WooCommerce Product Comparisons

Let's spend a month improving your WooCommerce site.

Over the last several years I've worked with independent, small and large businesses to improve their WooCommerce sites. I've written about some of these projects (sometimes on this site, other times in other spots)—from simple T-shirt stores to high-scale makeup stores.

So this month I'd like to create a virtual (and free) WooCommerce Help Guide packed with different tips to help you with your WooCommerce store.

Each tip works on its own, and not every tip will apply to you.

Most, however, will help you think better about your store. And honestly, that's the challenge most people face. The fear and stress of selling online means we often celebrate when a site launches. But a launch is the start of the story, not the end. Once it's live, you need to start thinking more about your store and how customers will interact with it.

Most of these tips can be worked on in small doses and won't require a complete overhaul of your entire site.

WooCommerce Product Comparisons

Product Comparisons-CarsIf you've worked hard on your WooCommerce site and loaded in all your products, you might think you're done. But there's still more to do—much more. And the tip for today is to look at offering your customers a feature where they can compare products.

The first time I built a product comparison solution it took weeks of development because you have to think about:

  • A user interface for letting the user pick the products they want to compare
  • A user interface for seeing side-by-side comparisons
  • A user interface for removing sub-optimal products (once you've compared multiple)
  • What data to show (and what not to show)

At the time, we created a site to compare wireless phones and plans. Today you can compare things like consumer electronics, but you can also compare big-ticket items like cars.

And here's the good news—it won't take you a long time to put this all together. Because today WooCommerce offers a plugin that will take care of most everything for you.

One thing to remember

When you've purchased and activated the plugin, there's one thing you need to remember when it comes to product comparisons.

People, when making a purchasing decision, can be motivated by the speed with which they'll receive the item they're purchasing.

This means you really need to make sure that you add a “In Stock” row of data across all your compared products. No one wants to see that one product is better than another only to add it to a cart or go to the details page of the product and find out it's out of stock and won't be available for weeks.

Improve Engagement

The point of all these tips, including this one, is to improve engagement and drive more (or better) sales. So make sure that people know both the price and the pace at which they can get your products.

You can do this easily—whether you code it yourself or use this plugin. The point is to make sure you give buyers an option to compare similar products so that they feel in control and educated about the decisions they're making.