WooCommerce is a fantastic tool to transform your WordPress website into a fully featured eCommerce platform. It’s free, well supported, and integrates with our tools inside Thrive Suite.
We all love WooCommerce, and it’s the basis of many successful online businesses.
But...
Out of the box, trying to create a simple online sales funnel with WooCommerce is a conversion rate killer. It’s simply not set up for the short, linear sales experience needed to quickly convert leads into paying customers.
Today, you’re going to learn how to transform this conversion rate leaking WooCommerce funnel...
... into this conversion rate boosting WooCommerce funnel
And that means more sales, more revenue, improved ad ROI, and just a simpler, more intuitive experience for your customers!
More...
Transforming a Conversion Rate Drop-off Disaster!
Already excited? Want to skip straight to the how? Click here.
First, let’s break down why the default WooCommerce funnel has more leaks than the Titanic...
Step 1. Visitors arrive from your targeted ads or emails
Step 2. Your stunning sales page speaks to their needs and convinces them to take action!
Ideally your sales page should link directly to a payment page. Ideally.
Step 3. With their payment card ready, they click the ‘Buy Now’ button...
...through to your WooCommerce product page, which is kind of a watered-down generic version of the sales page.
Your customers don’t need convincing twice. Some of them have second thoughts and drop off.
Why send people from a sales page to a product page? They’re ready to buy!
Step 4. However, some click the ‘Add the Cart’ button. A small message pops up and the product page reloads.
Yes... you read that correctly. The page reloads.
Some visitors get frustrated while others completely fail to see the ‘View Cart’ button (can you spot it below?). Again, they drop off.
It’s not immediately obvious that the visitor has to click the ‘View Cart’ button.
Step 5. The survivors of this conversion killer are made of sterner stuff. They finally find the ‘View Cart’ button and press on.
Surely the next step will let them pay?
No they can’t pay yet. And don’t call me Shirley.
At this point, your conversion rate is at an all time low.
Some visitors reconsider if they really need your product. Others fixate on the price. A few no longer have a pet cat in the time it took them to navigate your sales funnel.
Step 6. A few stragglers click the ‘Proceed to Checkout’ button where they can finally pay...
By the way, you can customize your WooCommerce checkout page with Thrive Theme Builder!
With visitor drop-off at each unnecessary stage of this funnel, the final conversion rate is now a fraction of what it could have been.
Let me show you how to reclaim that conversion rate to boost sales, revenue and advertising ROI...
Simplifying Your Sales Funnel with WooCommerce Dynamic Add-to-Cart Links
As with any sales funnel, a percentage of visitors will drop off at each step – and that’s totally normal of course. But it’s your job to minimize this and encourage as many people as possible to follow the sequence right through to a confirmed sale.
You could optimize each of these WooCommerce steps until you’re squeezing out as much conversion rate as possible... 0.05% here, 0.03% there. You might manage 0.5% if you’re lucky – but don’t forget, it’ll take tons of time to collect the data you need to be sure, and you’ll never completely pass along 100% of the traffic.
So why bother?
Why not just bypass most of the pages and eliminate any needless steps?
Just imagine all that sweet, sweet conversion rate you’ll be winning back!
Here’s how...
Create your sales page
I’m using the term sales page very loosely here.
You might want to use a professional, mobile-responsive, conversion-focused sales page template available in Thrive Architect.
Or you might prefer a simpler page with a text link instead of a button.
It’s completely up to you. The magic of the Dynamic WooCommerce Add-to-Cart Links is that they can be added to any element that supports links within the Thrive Visual Editor.
Add a Dynamic WooCommerce Add-to-Cart Link
Within the Thrive Visual Editor, select your button, text, or other linkable element, and head over to the ‘Main Options’ section in the left sidebar.
We’ve packed a ton of powerful features into the Dynamic link options.
- First, select the Dynamic Link icon.
- Choose ‘WooCommerce’ from the first dropdown.
- Choose ‘Add to cart product’ from the second dropdown.
- A third dropdown will appear where you can search for the product you want to link up.
- Choose where you want to redirect visitors after they click the button or link: the intermediate Cart (basket) page, or the final Checkout (payment) page.
- Don’t forget to click the ‘Insert’ button to lock it all in.
Now anyone who clicks on your button or link will go straight to the checkout page, with the relevant product already loaded into their basket.
Congratulations... you’ve just boosted your WooCommerce sales funnel conversion rate!
Which types of WooCommerce products are compatible with this feature?
You can link up the Dynamic Add-to-Cart link with any product available on your WooCommerce site:
Can I sell online courses in this way?
You sure can!
Our conversion-focused online course LMS, Thrive Apprentice, integrates with WooCommerce to provide a seamless way for visitors to become paying students.
We even offer a free video course on how to sell your online courses from your own WordPress website using Thrive Architect and WooCommerce.
So now, you can simplify your online course sales funnel even more using Dynamic WooCommerce Add-to-Cart Links... both you and your customers will love it!
Not yet using WooCommerce? Want to learn how?
Check out Christine's excellent video guide on How To Build a WooCommerce Store from Scratch with Thrive Theme Builder.
You'll learn how to create a conversion-focused eCommerce store on WordPress that looks stunning on all devices, and how to customize it using the power of Thrive Theme Builder. Go on, you can do it!
This is amazing ????
However, I’m thinking, how can one create a simple,yet effective checkout page that converts.
I saw a sample of a checkout page that I’d like yo replicate in the post.
Creating a good checkout page that is a major key to all these.
You’re absolutely right, a good checkout page can make or break an online sales funnel!
That isn’t the focus of today’s article however, so all things being equal and using the exact same checkout page, a 5-step funnel will convert worse than a 2-step funnel.
If you want to customize your WooCommerce checkout page with Thrive Theme Builder, you can check out this page for more information.
David, following up on Johnnie’s point and the answer you provided, it would be logical to give the ability to choose the Check Out template.
Right now in dynamic link settings you can choose to redirect to either the Cart page or the Check Out page. So it would be great if you took it a step further and also allowed to choose the template for either of those pages.
In this case I may keep the default check out template for the traditional woocommerce flow and make a separate check out template just for the sales page/dynamic “add to cart” buttons.
This would be another step in the right direction and open the doors of possibilities even wider!
We’d love to do this, but it does mean a fair bit more work. At that point, you’re breaking away from the global WooCommerce checkout and having multiple checkouts on your site, each potentially with their funnel-specific URLs. Maybe one day!
Hi David,
Is there any way we (or you guys via a new feature) can do this with an Infusionsoft checkout experience, e.g. in Thrive Apprentice? Thanks!
Can you share more about the Infusionsoft checkout experience? Maybe we have a solution, or I can share it with our team for a feature consideration.
Hello David,
Certainly. Here’s our current sales page:
https://www.bedandbreakfastcoach.com/bb-email-revival/
I would love the Infusionsoft checkout to operate within the same page as that sales page, and for it to integrate with Thrive Apprentice (i.e. grant access to our course, the way that experience currently works for Thrive Cart – which we don’t have). Many thanks for your thoughts on this.
Stunning website, Matthew!
I’ll definitely share this with the team for their thoughts. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks very much, David (on both counts!) – much appreciated.
Hey Matthew, our plan is to invite many 3rd party checkout tools such as InfusionSoft to integrate with the Thrive Apprentice API… once it’s ready to be scaled out. We’re not quite there yet, but we are getting close. Once we do, anyone who integrates with our API will be able to sell and refund courses in Apprentice.
Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to give you design control over the InfusionSoft checkout, even if they have an option to embed it on your site. Checkouts are very sensitive, since that’s where credit card numbers and personal information gets entered. So for many checkout tools, there’s a lot of resistance to letting a 3rd party tool like us make changes to their checkout, for fear that it’ll interrupt payment security.
Hi – does this work with add-ons – ie. I sell personalised gifts, so have to ask for names/messages etc to personalise what I do – can I add these to the sales page and then go straight to the check-out page? If so, this would bring me back to Thrive. All the best, Mark
What add-ons are you using to enhance the checkout page, Mark? We’ll need to dig into this use case some more to understand what you’re trying to achieve and what solutions are available.
Hi David – it’s WooCommerce Product Add-ons by WooThemes. It allows you to add checkboxes, lists, text boxes etc – which is perfect for the personalised options I collect. Thanks, Mark
Thanks Mark. We’ll definitely look into it and see how it fits with our roadmap.
It wouldn’t work for that use case, this basically generates a woocommerce add to cart link. To simplify, the Woo functionality we make use of here doesn’t support personalized text to be passed on to the checkout…that would be a whole different feature 🙂
How many products do you have? Are you currently using landing pages to sell them? Normally when you have personalized products you’d use the built-in WooCommerce product templates which already support add-ons, but I can see why if you only have a few products, maybe you prefer building separate landing pages for them? Anyway, if you can share some details about your ideal solution, we can log it as a feature request 🙂
This is great! But if they click on the back button to go back to the sales page and then after they read it some more and then finally decide they want it and click on the buy button again does it add 2 of the same item in the cart on the checkout page or will it keep it with just the 1 that they want to buy or will they have to edit the cart quantity to make it 1 again?
It would add another, unless you’ve specified in the product settings that only one can be bought per transaction. That’s what I’d suggest for digital products. That means no matter how many times the customer goes back and clicks ‘buy’, the checkout step will only have 1 copy of the product in their cart.
Okay cool thank you ????
This is great, Thank you! I once had to buy a Woocommerce extension to make this happen. It was pricey and half of the time did not work..
Hopefully this will be a better, more reliable solution for you Katharina. Keep us posted on how it goes!
Exactly what I need for my funnel. Thanks guys for this awesome update.
Thanks Homer. I’m glad it’s a good fit for your funnels!
Great enhancement!
You say that this works with Variable Woo Products. Any way to add an option to Pre-set the variations on button click?
So right now when one selects Dynamic Link icon, there are several steps one need to choose:
1. Select Woocommerce
2. Select ADD to Cart
3. Select the Product
4. Select Redirect to CheckOut and click Insert
What would be great – if you added another step between 3 and 4, so that:
If the selected product is a Variable product, then another drop down appears that asks to select pre-defined variations (i.e. Red color, Medium size, etc.). This should be very doable from the development stand point.
Thanks!
Hey Russell, that already is what happens! If the product selected at step 3 has variations, then after a second or two (while Architect fetches the product data), a new dropdown appears— just like this: https://share.getcloudapp.com/geugNeQZ
Hey David, this is such a nice feature which will eliminate a lot more plugins. But I have one query, will this allow upsells and downsells too…?
This uses the global WooCommerce checkout. So as long as your upsell/downsell extensions leverage the global WooCommerce checkout, then your customer will move through those steps just as they would if they used the regular product page.
Does this work the same way as https://mywebsite.com/shop/?add-to-cart=4797
Whereby you find the product ID and then use this code?
Does a direct link jump the user straight to the checkout page?
Basically yes. The Thrive Architect UI lets you select the product and it will apply the product ID as an add-to-cart link, and if you choose ‘checkout’, they’ll go straight there.
Thank you for your answers are very clarifying.
My question is, if it’s like using the link of add-to-cart, if someone doesn’t finish the purchase, and comes again through the same link, the second time maybe it would have the product twice in the cart. it would be like that?
If you’re selling a digital product, there’s an option in WooCommerce to restrict the product to only 1 per-cart. Enable that and no matter how many times your customers move back and forward, there will only be 1 product waiting for them in the checkout.
Thanks for the article! I am wondering if you are planning a 1-Click-Upsell feature?
You’re welcome Oliver. There’s no upsell feature planned yet, but feel free to share your ideas here and we can share it with our planning team.
David, it would be great to have a feature for post-purchase offers so that users can buy in one click without re-entering payment details.
Example: If someone buys product A than I want to offer product B (Upsell) where the user just needs to click a button to make the purchase.
I love this idea. I guess the upsell would come on the payment confirmation page of product A… this might be a WooComm thing rather than a Thrive solution, but I’ll share this with the team so we can put our heads together on it. Thank you, Oliver.
This feature can easily be solved if, CartFlows.com can integrate with Thrive Suite.
Also, another way to solve this problem is to use Thrive Cart if you have it.
A while ago, Bradley Stevens at Thrive Themes wrote an excellent blog post on this topic. Here’ the link to that article:
https://thrivethemes.com/sales-funnel-with-thrive-cart/
Enjoy it.
Maravilloso
Sure,I will try to implement it on my website.
Thank you for your great update. I love to thrive suite.
This is awesome and a useful update to your WooCommerce integration.
In addition to this useful update, are by any chance working on integrating CartFlows to work natively with Thrive Suite?
Thanks in advance for your anticipated response.
Hey.. great post.. just what i was looking for.. but will this work if i am only using Architect and not Thrive themes?
I see that there is an option to choose Checkout or Cart. Will a Custom Url be added as an option in the further? And/or perhaps an ability to open a lightbox. Would open up more possibilities.
Great article. However when i go to select my products i get a message that says “The results could not be loaded” I have 60 + products so why is it not showing up?
Please contact our support team so they can investigate and help you out.