5 WooCommerce Extensions to Make Your Holiday Sales a Success

Though it might seem early, September and October are the best times to plan and prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season. During these crucial months, you should be taking a hard look at your store from top to bottom, examining everything from its hosting to your marketing plans to how it stacks up in search engines.

If you’re using WooCommerce to sell online, this is also a crucial time to take a look at the extensions you’ll be using. You might find that you’re missing a necessary piece of the holiday sales puzzle, like a shipping provider or coupon solution.

To help you get ready for this busy time of year, here are five extensions we recommend putting in place now, and why they’re such a great fit for WooCommerce-powered stores.

1. Cart Notices

You have the full attention of your customers the moment a product is added to their shopping cart. In that moment, they’re halfway to a purchase — they’re feeling good about your store and your products.

If you want to capitalize on that attention, as well as communicate your store’s important shipping or ordering deadlines, our Cart Notices extension is the option for you. It’s got loads of features and nifty functionality.

You can add in in-cart notices for anything you like, including:

• Promotions
• Available coupon codes
• Shipping cutoffs
• Product-only specials

2. Ship to Multiple Addresses

During the holidays, you’re likely to see customers buying from you for multiple recipients. This isn’t an issue if they’re shipping the items to themselves, but what if their recipients live far, far away?

Lucky for you (and them), we have an extension that lets you divvy up a single order’s goods: it’s, appropriately, called Ship to Multiple Addresses.

When multiple addresses are enabled, your customers will see a notice in the shopping cart about it. Once products have been added, they can then specify which products go to which destination, and choose different shipping rates for each if need be (so Grandma can get her presents faster than your many cousins).

Customers only need to place one order and pay one amount, and then can relax while you take care of the shipping for them.

3. ShipStation

Speaking of shipping, during the holidays it can be a royal pain in the you-know-where to manage all the moving parts of a customer’s shipment (much less hundreds of them).

That’s where ShipStation comes in. Our ShipStation integration helps you manage orders, batch label creation, and automate every aspect of the shipping process. Plus it can sync orders not only from WooCommerce, but also popular marketplaces like Amazon and eBay — so all your sales channels are in one place.

You’ll also get advanced features like customized rules, shipping service mappings, wireless printing, return labels, and detailed reporting. And ShipStation’s tight integration with WooCommerce means your orders will automatically be updated, so there’s less to manage.

Best of all, the extension is free. All you need is a ShipStation monthly plan to get started. How’s that for a happy holiday?

4. URL Coupons

One of the biggest gripes of anyone who either sends or receives emails with coupons is that there’s so many steps involved in getting that code applied. You usually end up doing something like this:

1. Adding products to your cart
2. Opening the email up to find the code
3. Finally finding the code and pasting it into the coupon code box
4. Half the time realizing it doesn’t work anyway… :(

Yuck. Let’s cut those steps back.

URL Coupons can automatically apply a coupon code to any WooCommerce customer’s cart, and even add one or more products of your choosing to the cart along with it

With this nifty extension, you create customer-friendly URLs. When a customer visits one of these URLs, the extension kicks in, applying a pre-created discount to the cart, or even adding specific products of your choosing.

Sounds like a dream compared to that copy-pasting, hunting-through-emails scenario, right?

5. Free Gift Coupons

Finally, the holiday season just wouldn’t be complete without a little gift giving of your own. Free Gift Coupons is the extension you need to bring some cheer to your shoppers in the forms of free gifts.

Whether you want to offer free gift wrapping with a purchase or give away a freebie with orders, using the extension doesn’t take much effort:

1. Create the product you want to give away for free
2. Use the extension to create a corresponding coupon code, and
3. Give the code to your customers

Now customers who enter this code at checkout will be entitled to get the product you’re offering for free. Sounds like a great way to play the part of Santa, if you ask us.

What extensions are you using this holiday?

If you’re using WooCommerce, what extensions will you be using this holiday season? Leave a comment and let us know.

Thanks for reading!