instead of worrying about theme tweaks and updating plugins? Think about it. How many hours a day do you spend on fixing website issues, website design changes, broken themes or even trying to track down those developers in another time zone? How much of that time would have been better spent on handling things like planning your growth and marketing initiatives? Your time is precious and you need qualified and dependable developers on your team to help tackle your store’s technical needs so you can focus on the most important stuff. 3. In case of an emergency, you’ll have someone who’s got your back Do you have someone available in your time zone that you can reach out to in the middle of an emergency technical issue? Do you have confidence that person can handle the majority of technical issues thrown at them without spending hours or days to resolve? If you can’t answer those confidently, you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision to use your current developer or technical support team. Critical technical issues happen, and in the online ecosystem your dealing with an ever changing landscape of bugs, security holes and internet issues. The important thing is that you have a responsive support team that’s got your back. 4. It’ll improve your store’s security If your site were to be comprised right now, what would you do? Who would you call? There’s a lot more to managing the technical aspect of a website, especially an ecommerce site. Your customers depend on your site to be secure and safe.  Ignoring these things can be detrimental to your business and having a dependable WooCommerce team you can call can help ease your mind. We’ve seen plenty of store owners think of security as an afterthought. Many believe by keeping the site up to date and slapping on an SSL certificate they’re covered. While these things are very important, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. There are multiple other areas where your store could be compromised and not locking these areas down can leave your WooCommerce store incredibly vulnerable. At Tribe, we actively follow WordPress and WooCommerce security updates to be aware of any critical bugs or holes, run weekly security scans and will proactively make adjustments to your site that will improve security. 5. You’ll never have to worry about plugin updates & conflicts Your store is complex cocktail of scripts, plugins and 3rd party tools. It’s software running on machines. Machines require ongoing maintenance and upkeep to prevent breakdowns and technical issues. Just like your car requires regular tune ups and oil changes, your website requires updates and maintenance checks. As a WooCommerce store, your uptime is vital to the health of your business. Any downtime could bring your sales to a halt. While it may be tempting to click that update button in your WordPress dashboard, doing so cavalierly could cause irreversible damage to your store. The WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem consists of thousands of 3rd party plugin and theme developers. Sometimes the code they create doesn’t play so nice together and often times we’ve seen sites completely go offline due to incompatible plugins or themes. So while clicking that update button may sound easy, there are actually some important things going on in the background that you need to be cautious about. Having a WooCommerce expert who knows the intricacies of the many WooCommerce plugins and how they work with each other is vital. Most WooCommerce experts will do updates on a staging server and test throughly before pushing live. This way your WooCommerce expert can identify potential conflicts, troubleshoot and fix any such issue before it gets to your live site. 6. You’ll have WooCommerce and Ecommerce expertise at your fingertips In order for you business to grow, you need a team who understands WooCommerce and preferably understands the many facets of running an ecommerce business. Someone who can handle all the technical issues that come along your way, as well as guide you in the right direction when it comes to which plugin you need or which payment provider to use. Why bang your head and scour Google for answers when you can ask a dedicated expert with a simple email or call? When you have a support team who understands how to work with 3rd party ecommerce vendors, is familiar and can recommend the best ecommerce tools and services, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, money and headaches. We’ve seen over and over again clients come to us frustrated because their developer threw up their hands, unable to solve a WooCommerce issue. In fact, we also maintain relationships with many WordPress agencies who hire us to manage their WooCommerce clients because it’s not their expertise. Bottom line is this: If your serious about your online business and interested in growing a scalable, secure and profitable business, you need to have a team with the expertise on board to manage your store in a technical and consultative capacity. Otherwise you’ll continue to run the risk of losing time, wasting money, damaging your store and hurting your growth. --- ## WooCommerce Hosting: Why WP Engine Wins Our Pick as Best URL: https://www.madebytribe.com/woocommerce-hosting-ditch-your-host-for-wp-engine/ Web hosts are a dime a dozen nowadays. There are hundreds of thousands of web hosting options, small and large, and the starting costs are relatively inexpensive. So finding a WooCommerce hosting solution for your store should a piece of cake right? This is where most WooCommerce stores fail in picking the right web host. Not every host is built the same, and for a WooCommerce store it’s important you find a host that’s specialized in specifically WordPress hosted environments. I’ve worked with my share of hosts from dedicated servers to shared hosts across GoDaddy, Bluehost, Flywheel and many many more. My web host of choice for the last 7 years or so was MediaTemple. That is, until their customer service took a dive for the worst (thanks GoDaddy!). Last year while searching for a good web WooCommerce hosting provider, we stumbled upon WP Engine. We fell in love right away. Below are just a few reasons why we chose, and continue to recommend WP Engine for all our client WooCommerce hosting needs. Rockstar Support It’s extremely important to find a web host who understands the technologies behind your site intimately. With over 100 full-time WordPress experts on staff, the folks at WPEngine understand the complexities of keeping your WordPress hosting server running like a well oiled machine. Reaching someone for help is a breeze too, with 24/7/365 support through either live chat, email or telephone support. They boast a 97% customer satisfaction rating and I can say that each time we’ve needed to interact with WP Engine the experience has been a joy. The engineer on the other end instantly speaks our language and understands what we need done. They typically don’t just point us to an article and say “good luck!”, they instead work with us to tackle any problem we’re facing. A+ support in my book! Pair WP Engine’s support with Tribe’s ongoing support and maintenance package, and you’ve got two rockstar teams ready to tackle any issues that pop up. One click staging environments The WordPress ecosystem is constantly being updated. As anyone with a WordPress site knows, updates happen very frequently. Some of these updates can be detrimental to your store if your theme isn’t set up properly or there’s a conflicting plugin. This is why WooThemes recommends always testing updates in a staging environment first. Most hosts don’t have a WordPress staging environment right out of the box for you. Setting up and managing a staging environment on your own can be a bit cumbersome and often involves many parts and tools to work efficiently. WP Engine’s one click staging interface is baked right into your WP admin panel, making it a breeze to easily set up a staging site in less than a few minutes.  When you’re ready to push your staging site back live, it’s one again as easy as a click of a button. You also have the option of pushing the entire site live, or just copying over theme an plugin files. This is a huge help for WooCommerce stores, because your production site is likely to create new transactions daily. Replacing the entire DB, would wipe those transactions out. Because WP engine allows you to transfer only theme and plugin files, it lets you keep your DB in tact while you update plugins, themes styles or images. To date, we’ve never had any issues working with WP Engine’s staging features. This is by far our favorite, and most used feature of WP Engine. Automated backups WP Engine’s automated backup and restore functionality is fantastic. The backup process is seamless, happening behind the scenes everyday. Each backup is done at a set interval each day and the backup covers all files and database records. You can also request backups on demand, which surprisingly is something not all hosts offer. Restoring backups are just as easy. Simply click another button to restore your site in less than a minute to a previous backup version. For WooCommerce stores, this means your site, your customers and your transactions are backed up automatically multiple times a day. If anything should go wrong with your store, you can easily roll back a previous backup within just a few minutes. Security A big complaint that critics have of WordPress in general, is there are constant security threats. What those critics sometimes fail to mention however is there’s also a huge community around combating WordPress and WooCommerce security issues. Holes and bugs are usually found right away and the knowledge spread throughout the community. WP Engine adds to this with it’s top notch security team and security protocols. Any critical security update they are sure to pass the info along to you and if you don’t get around to updating your site or plugin they’ll do it for you. WP Engine’s “disallowed plugin” check is a first I’ve seen for a web host. They check for plugins with known issues or conflicts on their network and notifying you if they find one in your site. If you don’t remove them, they’ll also automatically do it for you to ensure security and consistency within their network. Speed With running a WooCommerce store, speed should always be a top priority. Customers will leave if they have to wait for your site to load. This is where WP Engine’s built in caching and CDN come into play. Caching is a process of temporarily storing your site’s content, thereby reducing server load each time your site is loaded. WP Engine uses it’s own proprietary caching service called EverCache and it’s fully integrated into their hosting environment. This eliminates the need for 3rd party caching plugins. They also make use of a NetDNA powered CDN or content delivery network. This allows WP Engine to serve your site all across the world and ensures your visitors always have the shortest route on the internet to reach your site. So instead of someone from France attempting to reach your web server all the way in the USA, WPEngine’s global network of servers will instead find the closest server to them and serve your site from there. This equals faster delivered websites and happier customers 🙂 If you’re interested in getting your store to run even faster, we include free speed optimization as part of our WooCommerce support plans. Conclusion It’s easy to see why we’ve chosen WP Engine as our WooCommerce host of choice. Ever since switching to WP Engine, we’ve moved over a dozen clients and every single one of them has loved the move. So if you’re on the fence about where to host your WooCommerce site, I hope that this has helped educate you on our host of choice. If you’re already another host, I highly suggest you move, like yesterday! Whatever host you choose, just please make sure to pick one who’s up to par with these features. Your WooCommerce store will thank you for it! Click here to get 3 months free on annual plans with WP Engine. Use code WPE3FREE. Disclosure: In the spirit of full disclosure, we may include affiliate links within this post and may get commissions if you decide to purchase anything from those links. That being said, we will only recommend products & services that we use, trust and love ourselves, so we know you’ll be in good hands. ---