WooCommerce: 3 ways to increase sales using customers registration

One of the worst fears for anybody who is trying to sell their products or service online is the so called “conversion rate”.

For those who are not familiar with this term, it means the rate of customers who, once they reached your website, actually purchase a product.

While it’s true that it’s important to increase the number of visitors, the difference lies in this percentage, as usually only 8% of the users of online stores actually adds products to their cart (80% of the visitors leave stores within a few seconds)

This means that for any customer who stays in your store, ten more are leaving without you having any contact with them.

Is there a way to get back to these customers?

There are more then one, actualy, just like the number of plugins dedicated to abandoned carts, live chat services and so on…

One of the most efficient ways is to bring customers to register on your website, since vendors will gain a whole lot of advantages, such as the opportunity to assign a face to their customers and have access to their email address.

This allows you to create a newsletter, get back to lost customers and abandoned cart, offer deals etc…

For this same reason WooCommerce offers to restrict purchases for registered users only (besides from being a basic prerequisite for specific products, such as digital ones).

But using this option can only save the small amount of customers who reaches the purchase options, what about the remaining 92%?

A business model which is recently getting more popular (due to its results) is the one based on selling products to registered users only. This will grant you a much higher humber of subscribers, but if done the wrong way, it may compromise your sales.

In this asrticle we are going to see how to create an efficient website in which products are displayed to registered users, in three easy steps:

• How to display products to registered users only
• An alternative option to bring customers to register
• How to deal with registrations

In order to do so, we are going to use three different plugins.

Restrict access to registered users only

Using an appropriate marketing campaign and arousing your customer’s curiosity by hiding the product catalog to unregistered users can highly increase the number of registrations.

You may offer previews, show brands only, show only a part of your products… There are many ways to make your visitors curious about your store, but how do we restrict access to registered users only, then?

You can do so using the YITH WooCommerce Membership plugin, which among other things, allows you to link website content (posts, pages, products etc…) to a specific action.

This action could be the purchase of a product (online courses, for example) or, as in our case, registration.

So how do we set this plugin up? Once it’s installed and activated, you should create a new membership plan by going to Membership > Add Plan:

As you can see it allows you to choose which content you wish to link to the plan.

Since you want to hid products to unregistered customers, you are going to have to select all you wish to hide using tags, selecting related products or whole categories.

Once you have linked all of the products you wish to reserve to registered users, save and move on to the settings. Of all the available options, you need to look for two of them in particular: The first one is “Membership Plan on user registration” which allows you to link a membership plan to a single customer registration, so select the membership you just created:

Now all you have left to do is hide the products for any other user, to do so go to the “Products in membership” option and set it as “Show Products only to members”:

And this is how you created a store in which products are only visible to registered users, if you’ll use it the right way you will be able to indrease the amount of registration and sales on your website on medium and long term.

Now let’s see another way to bring customers to register.

Registrer: It’s worth it!

In case you  didn’t want to hide your products (despite it might be an effective strategy, there are several reasons why you might choose not to do so) you can still bring your customers to register using one of the most powerful sales tool: discounts.

Consider this: you approach an online store to get a pair of shoes and you see a pop-up informing you that if you register, you’ll be granted a 10% discount.

After all registration is a quick and free process and it’s easy to do even for those who are not actually going to purchase anything.

And that’s not all: once customers will have their discount available, it’s going to be much easier to convert their sales, as they are going to be more likely to want to purchase and not waste their opportunity.

You are going to need a plugin that allows you to change the price of products after customers are registered, such as YITH WooCommerce Role Based Prices.

This plugin allows you to set different prices according to the user’s role within the website, which is why you can set a general discount for those who register:

Doing this, and advertising this service in the right way, you will be able to use this tool to further increase the amount of registered users in your store.

But once you have obtained subscribers, how do you use their full potential?

Get to know your customers

As I’ve stated earlier, having access to emails address and personal data of our customers allows us to make custom offers, increase the average transaction value in our store and increases the chance of future purchases (thanks to a newsletter service, for instance), but is this all of the benefits registering could offer?

WooCommerce allows you to have access to the data users have entered during their registration, but which are the relevant informations you can gather from users?

Considered the viewed pages: if we could have access to their browsing history, we would know the products they are interested in the most and maybe offer them a custom deal.

Sales themselves are a highly relevant tool for statistics: knowing how much a customer buys, what they buy and the average transaction value per customer are essential components of knowing how to shape your own store.

What often happens is that a specific store is built with a different mentality from the one of most customers, which undermines the amount of sales it could potentially have.

Which is why knowing your customers is highly advantageous for your business.

But how do you get access to this data? As I said, WooCommerce has pretty narrow overview of our customers’ movements, which is why we are going to use a third plugin: YITH WooCommerce Costumer History.

This plugin grants you access to all of the previously mentioned information, including the opportunity to get to know the most searched keywords in your store:

So here are the benefits brought by bringing your customers to register on your store, how to do it and how to further improve its benefits. Are you ready to turn your store around?