E-mail marketing is, or should, play an important role in your online business. There are lots of solutions out there, but MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com) is a very popular choice because of the free plan up to 2000 subscribers. Using the MailChimp integration plugin, your customers will be able to sign up to your e-mail list when they go through the checkout. Besides this, the plugin also offers a nice widget for your WordPress dashboard that shows the subscriber statistics. Since it is offered on the WooThemes website, we may assume that it will still work with the latest version of WooCommerce. You may find the plugin here: http://www.Woothemes.com/products/newsletter-subscription/. The plugin is also able to use the Ecommerce360 functionality of Mailchimp that gives you the possibility to track visitors and customers coming from your e-mail campaigns individually. Currently, the price for this extension is $49. It can also be used to connect WooCommerce to the e-mail marketing provider Campaign Monitor (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/), instead of Mailchimp. Both e-mail providers have plenty of functions available. Mailchimp has a pretty good free plan, which makes it easy and accessible for starting sellers.

There's also a cheaper alternative available at CodeCanyon for $19: http://codecanyon.net/item/mailchimp-for-wordpress/11479536, which even includes a visual form designer.

Are you working with a different e-mail marketing solution for your newsletters? There's a good chance that there are integration plugins available. Just check the various extension websites and ask your e-mail provider, if needed.

Having the standard social like and share buttons in your store is something that we cannot do without. We could use the default share buttons you see everywhere, but there are better alternatives available. One of them is the Social coupon for WordPress plugin available on CodeCanyon at http://codecanyon.net/item/social-coupon-for-wordpress/3417466.

What makes this extension so interesting is that our visitors can share the product page on social media networks to obtain a discount coupon code that they can immediately use. This could be the ideal last step to convince visitors to buy. If products get shared a lot, this will automatically drive new traffic to your store! Below you'll find a screenshot of this plugin working on our demo store:

Advertising is going to be important as your store has just gone live and no one will be able to find you through the search engines yet. We recommend having a closer look at this area and learn to use the various possibilities. Besides the well-known regular Google AdWords ads, you could consider using Google shopping as well. More information can be found in Google Merchant Center at http://www.google.com/merchants.

You'll need a plugin for WooCommerce to be able to connect the products in your store automatically to Google. You may buy this plugin here: http://www.woothemes.com/products/google-product-feed/. It's currently priced at $79 for a single website. There are also other alternatives out there, but for those you need to pay. Free plugins to export your products to the Google Merchant Center are often not maintained.

Alternatively, if you do not have a lot of different products, it's also possible to just fill in a Google spreadsheet with your data and upload that one.

On the other side of the spectrum, we see services like the ones offered by http://www.exportfeed.com/. This isn't cheap, but they offer a full service including the possibility to export your products automatically to marketplaces like for instance Amazon and eBay. If you have lots of products and want to be able to sell them everywhere, this is probably a good solution.

We mentioned earlier in this book that the possibilities to calculate the shipping costs in WooCommerce are not always enough to suit your needs. Sometimes, you need to be able to store tables with shipping amounts based on volume or weight of the individual products or the total cart. This is where the Table rate shipping extensions will be helpful. There are multiple plugins available on the market. Let's start with the table rate shipping extension offered on the WooThemes website: http://www.woothemes.com/products/table-rate-shipping/.

The screenshot below shows you the table rate shipping plugin. In this example, the shipping fee that the customer pays is based on the country and total weight of the order:

This is a pretty expensive extension with a price of $199 for a single website. The extension is flexible and easy to use, but maybe other alternatives can work just as well. The table rate shipping extension offered at CodeCanyon offers similar functions on a bargain rate of only $22: http://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-table-rate-shipping/3796656. However, note that setting up table rate shipping can become complex. The support offered by WooThemes might therefore be one of the reasons to still choose that plugin.

WooCommerce is offering the possibility to generate invoices for your store, but these won't be valid for all countries. Of course, we have the e-mails that will be sent out, but these are order confirmations only. The PDF Invoices extension available on the WooThemes website does just what we need. It's able to create a PDF invoice and use sequential invoice numbers. The invoice file is automatically attached to the e-mail that will be sent when the order is marked as completed.

The plugin is available here: http://www.woothemes.com/products/pdf-invoices/.

The other vendors that we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are offering invoicing plugins as well. Just check which one fits your needs.

A function that is often asked for is being able to use subscriptions. Let's say that we would offer access to a closed area of our website with very valuable content. We'd like our customers to buy a subscription in this case and charge them every month. By default, that's not possible in WooCommerce. With the subscription extension, we can do so. This plugin can also be bought at the WooThemes website for $199 (http://www.woothemes.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/).

To be able to charge customers every month, our payment gateway needs to support such transactions. This isn't always the case. PayPal is supported out of the box by the plugin. For other payment gateways, have a look at this overview: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/payment-gateways/.

In Chapter 7, Running Your Online Store, we noticed that the reporting and management possibilities of WooCommerce can sometimes be a bit limited. And even looking at the available extensions, the choice is still very limited.

The Cart reports extension available on the WooThemes website extends the standard functions with a few additional reports. It delivers interesting information about the number of carts that were abandoned and products that were abandoned while in the cart. If the cart was created by a logged-in user, we can even send them an e-mail about it. The extension is available here: http://www.woothemes.com/products/woocommerce-cart-reports/.

Another extension that can get integrated into the reporting function of WooCommerce is the Cost of goods plugin. It gives you the possibility to check your margins by date or product. The extension is available here: http://www.woothemes.com/products/woocommerce-cost-of-goods/.

Finally, we would also like to mention the following reporting plugin: http://woo.report/. At the moment of writing, this extension could be downloaded for free, but it seems that in the near future, a fee will be charged. This extension delivers some really good insights on customer behavior, sales per product, and value of your stock. These things are missing in WooCommerce itself.

WooCommerce can easily be used as an online catalog, but prices will always remain visible. If you want to hide your prices and only show them to authenticated users, this plugin is the one that you need: http://www.woothemes.com/products/catalog-visibility-options/.

This plugin also offers the possibility to hide the e-commerce functionality completely so that your store will only be an online catalog:

If we would already have a product catalog available, WooCommerce is not giving us the possibility to automatically import product data. The Product CSV Import Suite available at WooThemes can be a real time-saver: http://www.woothemes.com/products/product-csv-import-suite/.

If you are moving from another WooCommerce store, you can just export product data from the first site and import them to the new website using the WordPress importer plugin. In other situations where you have to import your products from another software solution, it's better to use a plugin like the one mentioned previously.

At the moment of writing this, this plugin is priced at $199. You can easily create a CSV file using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. If you're currently using a different solution to store your product data, then often there's a possibility to export this data using the CSV file format. The plugin offers enough flexibility to map your product fields to the fields available in WooCommerce.

Alternatively, take a look at the WP All Import plugin at http://www.wpallimport.com/.

We've seen during Chapter 1, Setting Up WooCommerce, that the standard available tax calculations are not always flexible enough when you're doing business in the USA.

The TaxNow plugin, using the Avalara service, can overcome this problem, but it is a paid service. More information about TaxNow can be found here: http://www.avalara.com/products/avatax. The WooCommerce plugin can be bought here for $49: http://www.adipietro.com/product/taxnow-for-WooCommerce/.