How Bold Commerce products optimize the WooCommerce experience

If you manage an online store on Wordpress, you likely have come across WooCommerce, a popular plugin designed to help you create and manage ecommerce assets. It offers various levels of flexibility and features such as inventory and tax management, payment security and shipping integration.

But for enterprise leaders looking to scale, there can be challenges when leveraging WooCommerce. Those obstacles often crop up at checkout, leading to slower, site performance speeds and administrative headaches, all of which could substantively impact both a company’s consumer-facing, and internal operations. 

As management teams look for ideal solutions to empower them to stay agile, they are reaching most for ones that integrate easily with their store while also providing the reliability and resilience they come to expect from technology partners. 

Out-of-the-box checkout puts you in a tough spot

Brands and organizations using Wordpress and WooCommerce want to optimize the checkout journey for their customers. It helps to empower digital projects with a robust CMS but developing a stronger checkout solution still requires a third-party solution.

For those beginning to build a Wordpress ecommerce experience, WooCommerce allows you to set up and run online stores without much hassle. Still, its basic checkout product may not provide the kind of flexible functionality many leading retailers need to create an efficient and seamless checkout experience. 

As convenient as an out-of-the-box solution may be, if your specific needs fall outside that product’s borders, it might be challenging to solve for them solely through WooCommerce.

This situation may compel you to try to find a plugin that works, costing valuable time spent determining how to integrate it into your tech stack. The other option is building a checkout from scratch, which may be too overwhelming a responsibility, an avenue many owners don’t want to head towards when they use a plugin aiming to lower their dev time, as opposed to the reverse.

Bold Checkout, on the other hand, comes with pre built integrations for several of the most common areas where leaders need advanced or tailored functionality, such as taxes, fraud, shipping, and marketing. 

Tailored checkout parameters to your store’s needs will be a significant value-add to enterprise leaders around the globe. For example, if you’re selling computer parts and you wanted to offer online customers specific shopping processes, such as free pickup for local customers or reduced shipping fees for those within your state/province, rather than trying to maneuver your needs around the efficacy of an out-of-the-box checkout, imagine if your checkout did the customized maneuvering for you. 

Be careful with plugins causing slow site performance

There’s no denying how dynamic and robust the WooCommerce plugin library has become over the years. Giving your business the WooCommerce edge could energize your digital portfolio, but there’s a cost to curating the kind of plugin overload that Bold Checkout is designed to solve. 

It’s also no secret that the more plugins you add to your ecommerce store, the slower your site will load, including at checkout. 

According to research reports, 47% of consumers expect a site to load in no more than two seconds. Also, in relation to cart abandonment challenges, PayPal noted that retailers are missing out on $260 billion USD by failing to better design the checkout experience. 

It’s clear that site speed is vital for any enterprise seeking to establish a frictionless ecommerce environment for their customers. Optimizing the WooCommerce experience is critical to ensure customers aren’t facing any unexpected surprises as they navigate from page to page, especially when they end at checkout.

A customizable modular checkout framework like Bold Checkout can help boost site performance several ways, such as:

• Streamlining your WooCommerce stack by applying Bold’s prebuilt integrations instead of adding them through an array of plugins.
• Managing peak order volume without having to add more servers, since our product decouples the checkout experience from the WooCommerce servers.
• Fewer database calls because we handle the entire transaction, floor to ceiling.

An example of an enterprise brand opting to harness Bold Commerce solutions is Staples Canada, which selected Bold for their highly-customizable modular solutions, along with partners Orderbot and Contentful to build on top of their ecommerce platform.

With Bold Checkout in their corner, Staples Canada faced record highs in traffic and orders processed with 100% reliability, despite the frequent COVID load spikes. The project also included rapid deployments, such as 72-hour curbside pickup implementation and speed to market with an aggressive roadmap, as we outlined in a Staples Canada case study.

Easing the administrative burden

Along with site performance issues that come with multiple plugins added to an ecommerce store, administrative challenges also may frustrate business owners. 

After all, with so many plugins to manage, you have to make sure their various integration methods don’t hamper the efficiency of each other. That kind of synchronization isn’t always guaranteed when dealing with a range of vendors.

Poor cost effectiveness could result from cobbling together various plugins that each only do a handful of tasks, instead of selecting one product that accomplishes the majority of responsibilities required.

In addition to that potential slowdown in productivity, with so many WooCommerce plugins you may have to log in to different administrative portals to manage them all. Why worry about login credentials for a bunch of plugins when you can just access one key plugin from your Wordpress admin?

One option for business owners is Bold Commerce’s pre built integrations, which help streamline this approach, no matter which Bold products you decide to add to your ecommerce store. 

An area that some business owners may lean towards is bringing subscriptions services to their store, and while they consider WooCommerce Subscriptions for the task, that product could face some performance issues at scale.

Bold Subscriptions is accessible through the same admin portal and flows through Bold Checkout, meaning any custom options you bring to the checkout experience will also apply to the Subscription setup process as well.

To cite another example, if a business owner wanted to offer various pricing to various customers, they may want to give corporate customers a special rate or give a discount to employees shopping on the store. Or a holiday discount may need to be unlocked by specific customers. Bold Price Rules makes sure the correct price is delivered to the customer segment it intends to serve, at the right moment. Its API-powered technology provides a single source of truth for all pricing and promotion management in order to create a flexible and agile approach, limiting the amount of plugins weighing down that particular area of the store.

While WooCommerce invites business owners to enliven their stores with online capabilities quickly, Bold Checkout optimizes this experience to enrich both the owner’s operations and the customer’s journey from site load to checkout.

Let’s get started

Are you a high-growth Wordpress brand looking to solve for unique business cases while optimizing your WooCommerce checkout? We'd love to chat about the potential of integrating our headless solution. 

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