Online shopping has become more popular to support local businesses and meet their needs. This can cause eCommerce companies to struggle, even those that are well-established.

Shop owners can reduce stress and keep customers informed with a few WooCommerce extensions. You can provide outstanding service without creating backlogs, confusing customers or overworking your employees by automating as much as you can and setting order limits.

To manage inventory and orders, set shop limits

It’s important to limit your purchases to what you can handle, especially if you are a small business or have fewer employees. Although it may seem counterintuitive at first, if you only have the ability to fill a handful of orders per day, accepting hundreds will lead to a backlog. This can be stressful for your team and a disservice to customers.

Restrict orders per day is a new extension to WooCommerce that allows you to limit the number of orders you can place for any 24-hour period. Your shop will stop displaying items after the daily limit has been reached. However, it will continue to display the items and not allow customers to proceed with the checkout process. Instead, WooCommerce will display a message on each WooCommerce page explaining that the daily limit has been exceeded and asking shoppers to come back tomorrow.

These extensions might be of interest to you:

• Minimum/Maximum Quantities: Limit the amount of items a customer can buy at one time to maintain fairness in your community.

• WooCommerce WAITLIST: Create a waiting list for products that are out of stock. Customers will be notified in the order that inventory arrives once they sign up. Customers won’t need to return to stock to make sure they are satisfied. You’ll also be able to quickly identify the most popular items.

Keep customers updated at all times

You can ease customer concerns if there are backorders. Most shoppers will understand if you communicate clearly and keep them updated on the status of their orders. Automating the process with WooCommerce extensions can save you a lot of time.

With the WooCommerce order status manager extension, you can create custom order statuses. You can add as many steps as you need to your order flow — maybe you want to break it down into smaller steps like “Order Received from Warehouse” or “Order Being Packed for Shipment.”

Customers are also automatically notified by the extension whenever their order status changes. To create email templates for every status change, navigate to Settings. The buyer will be kept informed and can follow the progress of their order.

Customers can log in to their accounts if you have allowed them to create one. Your custom status flow will make it clearer for customers to see the current stage of fulfillment.

It might be worth adding:

• AutomateWoo: An automated chain of emails that is triggered by a customer’s actions. A request from a customer for a product with a history of being late can trigger an email that contains additional information.

• Subscribe to the Newsletter to automatically add new customers. This allows you to notify them about policy changes and discounts.

Your staff deserves your support

Essential staff are working hard to fulfill orders. Make sure they have all the information necessary to make quick and effective decisions about fulfillment. Do not place one person in charge of everything and create a bottleneck. Make sure everyone is informed, no matter if they are shipping orders or managing inventory remotely.

Advanced Notices lets you create stock and order notifications for your team members and other third parties. You can send email alerts regarding inventory for all products or products in specific categories. Or, you can just send one or two products. 

Staff should be notified about low stock to allow them to reorder products in advance or find substitute products. Even better, you can directly notify suppliers to set up automatic orders.

It might be worth adding:

• WooCommerce Packing Invoices: Bulk-print orders, separated by product so that staff can complete multiple orders at once. Employees can also automatically generate packing lists that include product-specific instructions. Customers with accounts have the option to log in and view their entire order list, as well as generate their invoice copy.

• Bulk stock Management: Manage stock quantities and statuses across multiple products and view current inventory levels via your dashboard or printed reports.

Automate as much of your work as possible

Automating as many of the processes as possible is key to staying afloat in a sea of online orders. It is not necessary for business owners to spend their time sending out emails with updates, calculating tax rates repeatedly, or answering the same questions over again. WooCommerce offers a number of additional extensions that will make everything run more smoothly.

• Shipping: Use your dashboard to automatically calculate USPS rates, and create shipping labels. You can drop your packages at the post office or arrange for a pickup at home.

• WooCommerce tax: calculates the correct tax rate in more than 30 countries.

• WooCommerce SmartRefunder allows customers to request refunds. You can either accept all refunds automatically or manually approve them.

Online shops are becoming more popular than ever. This should help you grow your business and make it easier for your customers. WooCommerce extensions can automate standard sales processes, both now and in the long term.