The best Woo­Com­merce plugins

If you’re planning to create an online store with WordPress, sooner or later you will read about Woo­Com­merce. The popular store system is the solution for creating your own online shop in WordPress quickly and easily. With the right Woo­Com­merce plugins, you can expand the system in no time at all to adapt it to your needs.

This article was last updated in August 2021.

Further on in this article, you’ll find out about Woo­Com­merce plugins that can be used in various cases. The following table provides an overview of the types of plugins and their key benefits:

Woo­Com­merce plugins expand your online shop with important features that not only improve the customer ex­per­i­ence but also the con­ver­sion rate. Woo­Com­merce itself provides the technical basis for an online shop in WordPress. However, every shop operator has their own in­di­vidu­al re­quire­ments for their shop. This is where Woo­Com­merce ex­ten­sions come into play. There are now numerous ex­ten­sions that cover a wide range of demands.

It is precisely due to the wide range of Woo­Com­merce ex­ten­sions offered that too many plugins end up quickly being installed, thereby reducing the speed of the online store. Therefore, it is important that you think about the following points in advance:

1. What special re­quire­ments do you have for your online shop?
2. Which of these features are not directly in­teg­rated into Woo­Com­merce?
3. Is there a theme that already covers these re­quire­ments?
4. Which plugins meet your re­quire­ments, and which of them may cover several re­quire­ments at the same time?
5. Are there certain Woo­Com­merce plugins bundled in a package to save money?

For Woo­Com­merce, there are now many plugins that provide more legal certainty, simplify purchase processes and support customer loyalty. We will introduce you to some of the best Woo­Com­merce plugins for different needs and show you their key features in detail.

A pro­fes­sion­al Woo­Com­merce shop should be issuing store-branded PDF invoices and delivery no­ti­fic­a­tions. This is par­tic­u­larly important when you are running a larger eCommerce business, but even smaller shops and sellers can benefit from adding pro­fes­sion­al-looking invoices and no­ti­fic­a­tions to their order con­firm­a­tions. The following Woo­Com­merce plugin makes it easy to add cus­tom­ised and branded invoices, and issue delivery no­ti­fic­a­tions.

Print Invoice & Delivery Notes for Woo­Com­merce is a plugin that sim­pli­fies printing invoices and delivery notes for your Woo­Com­merce store orders. Users can customise the name of their shop, postal address, and even add a refund policy in the footer. The plugin is available free of charge. For more advanced features, Tyche Softwares offers pro plugins such as a Custom Order Status for Woo­Com­merce at around 30 pounds per year.

A good con­ver­sion rate is par­tic­u­larly important for the payment process. With these Woo­Com­merce plugins, you can adapt your checkout process to your needs and those of your customers:

With the Woo­Com­merce plugin Checkout Field Editor, you can add in­di­vidu­al input fields in the billing address, delivery address and optional areas in no time at all. In the free version, in addition to field types such as input and text area, there are also other input options available such as password, email, telephone, select and radio buttons. In the Pro version, starting at around 35 pounds, there are 17 different field types including tick boxes, date input, and multi-select.

Similar to Woo­Com­merce short­codes, you can also integrate all fields quickly and easily using hooks. With just one click, you can decide whether the entries will also appear later in the order emails. In addition, pre­defined fields from Woo­Com­merce can be de­ac­tiv­ated and the order of the fields can be adjusted. The automatic de­ac­tiv­a­tion of fields based on the products in the shopping trolley is also no problem with the Pro version.

The following table provides an overview of the free and paid functions of the Woo­Com­merce plugin Checkout Field Editor:

The provision of various payment methods in your online shop is an important criterion when it comes to closing sales. With the Woo­Com­merce Stripe Payment Gateway, you can expand your online shop with numerous payment gateways. In addition to PayPal, Stripe has also es­tab­lished itself worldwide as a serious and secure payment provider and supports Google Pay, Apple Pay, local payments, and recurring payments.

The number of clicks in a purchase process is often decisive for the con­ver­sion rate. With the free version of the Woo­Com­merce plugin Direct Checkout, you lead your customers directly to the checkout process, instead of first to the shopping trolley. To further simplify the process, checkout fields that are not required can be removed. In the premium version, a quick-purchase button can also be placed under each product and the ordering process can be minimised to one page.

Customers can manage their orders and details more quickly and easily via an account in their online shop. With the Woo­Com­merce Social Login, customers can log in directly through one of their existing social media accounts. The in­hib­i­tion threshold for opening another account is thus reduced because data does not have to be re-entered. Es­pe­cially during the checkout process, this un­com­plic­ated solution ensures faster pro­cessing and fewer abandoned purchases. In addition to a branded re­gis­tra­tion form, this Woo­Com­merce plugin offers stat­ist­ics for analysing user behaviour on the website. Woo­Com­merce Social Login is available on Envato Market for around 35 pounds.

Both the retention of existing customers and the ac­quis­i­tion of new customers play an important role in e-commerce. With the right Woo­Com­merce plugins, you can easily create customer-retention and customer-winning marketing campaigns.

The free Woo­Com­merce plugin HubSpot not only offers a com­pre­hens­ive CRM to manage customers and orders but also the ability to track abandoned shopping trolleys, send email marketing campaigns, create ad­vert­ising campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, and generate reports on customers and orders. Data from Woo­Com­merce can easily be syn­chron­ised with HubSpot.

A wishlist not only gives existing customers the op­por­tun­ity to save products for later but also to share them with others. Ideally, this is how you can win ad­di­tion­al customers. YITH Woo­Com­merce Wishlist includes all the functions that a user-friendly wishlist needs. In the free version, you can already choose which page serves as a wishlist or where the button ‘Add to wishlist’ appears. The premium version expands the wishlist with functions such as email no­ti­fic­a­tions about products in the wishlist or a login notice.

The following table provides an overview of the dif­fer­ences between the free and premium versions of this Woo­Com­merce extension:

If a customer has bought one or more products, it is up to you to process the order. Invoicing, shipping items, and managing returns should ideally take place in an optimised process. There are also Woo­Com­merce plugins to support you with the purchase process in this case.

The Woo­Com­merce plugin PDF Invoices & Packing Slips auto­mat­ic­ally attaches an invoice in PDF format to the order con­firm­a­tion email that is sent to your customers and saves it in the re­spect­ive customer account. Even in the free version, invoices can be com­pletely adapted via HTML and CSS and given in­di­vidu­ally formatted invoice numbers. In addition, this Woo­Com­merce extension generates a packing slip with all items, their SKU numbers, and the number of products for the shipping de­part­ment. With the premium version, you can easily create PDF invoices and credit notes. In addition, packing slips can be sent by email or uploaded to Dropbox and delivery notes can be sent directly to a printer.