One plugin to rule your WooCommerce checkout

Checkout is the moment of truth. 

Will a customer go through with a transaction, or will they abandon their online shopping cart and walk away from the purchase? Almost 70% of the time, consumers choose the latter option.

It is essential for ecommerce checkout experiences to be as frictionless as possible, expediting the transaction process, says Lee Trotter, Manager, Solutions Consulting & Advisory Services at Bold Commerce. Case in point, 18% of online shoppers will abandon an order simply because checkout is too long or complicated, reports the Baymard Institute.   

When using the WooCommerce platform, it can be challenging to create the fastest, most frictionless checkout experience possible. 

The default checkout available in WooCommerce is limited. With plugins, it’s possible to create a customized checkout experience — think one-page checkout, unique fields, post-purchase upsell, subscriptions — but it comes at a cost. 

So many different plugins means checkout performance suffers. Checkout load times slow dramatically due to incompatibilities between plugins or an overloaded server especially as the volume of shoppers increases. With smaller vendors, technical support to address issues can be limited and a multiple vendor environment can introduce security vulnerabilities into a checkout. Adding value-added checkout options to drive growth become a nice to have as development teams work to fix performance issues. 

When a WooCommerce checkout is poorly performing, as much as 30% of a brand’s revenue is at risk due to lower conversion rates, according to our independent tests. 

Bold Checkout Experience Suite for WooCommerce is built to address these performance challenges. It is a single plugin that:

• • Covers all checkout needs including shipping, taxes, pricing, payments.
  • Is a cloud-based SaaS solution so it can scale while maintaining enterprise-grade performance.
  • Is managed directly through the WooCommerce dashboard. 
  • Streamlines site management and maintenance for more efficiency.
  • Reduces security risks with PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC2 compliance.
  • Backed by readily available developer support, services, and documentation.
  • Has one set of robust APIs to make any channel shoppable.

Avoid lost revenue with enterprise grade performance

WooCommerce Checkout often struggles with slow load times, which research shows leads to cart abandonment, lower conversion rates and, by extension, lost revenue. 

Bold Checkout can save up to 30% of lost revenue from checkout abandonment, because it is up to four times faster than the WooCommerce checkout, according to tests by third-party content delivery network, Akamai.

Trotter explains this performance boost is possible because Bold offloads checkout functionality from the WooCommerce server onto a cloud-based Bold server.

“Because we’re SaaS based from the ground up, we’re designed to scale for the checkout. So once a customer lands on our page for checkout, there is no need for the brand’s server to scale. It’s all handled by Bold, ensuring that once the customer tries to give an online store their money, they can complete that transaction without friction,” he says. 

A bonus feature of this process is that Bold takes on the liability of collecting payment information, which reduces security risk for the business, Trotter adds. 

Bold Checkout is also PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC2 certified, which protects credit card usage and data, respectively, and compliance standards are regularly reviewed to ensure they are up-to-date and effective. 

Bold Checkout solutions don’t just improve performance and security though, they also help clients manage their WooCommerce site with more efficiency and less hassle.

The fact that we’re cloud based allows you to scale. The fact that we’re headless allows you to serve a checkout to any customer touch point or channel.

Lee Trotter, Manager, Solutions Consulting & Advisory Services, Bold Commerce

Lighten checkout management with a single solution

Most WooCommerce developers need to incorporate 20 to 30 plugins from different vendors when building out an ecommerce store. Management of this many plugins can lead to a great deal of complexity, resulting in performance problems and maintenance headaches — while only limited vendor support is available. 

Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite, encourages brands to combine open source like WooCommerce and SaaS, like Bold, to achieve the best of both worlds: open source for its flexibility, customizability, nimbleness, and SaaS for powerful integrations to do the heavy lifting for specialty features. 

“Think of your open source or CMS as a hub that spokes out to best-in-breed SaaS systems that are experts in everything you need — you can have both,” he says.

Some of the heavy lifting that Bold Checkout takes on is to streamline site management and maintenance, which leads to much greater efficiency. Two key benefits include:

• • Reduced complexity: By managing all of the checkout needs with a single plugin, the features you might want to incorporate have been designed to work together seamlessly — and thus more speedily — from the get go, says Trotter. Even if you don’t need to use all of those features now, they’ll be available for integration later. “It’s a scenario where we look at what you can do in the future, not just what you’re doing today,” he says. 
  • Developer support: Switching from multiple checkout plugins to one overarching solution that manages everything will simplify a developer's needs. And Bold takes it one step further with additional layers of both technical and development consultation 24/7. Trotter says the goal is to “make sure that our partners are empowered and enabled to do what they need to do for their customers.” 

Integrate value added offerings to drive revenue growth

In order to grow revenue, brands need to implement features and solutions to improve conversion, increase order value and grow customer lifetime value. And improving checkout is a top priority for better site conversion, according to over 86% of WordPress recently surveyed at WPEngine Summit 2021. 

Superior, integrated solutions like Bold Checkout Experience Suite for WooCommerce will allow brands to convert more shoppers in more ways thanks to integrated offerings and robust APIs. 

Each brand has a different use case and thus will require different types of customization, but some approaches Trotter suggests include: 

• • Creating a one-page checkout so the user doesn’t have to engage in multiple steps to complete the transaction. 
  • Adding a service plan or warranty upsell.
  • Offering a variety of different payment options or buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) providers.
  • Enabling a subscription engine and allowing the customer to choose the subscription option that best suits them. 
  • A/B testing to determine layout and options that users are most drawn to/inspire conversion, and allow for rapid optimization. 

With Bold’s APIs, innovative brands can create differentiated checkout experiences based on the unique needs and expectations of its customers. The headless architecture of the Bold Checkout plugin means it’s possible to make any moment shoppable, such as:

• • Turning a product image in a blog post into a one-click purchase. 
  • Making it possible to shop from an email. 
  • Buying a product from a chatbot on a phone or website. 

Ultimately, Bold Checkout offers such flexible customization and innovative power because of two key value drivers, says Trotter. “The fact that we’re cloud based allows you to scale. The fact that we’re headless allows you to serve a checkout to any customer touch point or channel,” he says.  

Ready to explore Bold Checkout on WooCommerce? Contact us and we’ll share access to the plugin.