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WooCommerce Guide Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce

How To Auto-Sync WooCommerce Products To Google Merchant Shop in 2024

Auto-sync with Google

It is natural for most WooCommerce Shop Owners to try and increase their sales by promoting several different merchant shops. Almost all WooCommerce store owners promote their WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop since it is the largest marketplace to get more potential customers.

Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce makes it extra easy for you to promote your valuable products in different merchant shops. As a reliable WordPress agency, we care about your success. With the regular iteration of our plugin, we are spreading the way for your continuous improvements and benefits.

Today, we are happy to inform you about the new update of our plugin Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce. We recently added a new feature that will give you an extra hand in promoting your products on Google Merchant Shop.

With this latest version, you can simply work in harmony with the best merchant shop out there and potentially increase your revenue with product feed management strategies.

Let’s dig in!

Here’s the complete video tutorial. Or you may read the written guide below so that you can auto-sync your WooCommerce Products to Google easily.

Auto-sync WooCommerce Products To Google

You can auto-sync your WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop using our plugin.

This means that with the latest Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce, you can now directly send your WooCommerce products to Google Merchant Shop; you no longer need to download and upload feed on your Google Merchant Center manually.

This feature carries out the task by allowing your Google Merchant Center to fetch the data of your updated Google product feed according to the schedule you decide.

You need to simply set up your Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce to integrate with your Google Merchant Shop.

Once you have set the required credentials to auto-sync the plugin with your Google merchant account, you can then choose your desired schedule, when you want your updated product feed to be collected by your Google Merchant Shop. It’s as simple as that.

This will save you so much time. You can focus on improving your WooCommerce Shop while your updated product feed will automatically be sent to your Google Merchant Shop.

WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop

Here’s How It Works

Synchronizing your WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop is an easy procedure. Just follow these steps and you are good to know how to generate A WooCommerce Google feed with auto sync featurs.

You will need 3 specific information to set up the synchronization:

  • Client ID
  • Client Secret
  • Google Merchant ID

You can collect your Client ID and Client Secret from your Google Developers Console and you can collect your Google Merchant ID from your Google Merchant Shop.

In case you are unaware of how to find them, continue reading, we have provided instructions on how to collect them.

Let’s begin with the steps now.

Steps to Auto-Sync WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop

You need to follow a few specific steps to set it up.

So let’s go through each step one by one.

Step 1 – Collect Client ID And Client Secret

i. Create A Project

First, go to Google Developers Console and log in with your Google account. You will see a dashboard like this:

Google Console API Dashboard.png

If you already have a project created for your products, you can use the same, or you can create a new project if you don’t have one yet.

To do this, you need to click on New Project. Here you will be given a list of projects that you have created so far.

Select New Project

Click on New Project to set up a new project.

Create New Project

Now provide the required information.

New Project Required Information

Here, you can change the Project Name/ Project ID if you want.

Once the project is ready, you will get a notification on the top right corner. You can select your new project from the New Project option or from the Notification dropdown.

New Project Added Notification

ii. Enable Content API for Shopping

Content API for Shopping is an interface that allows you to interact with the merchant center platform directly. This helps you to increase the efficiency of your shop with proper data management in a more organized way.

To activate it for your current project, Go to the Dashboard. Select ENABLE APIS AND SERVICES.

Enable Content API Option

It will take you to the API Library Dashboard.

API Library Dashboard

Search for Content API for Google Shopping and select the Content API for Shopping option

Search Content API for Shopping

Click on the Enable button to enable the Content API for the Shopping option

Enable Content API for Shopping

However, you don’t need to enable this Content API for Shopping if you see that it is enabled in the first place.

iii. Create Credentials

This is the most important part where you will need to set up credentials to make the API work properly. Let’s get started.

a. OAuth Consent Screen

Click on the OAuth Consent Screen option on the left, and It will take you to the OAuth Consent Screen.

Select External as the User Type and click on the Create button.

OAuth Consent Screen - User Type

Now fill up the forms and click on the SAVE AND CONTINUE button.

OAuth Consent Screen - App Registration
The terms you will face here are

OAuth Consent Screen

• Application Name

The name of the App you are asking for consent. You need to provide this otherwise you can not approach with your step.

• Application Logo

The identical image of your app to be specific, a logo of your app. Customers will recognize your app based on this image.

• Support Email

This email ID will help your customers to reach you in need of user support. The google id you used to log in to your google console will be placed here by default.

• Authorized Domain

You must enter the application URL here. Otherwise, Google won’t mark your domain as authorized. As you can see in the picture below, I provided my domain, cloudwaysapps.com.

Your domain will probably already be there by default but in case you see that there is no domain, you should provide the authorized domain of your shop here.

• Application Homepage/Privacy Policy/ TOS Link

These are the respective homepage and privacy policy/ terms and service links of your application and they will be previewed on your consent screen. But it has to be hosted on your authorized domain — otherwise no need to fill the box.

Provide the Application Name and Authorized Domain(s) to start the process. You can add the rest of the options later.


Click on SAVE AND CONTINUE.

Scopes

OAuth Consent Screen - Scopes
• Scopes for Google APIs

You are provided with a list of scopes here. You can also add your own. The level of scopes you choose here (such as email/profile/OpenID/custom), your application can access only that part of your user’s data.

Click on SAVE AND CONTINUE.

Test Users

OAuth Consent Screen - Test Users
Assign Test Users

While the publishing status is set to “Testing”, only test users are able to access the app. Allowed user cap prior to app verification is 100, and is counted over the entire lifetime of the app. 

You can provide access to the test users from here.

Click on SAVE AND CONTINUE.

It will show you a summary and your registration is now complete.

OAuth Consent App Registration Summary
b. OAuth Client ID

Go back to Credentials. Click on the blue button Create credentials and choose OAuth Client ID from the drop-down menu.

OAuth Client ID - Create Credentials

At first, select Web Application as the Application Type.

OAuth Cliet ID Type

You will see the following info:

Create New OAuth Client ID
The terms you will face here are
• Name

You need to provide a name here to approach. It is the name of your OAuth(Open Authorization) Client ID. As you can see, I have set the name as Test Guide Web App1.

• Authorized JavaScript Origins

It is the origin URI of the client application. It is not always mandatory to use. However, if you are using a non-standard port, you should include it here.

• Authorized Redirect URIs

After the authentication with Google, this is the path you will need to redirect your users to your application. It can not be a public IP address and it has to be the matching Redirect URL from your plugin dashboard.

You will get the Redirect URL from your Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce dashboard. Go to Product Feed> Google Merchant Settings and you can see the redirect URL marked in the picture below.

Collect Redirect URL

Copy the address and paste it under Authorized redirect URIs and click Create.

OAuth Content ID - Set Redirect URL

You will see that under Credentials, you have an OAuth 2.0 Client ID created, and you will get the OAuth Client ID credentials.

New OAuth Client ID Credentials

Copy the Client ID and Secret and you can also download the credentials in JSON format for later use by clicking on the DOWNLOAD JSON button.

Close the box and you will see that a new OAuth 2.0 Client ID is added.

OAuth 2.0 Client ID List

You can click on the ID to view and edit information.

Step 2 – Get Your Google Merchant ID

To get started with Google Merchants, follow this link. You will be taken to your merchant dashboard. From here you can monitor your feeds, product list, and some more options.

So when you send your WooCommerce Products to Google, they will be listed here.

Finding your merchant ID from here is easy. It is given just beside our Profile image as shown in the image below:

Google Merchant ID

Copy the Merchant ID and save it.

Step 3 – Sync Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce With Google Merchant Shop

Finally, when you have your Client ID, Client Secret, and Merchant ID, Go to Your Dashboard> Product Feed> Google Merchant Settings.

Put all the information accordingly as shown below:

Enter Google Merchant Credentials to PFM

Once you have everything in place, click on Submit. After submitting, click on Authenticate.

It will redirect you to the permission page of Google. Allow your Google account to approve access to your authorized domain. Then you will get a message that ‘You are authorized’.

Authorized for Auto-sync

And you are all set! Now it’s time to use the auto-sync feature to send your WooCommerce Products to Google Merchant Shop.

Step 4 – Schedule the Auto-Sync

Now that the setup is complete, you can go to your product feed, and on the right side of the page, you will see that there is the new feature, Send to Google Merchant.

Schedule Product Feed Auto-sync to Google

Under this section, you will have the options:

  • Target Country
  • Target Language
  • Schedule
  • Select Hour
Send To Google Merchant Box

First, choose the Target Country and the Language.

FYI:
You have to input a short form, and it has to match Google’s format. At first, you can see a small paragraph with a ‘Click here’ link. Go there and check the short forms of your desired target country and language to be accurate.

Next, you can set your schedule according to your own will.

Choose between Weekly, Monthly, or Hourly basis.

Schedule Types

If you choose Hourly:

Hourly Schedule

Then select the number of hours after which the schedule will be triggered.

If you choose Weekly:

Weekly schedule

Then choose a day of the week and the hour of that day when this schedule will be triggered.

If you choose Monthly:

Monthly schedule

Then choose the date of a month and the hour of that day when this schedule will be triggered.

You can go to your Google Merchant Center > Feed and check the feed that was sent.

Since the schedule is set, this feed will be updated automatically according to the schedule, regularly.

Now your feeds are properly synchronized with Google Merchant Center and you won’t need to access your accounts every time you update your product feeds. Hence, no more manually uploading WooCommerce Products to Google.

Just simply make changes to your feed, and your Google Merchant Shop will get the update automatically.

Conclusion

Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce has been under constant improvement to help you promote your products easily.

If you find any Google feed errors, our support team is always there to give you instant support when you need it.

Update your Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce on a regular basis and benefit from all the new features we add on a regular basis.

We hope this article was useful to you and we wish you a delightful journey with your WooCommerce Store by auto-syncing your WooCommerce Products to Google.

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WooCommerce Guide

15 Amazing Ways To Prepare Your WooCommerce Store For Holidays [2024]

WooCommerce store for holiday traffic

Holidays are that time of the year when people are excited about all the new and amazing stuff they can get. They are more enthusiastic about buying winter wears, Christmas ornaments, gifts, decorations, and many more.

At this time of the year, sales skyrocket for all online shop owners as people look for exciting offers and Christmas featured goods to spend an amazing holiday.

It is a golden time for the WooCommerce store owners to convert regular prospects into potential buyers. Hence, you should grab this opportunity and prepare your WooCommerce store for holidays at its best.

To begin the preparation, let’s dive into the facts that can boost the sales of your shop during this time.

Optimizing Your WooCommerce Store For Holidays

Optimize your store for holiday traffic

Holidays are the time when people are in a festive mood. Likewise, they expect online stores to have a joyous appearance as well.

Stores that wear holiday suits are an indicator that they are well prepared for the coming vacations and booming with attractive products and offers!!

This is why you need to give your store a makeover to make the best use of this opportunity. Step out of the floor to grab the attention of your possible customers and make them excited about your appearance.

Several WordPress themes are specially made for holidays (both Premium and Free) which you can use if you want. And when the season is over, you can always switch back to your regular one.

Or you can redesign your pages and layout with the help of developers if needed.

You can always get help from WordPress plugins that can help you with special decorative features for your store, such as WP Christmas Class, Tribulent Snow Storm, etc.

Now let’s get on with the tips that can help you out with the process.

Making The Store More Engaging

Here are some tips that can help you make your store more attractive and engaging.

1. Get Exciting Banners

A Banner is a great medium to highlight your most trending offers and discounts. You can dazzle your viewers easily with the best discounts and promotions for the holidays using a holiday banner.

Create an amazing banner that hooks the minds of interested customers. Include the best offers you have that relate to Christmas and the holidays.

You can use the same banner to promote your offers on other social platforms and link it with your landing page. The idea is to get as many people to know about your offer as possible.

This way they will realize what they will miss if they don’t visit your store. Plus they will expect to find more offers on your store and spend more time to look around and find suitable products for themselves.

You can see the example of iThemes below. They have highlighted an amazing Christmas banner on their landing page which includes their biggest discount deal.

Holiday banner example

2. Catchy Holiday Pop-Ups

Pop-ups are a trend these days, especially during the holidays. They can be really useful to highlight offers, reduce cart abandonment, or exhibit promo codes/coupons. Thus helping your customers with the right pathway to purchase.

Some reasonable use of popups are

  • If someone is browsing through your store for a few seconds and intend to leave without any action, you can set up a pop-up to show them your best offer for holidays. (Usually known as exit intent pop-ups)
  • When someone adds a product to the cart, you can view a pop-up highlighting offers on any more related products, influencing them to probably buy more products.
  • If they are about to leave the cart or discard the cart, you can include a cart abandon pop-up with promo codes or holiday discounts on the total to keep the customer from leaving.

Don’t forget to decorate your pop-ups with attractive designs that express the feel of holidays just like the way Packed Party did. They have beautifully re-arranged their subscription pop-ups with a festive touch of Christmas, showcasing the importance of captivating popup design to enhance user experience and convey a seasonal atmosphere.

Holiday pop-up example

Usually, the goal of using pop-ups is to increase the chances of engaging with more and more prospects in your store. Thus increasing the possibilities of sales.

But using too many pop-ups can be annoying and can drive customers away. So don’t overuse them.

3. Embrace The Festive Look

As we said earlier, during this time people are looking for delightful stuff all over the internet. It is your duty to maintain that feel in your store as well.

You can change the background color or add a background image featuring Christmas, add decorations on buttons, and many more. You can also have an exclusive font style in your store just for the holidays.

Some WordPress themes are focused explicitly on holidays and allow you to make a few of these changes quickly. Shojumaru and Ranchers are two great themes for giving your store a holiday touch.

Decorate the headings and especially the holiday text with stylish fonts. But make sure not to include any font style that is hard to read.

FYI: It is wise not to use any authentic font styles on the product details or on any necessary information that helps users to understand your business. Your content should be kept in simple font styles so that they are easy to read.

Create MindBlowing Offers

Holiday offers for your store

During the holidays, peoples’ expectations from online stores increase massively. They are more likely to adore sites that provide more exclusive and rare offers.

To meet their expectations, you also need to give unique offers and discounts limited for the holidays that will make consumers purchase from your store and not from your competitors.

Here are some suggestions that will come in handy.

4. Promote Your Products

To begin with the holidays, the first thing that comes on the list is to let your targeted customers know that you have the products on-demand in your stock.

This is a long process and previewing your products just on your website is not enough. You need to promote your products on multiple merchant shops that can give you a rise in conversion.

You can speed up this process with one of the many plugins available in the WordPress repository. These plugins will help you generate your product feeds in accordance with different formats of the merchant centers such as Google Merchant Shop, Facebook Dynamics, eBay MIP, etc. Later you upload can promote them to your desired merchant shops.

Many online store owners have been successfully doing it using the Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce plugin. We suggest you do the same as well.

5. Give Exclusive Discounts

Your discount campaigns are the primary source of attraction during the holidays, which customers look forward to. Try to set up creative offers that excite the buyers and gradually lead them to making purchases.

You can offer a discount on your best holiday selling product (maybe 30%) and start an active campaign to reach out to all of your customers with that offer.

Try to bring something different by setting a target purchase amount and offer discounts on the total.

You can also offer a discount or a gift certificate that they will get in the next purchase from your shop. This will prompt them to make another investment in the future.

6. Offer Free Shipping

Free shipping is another way to give people a positive vibe about your store. They will develop a reliable trust with your service that you care for them. This will inspire them more in the future to purchase from your store. Hence you can consider giving a free shipping offer during the holidays.

7. Start A Countdown Watch

Give prospects a feeling of urgency in your store. Create exclusive limited-time offers. It will make your prospects feel that they will miss a great opportunity if not taken right away.

You can easily do this by adding a countdown timer to your store, highlighting a time limit for some of your great offers. This way, your possible consumers will get into a challenge to choose between “now or never”.

There are many plugins available in the WordPress repository for this purpose only.

8. Bundle Offers

Bundle products are a great attraction to most families. Since people are looking for their essential commodities during this time, you can easily bundle up several related products into a single discounted price and present them as offers to your customers.

Bundle offers for your store

Let’s say you have an online wine shop. Including that you also provide other accessories for its ambient environment. Basically, people will look for a quality store to purchase beverages when it is time for a celebration such as Christmas.

You can create a bundle that includes your best class wine, along with some additional tools like ice-breaking boxes and wine drinking glasses. You can offer this bundle at a single discounted price. This will surely get them delighted.

You can also create a combo package of different accessories for your customers. For example, creating a dinner set with all relative items (plates, glasses, forks, etc) at a comparatively low price than offering discounts separately on each of the items.

Bundle offers are a great way to make more money from your holiday sales. Make sure you include a few to attract potential customers.

9. Attractive Gift Ideas

Try to generate unique gift ideas for your customers. You can arrange creative quizzes or riddles where all your subscribed customers can take part in. WordPress quiz allows you to design fun and interactive quizzes that engage your audience, fostering a sense of community while enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

You can include a raffle draw where anyone making a purchase will be able to take part in and get a chance to win something exclusive. Make people buy your products in such a way that they feel like they have a chance to win something extra in return.

These type of practices are the best to engage clients in your store and turn them into potential leads. People love to gain something by winning regardless of their age and gender.

10. Build An Emotional Trust

Though holidays are a delightful moment for most of us, some people aren’t that lucky to be able to have a happy holiday. So it is only human to help them out. Many of your customers also feel the same way.

Hence, you can arrange a charity campaign during the holidays where you can donate a part of all your sales revenue to the less fortunate ones. Many customers will find this very generous and probably make a few extra purchases.

This will not only help you get some extra sales but will also allow you to become a more generous person, helping the needy. You will be proud of your own store and the community will have extra respect for your store.

11. Email Campaigns

Email campaigns are pretty reliable. But sending the same email to all of your subscribers has become old-fashioned now.

Send personalized e-mails to customers based on the products they recently browsed in your store. You can easily track them using certain plugins. Then you can send targeted emails to them with relevant products and offers based on their interests.

For example, if a person went through t-shirts in your store in his last, you can send him e-mails with the latest offers on t-shirts, featuring Christmas and the holidays.

As for your regular customers, it is best to create customer personas for them and send them offers for certain things that they purchase on a regular basis or products they have viewed frequently but didn’t make the purchase.

These are some unique ways of engaging people with interest. The more innovative you get in it, the more effective they are.

Get Ready For Holiday Traffic To Your Store

Prepare your WooCommerce Store for holidays

Attractive holiday themes and exciting offers are the two ways to boost your holiday sales. Having said that, holidays also mean more visitors to your store.

You have to be ready with the technical aspects of your stores. Terms you should consider before getting ready for holiday sales are:

12. Website Speed

If your website is taking more than 3 secs to load, it is enough for the visitors to quit your site and move on to another.

To make sure it doesn’t happen, monitor your site loading speed. You can do it by Google PageSpeed Insights(PSI) or via Pingdom Tools.

If there are any images or any contents that are lowered down your site speed, PSI will detect them and you can minimize them.

Ideally, if you upload images correctly in your themes, they should automatically be compressed and resized (usually not more than 157kb).

You will also get an overview of your server response time by PSI. If you don’t find it fit for holiday loads, try reducing the server response time.

13. Upgrade To The Latest Version Of PHP and MySQL

Ever since PHP 7 was released, as stated by users, it can give your site a 2x faster performance and improves memory consumption up to a significant amount.

Running the latest version of PHP 7 is not enough. Make sure your database is also updated as well to be compatible with the current version of your framework.

To ensure your site runs perfectly on PHP 7, check its compatibility with PHP Compatibility Checker Plugin by WPEngine.

14. Use of CDN

During holidays, It is common for the store owners to upload more content such as banners, holiday GIFs, short clips, etc.

Use of these heavy files bears a reasonable cause to drag your loading speed down. Hence, it is a good practice to use a content delivery network, i.e. CDN, for delivering all of your content from the nearest caching servers.

This way your server will be safe from undertaking heavy loads and your site will load more quickly with less latency.

15. Hosting Server Capacity

We all know that to run a good WooCommerce store, you must have a good hosting server. But now that it is the holiday season, you will surely get a surge of visitors to your store.

If your regular traffic is satisfying, then chances are during holidays the number will get double (even more). This is why you need to make sure whether your hosting server is ready for it or not.

Hence, once you have planned out the preparations for your store with offers and promotions, you should consult with your hosting provider to allow you on getting a flexible plan for the holidays. You wouldn’t want customers to face a server crash due to excess visitors at a time.

Conclusion

As a WooCommerce shop owner, you have to be concerned with all the aspects that can help you grow your store.

You can often choose to take help from remote agencies to help you out with these or you can carry out all of these yourself.

You can boost the sales of your store with a higher conversion rate in holidays by preparing an amazing store, a fast-performing website, and the ability to connect with your customers.

Thus, brace yourself and prepare for a delightful holiday fever. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

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WooCommerce Guide Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce

6+ Powerful Google Product Feed Optimization Tips For E-commerce Success

Optimize Google Product Feed

Google is the #1 search engine in the world and seemingly the best place for marketing. Google offers Google Merchant Center to allow eCommerce stores to promote their products through Google.

If an eCommerce store can create proper Google product feeds, its sales can skyrocket in no time.

But, you will need to know how to optimize Google Shopping feed so that your Google product feed is approved by Google in the first place. 

Your WooCommerce store may include many variations and attributes for your products, but Google Merchant Center has its own set of requirements that you must meet in order to upload your products and get approved with your Google product feed.

That’s why I came up with 6+ high-impact Google product feed optimization tips and going to explain them in this blog.

So, let’s get started!

**P.S. These are just basic tips. If you want a detailed guide then read:

1. Select Product Category According To Google

Google Product Feed Category

Your website may have custom categories, different from Google. But Google has its own taxonomy list, and you must submit a feed accordingly.

You must make sure that Google product feed has all the products categorized according to the Google taxonomy list.

Your website may have custom categories, different from Google. But Google has its own taxonomy list, and you must submit a feed accordingly. You must make sure that Google product feed has all the products categorized according to the Google taxonomy list.

When you optimize product feeds, you must map your categories with Google category list, or else Google won’t accept it.

For Example:
If you have a product under the category ‘Apparels > Bodywear’ on your site, it is not in the Google taxonomy list. So you need to map it with the most relevant one. In this case, in Google, the product should be under ‘Apparel & Accessories > Clothing.’

Also when mapping, be as specific as possible and categorize the product under the most relevant sub-heading. 

For example, if your product is a Tuxedo, then the best category under Google will be ’Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Suits > Tuxedos.’ 

This will narrow down search results for targeted customers, hence more chance of a conversion.

2. Deciding A Good Title

Your product title is what Google relies on when deciding how to optimize Google Shopping feed for a customer’s search phrase.

Plus the title acts as a hook, to grab customers’ attention and create more interest.

Google allows you to write a title of up to 150 characters. It is wise to optimize product feeds by giving a title that says what your product is from your eCommerce store, and some of its best features that people search for.

For Example:
If you are selling a Tuxedo for a particular brand — let’s assume ‘Rexth Clothing’ is a brand. You can choose the title “Rexth Ultralight Black Modern Fit Tuxedo With Golden Buttons.” This title highlights the brand, the color, the type, the product itself and one of its exclusive features.

Now, basic Google previews will only show 35 characters only. So try to make the first 35 characters relevant to what people might search for when looking for this particular product.

Inside the Google Merchant Portal, it will only display 75 characters and the rest will show when the customer clicks on your product. Which means you should include your best keywords within the first 75 characters.

It’s ideal for shop owners to write titles within 75 characters and include target keywords there for optimized results.

Google Product Preview

**P.S.: Don’t add promotional phrases to your title such as “Limited offer,” “Special Discount,” etc. Google algorithms take these negatively.

3. Beginning Of Description

After searching for a product on Google, a person will be able to see a preview of the details of your product. These details include the title, description, review rating, price, etc.

For description, even though you can write up to 5000 characters, the first couple of lines are crucial. How to optimize Google shopping feed involves making the description as compelling and informative as possible within the first 175 characters.

The description on Google Shopping Preview will only display the first 175 characters of the actual description. 

Thus you should try to include the best benefits and features of your products in the first couple of lines. This will act as a trigger to create ‘desire’ in customers.

Try to make it precise and not a marketing promotion of your site.

Description

4. Detailed Description

As we mentioned earlier, the beginning of the product description is crucial and should be catchy while including targeted keywords. But this doesn’t change the fact that you have to write a proper description nonetheless. 

Make the description as detailed as possible and include all the features and benefits of your product. This is crucial for google feed optimization as it helps in better ranking and visibility.

Also, keep in mind the SEO attributes when writing the description. Make sure to include keywords and avoid including any irrelevant data.

Do not give any misinformation. Reminding you that just one bad review can lower your rankings on Google search.

5. Advantage Of A Unique Image For Google Product Feed Optimization

Even though you may have multiple images for your product, Google will specifically ask for an image link to a picture of your product, which will be used as the preview photo in the search results.

Google Shopping Preview

It is best to create a high-quality Image for this purpose. Now, most shop owners directly take images from the manufacturers’ sites; thus almost all of their previews are about the same.

The smart thing to do here is to try and give a picture that is different and will stand out.

You can take a photo on your own or search for a uniquely clicked photo of the same product and use them (as long it is not a copyright infringement) as the image for your product.

Having a unique photo on display, among others who all look similar to each other, will create more curiosity among customers.

Unique Picure

A different picture stands out and grabs customers’ attention.

But do make sure not to add extra promotional text on the images. Also, it is advised to give an image with a white background.

6. Include The Mandatory Data In Your Google Product Feed

Include The Mandatory Data for Google Product Feed Optimization

Apart from the product category, title, description and image, there are a few more data which you must include in your product feed.

(i) Condition

This basically lets you choose from the options ‘new’, ‘refurbished’ or ‘used.’

(ii) Availability

You can choose from the options, ‘in stock’, ‘out of stock’ or ‘pre-order’. This information has to be included on your feed and later updated according to current availability on a regular basis.

**P.S.: Failure to deliver, while saying the product is available, has a negative impact. One bad review from a customer can affect Google’s priority on your products. Hence, be honest about the availability.

(iii) Price

You need to specify the product price and currency.

Make sure to include VAT within the price (except in the USA, Canada or India). Most customers expect to pay exactly what is mentioned. (The only extra fee people may agree to pay is the shipping charge).

**Note: Don’t tweak your Google product feed and make it different from your actual site, at least in the case of the data that are to be displayed on the preview. Once you provide the data, Google will cross-check with your website. Any mismatch and Google will penalize your ranking.

(iv) GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)

This is a unique product identifier for any product (often in the form of barcodes).

You may know GTIN as UPC (if in North America), EAN/UCC (if in most places outside North America), JAN (if in Japan), ISBN (if you deal with books), etc. There are more countries which call it by different names, but all serve the same purpose.

Often products may have multiple GTINs. In that case, you may choose either one. If you are offering a package with numerous products, then providing the GTIN of any one of the products will be fine.

GTIN is not a marketing term or a feature of the product. But Google algorithm gives more priority to products that have GTIN. So it’s best to include it in your Google Product Feed.

(v) MPN (Manufacturer Part Number)

MPN is a unique identifier of each product, deduced by the manufacturer. You will be required to include this in case you don’t have a GTIN for any product.

**In case you have a product with no GTIN or MPN, you need to mark the ‘identifier_exists’ attribute of that particular product as false. Not marking it false will automatically be considered as true, and Google will look for a GTIN in your product feed. In this case, your product feed will be rejected.

(vi) Product Link

You will need to provide a direct link to the product, not the root domain.

(vii) Brand Name

Google will ask for the name of the manufacturer, not your company or any distributors. So don’t include your name in this field unless it is your own manufactured product.

(viii) Product ID

The product ID is the code you assign to your products on your website. This will allow you to keep track of your products from Google to your site.

Google Merchant Shop is a must for any WooCommerce shop owners, who want more potential customers.

Make sure you have created a proper Google Product Feed. In case you are not confident in creating on your own, you can use plugins or feed management tools.

You May Try Out A WordPress Plugin

The process of setting up and keeping up a Google Shopping feed takes time and work.

You can rely on the plugin Product Feed Manager For WooCommerce (developed by us, RexTheme) which is simple to use and will help you generate Google Product Feed with no hassle. It has a built-in feed format set up for Google and many other merchants’ shops.

Product Feed Manager

This plugin will let you map categories very easily, and all you will need to do is select the products you want to generate a feed for. 

It will create a feed that you can auto-sync with your Google Merchant Shop, and with little or no changes, your products will be up on Google Shipping. 

You may try using its free version and see if it suits you.

Categories
WooCommerce Guide

10+ Tips To Optimize Your WooCommerce Store For Best Results

Optimize Your WooCommerce Store - Boost Your Sales Up

There are over 4 million WooCommerce stores out there (as per the WP repository). It alone powers up more than 30% of all e-commerce stores (according to Wikipedia).

Along with that, there is also a massive increase in people making online purchases. Retail sales in online shops have increased by around 42% from 2014 to 2018 (according to statista.com).

But still, there are many WooCommerce store owners who are facing challenges to reach their targeted sales goal.

In this post, we will discuss how to overcome those challenges and boost your sales.

First of all, you need to create a proper WooCommerce Product feed in the most optimized way. Then you can focus on optimizing your store by following the instructions below.

These are the tasks you must do if you want greater results from your WooCommerce Store (click on the topic to read detailed tips):

  1. Make Your WooCommerce Store Simple Yet Useful
  2. Prepare Your Store For Holidays
  3. Ensure User Security
  4. Speed Up Your Online Store
  5. Implement Up-Selling And Cross-Selling
  6. Learn When to Send E-mails And When To Stop
  7. Make The Product Title Relevant
  8. Implementation of GTIN is a Must
  9. Make Your Site GDPR Compliant
  10. Use Effective Description
  11. Color Attribute Optimization
  12. Focus On Visual Marketing
  13. Ensure Refund Policy
  14. Team Up With An A.I.

1. Make Your WooCommerce Store Simple Yet Useful

Easy and Simple Website

While making a WooCommerce store, you have to keep in mind that your site needs to be as much user-friendly as possible.

The first thing you need to ensure is that the site doesn’t look too complicated. Use a simple, but standard theme that is compatible with WooCommerce.

Keep the search procedure for products one step ahead of your customer. Include an AJAX search engine with advanced filter options to help customers narrow down their search to a handful of products.

Add the feature of displaying recommended products similar to the prospects’ search history.

2. Prepare Your Store For Holidays

Holiday Store

During holidays/festivals, people all over the world are in a joyous mood. They are hopeful to see something exciting in your store.

More people find leisure time and usually make more purchases online during the holidays. Statistics show that during holidays, online sales increased by 15.5%.

It is wise to take advantage of it and increase your sales by exclusively modifying your WooCommerce store just for the holidays.

Try altering the colors and designs of your store in a way so that your customers get the message that you are ready for sales and making their holidays better. For example, you can set up a colorful holiday banner highlighting your biggest sales offers during this time.

If you add some exciting offers to your WooCommerce store during special occasions, it will surely boost your sales. You can offer discounts on products that highlight the occasion. For example, a discount on Santa Hats during Christmas.

You may also provide other special discount offers. For example, you can announce a 10% discount on any $250+ purchases made. Or create bundles of multiple products and offer a discount on the subtotal. Some companies offer free shipping during the holidays.

Holidays are also a golden opportunity for you to introduce new products and engage in campaigns to enhance your market.

Take it seriously and start your holiday plans now! (Click here to learn about more ways to get prepared for holidays.)

3. Ensure User Security

User Security

With the increasing number of eCommerce stores, it has become essential to maintain high security.

Prospects use confidential data such as debit/credit card information online and it is very important to make sure their data is secured and not misused.

Make sure to add SSL certificates to your store or else search engines will mark the site as ‘unsafe’, which will definitely discourage your prospects from staying on your site.

You can do a few more things to keep your store more secure. Give a strong password for your WooCommerce store admin panel so that hackers cannot find their way in. Make sure to keep regular backups of your site.

Also, keep all your plugins and themes updated at all times to maintain site security. Limit the number of administrative roles to as little as possible.

4. Speed Up Your Online Store

Speed Up Your Online Store

On average, visitors do not like to wait more than 3 secs for your site to load. Hence a slow site can be a reason to lose potential prospects on your site.

Monitor your site’s loading speed on a regular basis. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insight & Pingdom help you keep track of your site’s speed.

One factor affecting your site’s speed is images. Images are vital contents of your store. But heavier images will take more time for your site to load.

Make sure to optimize your image sizes to a moderate dimension where it is not too heavy and at the same time can give you a good resolution.

Normally, an image doesn’t need to be larger than 150kb for a large full-width preview. Your image size should be smaller than that.

Learn about more ways to speed up your site.

Once you have tried the basics and your site is still slow, it is best to consult with your hosting provider or professional developers. But don’t ignore it.

5. Implement Up-Selling And Cross-Selling

Upselling & Cross-selling

Up-selling and cross-selling give you the option to make your customers aware of the additional products in your store that they might not have encountered yet.

Up-selling encourages a prospect to purchase a comparatively higher-end product than the one in hand. Cross-selling suggests the prospect buy products or accessories related to the product he is interested in.

In eCommerce marketing, these two practices are very highly effective. They are focused on adding customer value which can prove to be useful or related to their lifestyle.

The process is very short and easy. You can add products to your cart page that you wish to promote or suggest on your own.

6. Learn When to Send E-mails And When To Stop

Email and Newsletter Notification

Email marketing is a great way to spread the word about your products and offers to users.

Once a user has subscribed, you can send e-mails to the users regarding any new offers or exciting news you may have regarding your store.

Then again, keep in mind that e-mail marketing also requires proper market analysis. You need to understand the latest trends and demands of prospects and then decide on whether it is the right time to reach out. Prioritize email deliverability and use something like DKIM check to prevent your domain phishing and spamming.

Plus, the products you offer in your e-mails should be relevant to the prospect’s search history or popular products in your store.

However, sending too many e-mails and newsletters can irritate your customers. So it is wise to keep it to a minimum unless you have a good email marketing campaign running. For example, do not send more than 1 e-mail a week. But if you have a week-long discount offer, you can shoot e-mails probably thrice a week.

Make sure to send emails with proper purpose; do not spam.

And if your product is a WordPress plugin, then Promote WordPress plugins with relevant marketing tactics.

7. Make The Product Title Relevant

When it comes to managing your products, choosing a good title is important. Often, vendors focus on much-complicated areas rather than the title itself. But, a proper title is vital in catching your prospect’s attention.

Look for similar products on Google and find out how they are named. Try to understand why they are getting more attention and ask yourself several questions like,

  • What do you like/dislike about your competitor’s product names?
  • Are the titles too long/ short/ direct/ memorable?
  • Do they follow proper keyword research?
  • Are they SEO optimized and how?
  • How do they fit titles for each category (Branding, Purchasing, Packaging) of items?

Do proper research on these basics, before going into details.

Once you have a good idea about these products, you can then plan to decide what you can apply to your products and what will get them more traction.

Check several times if your content follows proper keywords or not. Take help from online keyword checker tools(such as kwfinder) if needed.

Research is always good and helps you identify what you are missing.

It will also let you understand your strong points over your competitors. For example, you might even find your competitor’s title too long or too short.

Conduct research and work optimizing your product’s title, descriptions, and other data to get more customer attention.

8. Implementation of GTIN is a Must

GTIN Compliance

The common trend in the online market is, most of the WooCommerce site vendors are resellers. If you are one of them, then GTIN is important data to look at. GTIN means Global Trade Item Number.

Here’s how GTIN is important:

  • Google’s algorithm takes GTIN into consideration. Through this, the advertisement of your product feed is pulled from the supplier’s catalog. And then placed in the auction with other resellers of similar products.
  • Once you get your listing into Google’s Product Listing Ad, you will be getting quality leads for your site. Thus resulting in better CPC and boosting your ROI.
  • You will be able to get placements with search queries like “Top” or “Best”, portraying your products as the better ones.

Hence it is only logical to include GTIN while managing your product feed.

9. Make Your Site GDPR Compliant

The current popularity of online stores influences thousands of prospects to make online purchases every second. People are inputting sensitive data (such as their banking information) on eCommerce sites which may be stored in the database.

The more the data, the greater the possibility of a data protection breach. Thus there will be a major tantrum if the information is stolen or misused.

To prevent millions of users from falling victim to these kinds of disasters, GDPR was introduced on May 15, 2018, requiring all the organizations in Europe, that hold data of internet users, to provide a high level of protection and offer explicit control to users on their personal information.

If an organization fails to comply with the rules of GDPR, possibilities are it will be fined administrative fees of up to € 20 million.

Although GDPR is a law in many countries in Europe, this can also affect offshore businesses where GDPR is not mandatory.

Any business all over the world, that is willing to collect information from a European prospect, must comply with the GDPR rule.

Make sure your store is compliant with the GDPR laws if you don’t wish to miss out on prospects from Europe.

10. Use Effective Description

The product description is very important to create awareness among prospects about your products. You may follow the instructions below to make your product description more effective.

i. Keep it Short & Simple

Try to keep the description within 300 words, but then again, this really depends on the product. But don’t make the description long unless it is really necessary.

For uncommon products, keep in mind that the prospect reading the description may or may not know of the product. Hence you need to construct a description that is both readable and useful.

ii. Mirror the product information from the manufacturer’s website

Try to match specific details in your description to the product description of its actual manufacturer. This way, the users will find the information more relevant and credible.

iii. Don’t Deceive Your Customers

Be honest about the product description. Avoid creating biased positive features or stop exaggerating about your product.

If you provide false information, you might boost some sales initially, but in the long run, it might just have a negative effect.

You will miss out on getting recurring customers as they will not visit your site again after being deceived

People may give negative reviews and discourage others from visiting your WooCommerce store.

Other good products on your WooCommerce store may be overlooked and your overall sales profit will fall soon enough.

11. Color Attribute Optimization

Color Attribute

A single product can have different colors. You need to follow precise filters so the users can narrow down their search results. Use Color Attributes to describe the color of your product.

Major merchant shops will deny your product if there is a mismatch between the product’s actual color and the information given on the landing page.

Google Shopping uses primary colors to determine the varieties of product colors. Although there are many shades of blue, Google may not recognize these unique colors.

In this case, you need to learn how to bucket unique colors into primary color categories.

12. Focus On Visual Marketing

People love it when you give them a more authentic form of description along with good content.

In online shops, prospects cannot see a product physically. This leaves them with complete reliance on the images you provide. This is why you need to be more serious when providing images of your products.

Include more quality images and avoid using unnecessary text on your WooCommerce store. Keep the background of your product photos White and make sure the item gets enough light.

A bad resolution will prevent prospects from getting into the details. It is your duty to make sure that your product photos have high resolution to support zoom in/out.

Provide several photos of the product from many different angles to try and give the prospect an intricate visual.

There are other ways to enhance the popularity of your store’s content as well.

Short GIFs or 3D images are the latest options that are being used and can be very fruitful in engaging with your customer’s overall idea about your service or products.

13. Ensure Refund Policy

Trust and reliability are important when running a WooCommerce store. Hence, having a refund, return, or exchange policy is important.

For example, you may include a 3-day exchange or return policy if not satisfied with the product, and offer a refund in case it is a return.

This will indicate that you are confident about the quality of your products and value customer satisfaction. Thus people will find you more credible and reliable.

14. Team Up With An A.I.

Artificial intelligence is rocking the virtual world out there. Global giants such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have already integrated artificial intelligence into their services.
According to a survey, A.I. can potentially boost the overall industrious sales rate by up to 38% by 2035.

According to Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet,

Artificial Intelligence

It is high time that we think of the endless possibilities that A.I. has to offer for WooCommerce stores. In fact, many plugins like Akismet, MyCurator Content Curator, and WatsonFinds are already implementing A.I.

One of the best Artificial Intelligence services is chatbots. Chatbots offer live chat services to your store visitors.

They may guide users to their desired products or help users compare one product with another, all on their own. They give immediate answers to the relevant questions users may have.

For your WooCommerce Store, live chat can be the key to your ultimate customer acquisition strategy.

Currently, LiveAgent’s Live Chat Software is one of the most advanced live chat tools you can have on a WooCommerce or WordPress site.

Consider including a chatbot on your WooCommerce store, if not included already.

Conclusion

I believe that your WooCommerce store is a reflection of your hard work.

Your hard work combined with some eCommerce expert tips can help your store grow.

If clarity and proper standards are maintained to optimize your WooCommerce store, you can increase your potential prospects.

Hence, you should focus on keeping up with the race and stand out among your competitors.

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