This is part 12 of a 30 part series improving your WooCommerce Store.
Have you thought of WooCommerce Gift Giving?
Before I get started, you should know this post is part of a WooCommerce series of thirty posts I’m writing this summer.
In part twelve of this series I want to talk about another part of what we’ve all come to enjoy at Amazon that is totally available to you when creating a WooCommerce store – the ability to buy gifts for friends and ship it directly to them.
Does your store make it easy to shop for friends?
Every Christmas I purchase gifts online and ship them to friends. The background on this is not shocking.
I don’t want to wrap my own gifts.
I don’t want to re-enter addresses for people I already sent gifts to.
I’m going to buy the same thing for many people.
I also want to do something interesting or unique – causing me to look at independent stores. But the problem when you find something really cool on Etsy, the problem is that they don’t support making a single purchase item that will be shipped to multiple people.
I should qualify that to say, most independent stores. I did find one person who made me 20 wallets and allowed me to upload a spreadsheet of people and addresses. But it was clearly an atypical situation.
This often drives me to Amazon, because they make all of this easy.
Giving gifts with WooCommerce
Now, imagine you have a store that sells bluetooth wireless headphones, like this pair. It’s good enough for a present to friends – but most stores make it hard for me to purchase in bulk, and some don’t support real gift giving.
I don’t want to have to buy the product 10 different times.
I don’t want to have to enter 10 different shipping addresses.
I want them to support gift wrapping.
Stores that help me are also the sites I recommend to others doing the same kind of thing I do (especially around the holidays).
To do this, you need two extensions – one that’s free and one that has a fee.
First, let’s help you support gift-wrapping.
The first plugin ensures that your WooCommerce store will support gift wrapping. Mind you, it doesn’t wrap the gifts for you. But it lets you make this an available option (and potentially charge for it). It was written by one of the core WooCommerce developers so you don’t have to worry. This is the free plugin, and downloading and activating it is really simple.
Then, let’s help you enhance your address book and shipping approach.
The second plugin has a small cost. But it’s worth it because it lets your customers add several addresses to their address book, and it allows you to offer shipping of a single order to multiple destination.
This means:
I pick the product at your store and add 10 of them to my cart.
I then step into the purchasing process and can assign the quantities to different destinations.
If I need to, I can add several people to my address book and then assign them as different destinations.
The nice thing is that all your normal shipping options and all your tax calculations are managed like normal, so you don’t have to do anything special.
It’s really that simple.
Two extensions and WooCommerce, and your store is ready for my bulk buying!