Drive eCommerce traffic and sales with social sharing

Continuing our WooCommerce plugin recommendations series, today we take a look at a great social sharing plugin which provides users with an incentive to share your products with their friends to receive discount coupons.

At this point I think everyone knows just how critical a strong social media presence is to the success of any eCommerce website. What I think a lot of people struggle with is how to provide tangible rewards to your customers who take positive actions to share your products via social networks.

Equally while you as a merchant will be doing everything in your power to encourage your customers to share your products on social networks, it’s very difficult to track and measure social media as a source of revenue unless you spend a lot of time studying your website analytics.

Enter Social Coupons

Social Coupons for WordPress is a commercial WooCommerce plugin which provides an elegant and tangible solution to the challenges we just outlined. Think of this plugin as a way of providing your customers with a tangible reward (i.e a discount!) at the point of sale for sharing your products via their social networks.

How does it work exactly?

Here’s a short video demonstrating how exactly the plugin works.

As you can see the process is very simple from the customers perspective. Another very nice feature is the ability to offer additional discounts for each additional share to a different social network.

Full feature list

• Gives your users a HUGE reason to share your pages, become a fan, and more!
• Hooks right into the WooCommerce coupon system! Just create a coupon in WooCommerce and select it from the drop down.
• NEW! – Multi Discount support allows users to gain a discount for each social button / social action they complete.
• Set custom URLs for Checkout & Cart Pages, and a second set just for your product pages for total control!
• Control where Social Coupon displays on your product, checkout, and cart pages with built in support for popular WooCommerce template tag hooks.
• Includes Social Coupon shortcode – add Social Coupon to any page, widgets, etc. using a simple one-click short code!
• All buttons can use the current page as the button URL!
• Full HTTPS support loads all plugin assets via secure HTTPS. No security warnings when you go to your checkout pages!
• Set custom expiration date for Social Coupon to limit how long buyers must wait until using it again!
• Choose only the buttons you want to show – easy enable / disable of all buttons.
• Includes mobile layout support! Social Coupon will shrink to fit smaller screens!
• Slick animated button covers keep your layout / button choice looking clean!
• Change Social Coupon text right from settings!
• Retina / High DPI display ready!
• AJAX admin panel!
• Takes only seconds to install and configure!
• Easy edit CSS makes customizing the layout for any theme a walk in the park.
• i18n Support – Comes with full i18n strings ready for translation with default english .mo and .po files.
• Includes full documentation on how to use and install.
• Free updates!
• Supported Buttons:
  • Facebook Like Button
  • Facebook Share Button
  • Google Plus Button
  • Twitter Tweet and Follow Buttons
  • LinkedIn Share Button.
  • Vkontakte (VK.com) Like Button

The admin panel for the plugin is very easy to use and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Overall plugin verdict

I would nearly consider this a must have for any fledgling eCommerce website. God knows I’ve received enough shares from friends on Facebook where you can clearly see it’s being triggered by the prospect of a discount for the sharer 🙂

My only slight concern at the moment with the plugin is that the plugin author doesn’t seem to be actively providing ongoing customer support. This might just be down to the time of year but customer support is a crucial part of the process of providing commercial WooCommerce plugins so that would be my only word of warning with this plugin at the moment. That said at $22 it’s a fantastic plugin that hopefully will continue to be updated as new versions of WooCommerce are released.