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If you’re using WooCommerce for your store to sell sample libraries, plugins or soundsets for synths, then you’ll know there are tens of thousands of plugins available to extend the functionality of your store – but which ones are actually useful specifically for selling these types of products?

We’ve compiled a list of our favourite WooCommerce plugins that you should be aware of, in a variety of different categories. You may not require all of these plugins (we wouldn’t advise installing all of them!) but you should hopefully find some new ones you were not aware of before that will improve your store and potentially increase your sales in the long term.

1. Stripe by WooCommerce – accept all major debit and credit cards from customers in every country in 135+ currencies, as well as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and other local payment methods, such as Alipay, iDeal or SEPA Direct Debit. One of the main benefits of Stripe is that its integrated directly into your site so the customer isn’t redirected to another platform to complete their purchase (like Fastspring or Paypal)
2. Partial.ly payment plans – allow customers to make a down payment on your store (eg. 10%) and pay of the remainder of the cost over a set period of time. Customers don’t get access to download their product until they have completed their payment plan, but this allows customers to purchase your product during sale time and “lock in” the price, then pay it off over time, thus increasing your potential sales.
3. Jilt by WooCommerce – Jilt was originally a cart abandonment platform but has since grown to offer much more functionality such as email marketing (a la Mailchimp). We’re mentioning it here specifically for its cart abandonment features as it excels at this – you can use it to increase your revenue by an average of 10% – 15% by sending follow up emails to customers if they add an item to their cart and don’t complete the checkout.
4. Metorik – Metorik is an all in one solution for “real-time reports, infinite segmentation, product insights, customer tools, email automation, abandoned carts, and 100’s of other features. ” In reality, it gives you a far deeper understanding of your customers while providing additional features such as email marketing (with deep automations / segmentations) and abandoned carts.
5. WooCommerce EU VAT Compliance (Premium) by Simba Hosting – no matter where in the world your business is based, if you’re taking payments from EU customers, you should be charging them VAT. There are many 3rd party companies who can help with VATMOSS reporting and filing such as Fastspring, but if you don’t want to go with them (many of them have a very high transaction fee of up to 9% on each sale), then this plugin does everything you need. It will record each customers evidence of their location, charge them the revelant VAT rate and provide quarterly reports for simple VATMOSS filing.
6. Digital Goods Checkout for WooCommerce – WooCommerce is built to sell digital and physical products. Due to this, the standard customer checkout page can be overloaded with information that customers need to add such as phone number, delivery address and more. This plugin shortens the amount of info required from customers for digital downloads, which in turn can potentially increase your conversion rate.

1. Cloudflare – Cloudflare will help reduce the load on your website by acting as a “reverse proxy”. It sits as a layer between your website and a customer and can cache different elements so saving your website from constantly serving them at all times. It can help mitigate DDOS attacks and they also provide a free SSL cert to save you around $100 per year – all on the free plan!
2. Imagify / WPSmushit – both of these plugins do the same thing so you only need one. They can help you reduce the load on your website and make it load faster for customers by offering a number of features such as “lazy load” (only loading images as the user scrolls down the page) and image compression to avoid loading high resolution images when its not required (resulting in lower site bandwidth and faster load speeds)
3. Updraft Plus – Create automated backups of your entire WordPress/WooCommerce website to external cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3. There’s no reason to not install this so you can always roll back your website to an older version if you need to!

1. Wordfence Security / iThemes Security– Wordfence and iThemes security are similar products and you only need one. Both are all in one security solutions for your WordPress site that offers a number of features such as blocking mailicious traffic, blocking users from attempting brute force password login attempts, a built in file scanner to check your website for mailcious or altered files, 2 factor authentication login, email alerts and much more.
2. WooCommerce Email Verification Pro – this plugin forces users to open an “activation” email and click a link in it for their account to be activated. This helps you negate users creating fake accounts with fake email addresses in order to download free products from your site.
3. Antispam Bee – Antispam Bee is a simple antispam plugin that will stop spam comments and pings/trackbacks from your website.

1. Adroll – When a customer visits your website, Adroll lets your “retarget” them on other websites via their ads. You can set a weekly budget and retarget customers after they visit your website to increase brand recognition and sales over time.
2. Google stories – Google Stories is a new visual format for SEO content that shows up in Google search results, Google Images, Discover, and the Google app. Each page of a Web Story contains a maximum of 10 words. The recommended size of a Web Story is between four and 30 pages.  Web Stories are meant to be consumed by mobile users who want to consume content at a glance. Google describes the typical content consumer as someone on a subway or having lunch. Using Google Stories can help dramatically increase your mobile user traffic.
3. Rank Math / Yoast – both of these plugins are similar so only one is required. They offer deep SEO functionality to increase your website’s SEO ranking and put you in more control over how your website looks on search engines as well as give you better visibility on your keyword optimisation.
4. WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration – this plugin is an alternative to adding your Google Analytics tracking code to your website header code and offers more eCommerce functionality. After you install it, you can get valuable data on your store’s eCommerce metrics such as which countries and referral traffic has the highest conversion rates and much more.
5. Refer A Friend – Refer a Friend helps you increase sales and revenue organically by turning your customers into sales channels. You can reward customers who refer a friend to purchase your software by providing them with store credit or coupons if someone they referred to the website makes a purchase.
6. AffiliateWP – This is similar to the Refer a Friend plugin, but is a more robust affiliate sales platform which allows you to create a network of affiliates who can promote your website and products and get a split of each sale they refer. In generaly, then industry standard is between 10-20% of every sale. It has detailed reporting for affiliates so they can see which of their links are the highest converting as well as a lot of additional functionality.
7. Sumo – Sumo is a simple way to increase your email subscribers on your website by showing them different email subscription forms – from slide in forms, to pop up, to scroll down and many more. With Sumo, its easy to offer someone a 10% off coupon if they stay on your website for more than X seconds and are about to close the site. Don’t overdo it though – people get bombared with subscription forms on every website so if you have one, make sure and offer customers something beneficial like free software or a coupon.
8. Facebook for WooCommerce – this is the official integration between WooCommerce and Facebook so you can add your Facebook conversion pixel to track sales that come directly from Facebook, as well as retarget customers who visit your website via Facebook ads.
9. Woochimp – if you use Mailchimp as your email marketing solution, integrating it with WooCommerce is important so you can track your revenue from each campaign, create signup forms on your website, auto add customers who checkout to your mailing list and more
10. WooCommerce Points and Rewards – To incentivise customers to perform certain actions on your website, you can provide them with “points” which can be redeemed for discounts on products. This plugin lets you choose how many “points” a customer gets from a purchase, how much each point is worth and the maximum discount they can apply using points.

1. Blacklister for WooCommerce – if you want to block particular users from purchasing on your website (based on name, address, phone number,  email address or IP address), this plugin can help you with that. This is useful in circumstances where you have used watermarking (the Pulse app provides this service for free) to detect which customer has shared your product on a piracy website and you can then block them from future purchases/downloads.
2. Duplicate Page – a very simple plugin that lets you duplicate a product / page / post and edit it rather than creating a complety new one from scratch. This will save you time when setting up multiple product pages that are similar.
3. Woolicense manager – if you’re selling products that have license keys (or Pulse redemption keys) then you’ll need a way to provide customers with a key after purchase. This plugin lets you upload a list of “keys” to a product and provide one to each customer in the “order confirmation” email after purchase
4. Permalink Manager – easily change page URLs and setup custom redirects if you change a page URL. This is important for SEO purposes and to avoid customers using old URLs and getting to 404 pages if the URL no longer works.
5. WP Rollback – As per the plugin page: “Quickly and easily rollback any theme or plugin from WordPress.org to any previous (or newer) version without any of the manual fuss.” This is a useful plugin for when you update your plugins / theme and it breaks and need to quickly rollback to avoid downtime.
6. S3 downloads – If you’re not using a platform like Pulse to deliver your products to customers, then you’ll need to use a delivery network like Amazon S3 to host and deliver your files to customers (avoid storing your files on your website as they will not be secure and if they’re large, could overload your server if too many customers download them). The S3 Downloads plugin makes it easy to provide customers with secure, expiring download links from files stored on Amazon S3 after purchase with little effort.
7. Image Map HotSpot – If you want to show a high resolution product image and add hover over tags and information on the image, this plugin (and many other similar ones) will let you do that. Its a handy way to show a large image, but include “hot tips” on hover over
8. User Switching – if a customer is having issues – for example, their download link isn’t working, or their “My Account” page isn’t showing an invoice – this plugin lets you “switch” to their account without needing their password, so you can see how the site looks to them when logged in. This is useful for troubleshooting “account” related issues for customers.
9. WooCommerce PDF Invoices – this plugin lets you automatically attach a PDF invoice to customer’s “order confirmation” emails after purchase. Due to EU VATMOSS rules, customers should be provided with a copy of their invoice which clearly shows the VAT rate charged and collected for tax purposes.
10. Product Bundles –  this plugin makes it simple to create product “bundles” (with parent/child functionality) in WooCommerce which doesn’t come as standard.

The post The 32 Most Useful WooCommerce Plugins for Selling Sample Libraries & Plugins appeared first on Pulse Downloader.