Simon Tomkins Author Page - Cofounder of CommerceGurus

23 Ways to Prepare Your Online Store for Holiday Sales

What would you do if you only had 30 days to prepare your online store for the holiday sales? What type of optimizations can you make to your WooCommerce store with such a limited amount of time to prepare?

If you are an online store owner who is starting out for the first time, finding what to optimize in such a short time is often difficult. That’s why we have decided to help.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are all about getting the most sales in the minimum time. To achieve that goal, you must have a clear strategy and an optimized website to reap the desired profits.

In this post we’ll learn how to prepare your online store for the holiday season sales in a short span of time. We have 23 ways to get ready, almost one for each day.

Let’s get started!

WooCommerce Images – the ultimate guide for your site

By Simon Tomkins14 Comments

High quality product images are a crucial factor in driving visitor engagement to your WooCommerce store. After looking at the best WooCommerce examples, excellent photography was a common feature. In this guide I’ll be showing you how to create great images within WooCommerce (no blurry ones) which are also optimized for speed. You’ll be able to apply these techniques, whatever the WooCommerce theme you’re using.

These performance benefits are a hugely important aspect of this. According to the HTTP Archive in 2019, images make up an average 21% of a total page’s weight. Having a fast WooCommerce site is crucial and you can see from the chart below what a big part images and video play in this.

Create a Better Thank You Page in WooCommerce

By Simon Tomkins4 Comments

We’ve had a couple of questions about the WooCommerce thank you page or confirmation screen, with people looking to edit the output. By default, its display is rather simple and doesn’t it offer any in-built options to change what is presented.

I think many stores are missing a trick here. There’s a number of features which could be very valuable to display on this screen. From sharing your purchases, signing up to a newsletter to displaying product guides, we’ll go through some ideas and then show you how to add them to your own WooCommerce store. Let’s make it work harder for you and get additional leads, signups and survey results. A strong thank you page can do more than simply display the order details.

Website Maintenance Costs – What to Expect

By Simon TomkinsLeave a comment

Website maintenance costs are an increasingly important topic for store owners. With so many hosting options, plus the cost of additional plugins and services you can add, some site owners have said that it’s getting more and more expensive to run an eCommerce site. We’re going to look at the monthly costs for folks running small, medium, and large eCommerce stores. Plus, we’ll look at simple maintenance tasks you can do yourself to help keep these costs down. Finally, we’ll look at a couple of paid services which offer excellent security and peace of mind benefits for anyone who is running a site which makes money.

Opensource eCommerce – 21+ Completely Free Platforms in 2020

By Simon Tomkins3 Comments

We’ll be looking at open source eCommerce platforms upon which you could build your online store. These platforms are all completely free, with source code you can access and change. All of them are self-hosted so you’ll need to have your own web server first of all before you can go about installing any of these.

WooCommerce Examples – 38+ Top Designs to learn from (2021 update)

By Simon Tomkins2 Comments

In this blog post I’m going to be showing you the top WooCommerce examples in 2021. This won’t be just a static gallery of beautiful screenshots. Each example will include a tip or action you can implement on your own WooCommerce site.

So, if you love real world WooCommerce examples and want to know how to apply key learnings to your own store, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in!

Do you want a whopping $50 off Shoptimizer for WooCommerce?