slavag8
- Sep 1, 2016
- 3 min read

Enhancing WooCommerce User Profiles

This is part 13 in a 30 part series on improving your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce User Profiles don’t have to be boring

Before I get started, you should know this post is part of a WooCommerce series of thirty posts I started writing this summer.

Part thirteen looks at user profiles, but before I get there, I should note that there’s no official underlying structure to these 30 tips. They’re in a spreadsheet based on how I thought about things. If I publish an eBook I’ll try to create a structure to make them easier. I’m saying this as a small apology if you’re like me and looking over the count and trying to figure out how we’re going from Zapier to gifts to user profiles.

The other day I was asked about a members directory on a Clarity call. The caller told me they were using WooCommerce and wanted to build a directory. In that conversation I shared with him my experience with Profile Builder Pro, which supports creating a directory.

There’s a lot you can do with the directory – from controlling what is displayed in the table, to which columns are sortable, to which fields to show. As we got off, I realized that while I’d answered his question, I’d not shared with him my suggested strategies with profile custom fields. And that’s what I planned to share in part thirteen.

Casual data collection

While it’s true that Profile Builder Pro (and the WooCommerce add-on) gives you the ability to manage registration forms and directories, that’s not why I recommend it to store owners. Instead, what I love most about the plugin, and the features it brings, is the ability to do casual data collection.

Let me explain what I mean.

Let’s say I host a WooCommerce store that sells cigars. My primary goal is to sell stuff. Check. But one of the things I care most about is repeat business. If you’re like most store owners, you’ve worked on your Google Analytics to capture all your key metrics:

Transactions
Transaction Revenue
Transaction Shipping
Transaction Tax
Item Quantity
Unique Purchases
Item Revenue

That’s all good. But I care about another metric: Repeat Purchase Rate

What I want to know is how many of my purchases are from repeat buyers. And I want that to go up. You do it by dividing the purchases from repeat buyers by the total number of purchases in any given time period. The higher the percentage the better.

To do that, I need to make sure I’m building rapport and connection with my buyer or they’ll just go elsewhere to buy their cigars. And that means I want to collect some additional data so I can surprise my customers with special news, special offers, or other features (like notice when we’re having a sale on shirts their size).

That’s where casual data collection happens.

Imagine I don’t collect any additional profile information during the checkout (though this plugin lets me). That’s too direct. Instead, I use the plugin to add additional fields about their likes, wants, and interests to use later.

So I create additional profile fields for their shirt size, their favorite lounge, and their favorite cigar.

Instead of asking for the fields at checkout (which could cause a delay, a tiny bit of friction or a reason to leave without finishing the order), I can use a follow up email to ask them to update their profiles.

It’s at this point that they’ll head to their “My Account” area – likely to review their billing and shipping addresses. But that’s where I can drop these additional data elements.

Adding a Custom Field

Adding a custom field is easy. You head to Profile Builder > Manage Fields and add one.

But you don’t have to make that show up everywhere. Profile Builder gives you the ability to determine where you want to place it, and that’s where I decide I want to place it in the Edit Profile form. The nice thing is they let you create as many of those forms as you like, and decide which one will get integrated with WooCommerce.

And the last part is to determine the details of that form, which you can do by clicking on it.

What you see is that you get to determine what happens after the customer saves their edits (via a redirect) and you also get to decide which fields to show.

Here’s the result.

Notice I haven’t made these fields mandatory. Like I said, it’s casual. But it can help me customize my emails and offers in a better way than normal blasts. And even though they know you asked for the info, they’ll still feel connected in a different way because a) you asked, and b) you remembered that you had the data and used it.