Learning by example is one of the best ways to progress in your craft. In this article, I present five inspiring ecommerce shops built with WooCommerce. Each shop has unique products, and a different lesson to help you with future projects. WooCommerce is quickly becoming the most popular WordPress ecommerce plugin.
Blue Star Coffee Roasters
Blue Star Coffee Roasters is such a beautiful site that it’s the main feature on the WooCommerce home page. With impressive imagery and quality design, this site shows the ability to which WooCommerce can be customized for a brand.
- Best features. The product pages don’t feel like any other WooCommerce shop product page, so you don’t have that common template feel. Secondly, when you add a product to your cart it shows up on the right sidebar immediately, which is a good user interface improvement over the standard method.
- Recommendations. As a potential customer, I’d like to see more detailed product descriptions. It would also be helpful if Blue Star included additional product photos, such as close-up shots of the coffee, on the product pages.
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Spectator Magazine Shop
“The oldest continuously published magazine in the English language” uses WooCommerce to power its shop, which has a unique New Yorker (magazine) feel to it. Spectator Shop makes the WooCommerce standard features seemingly disappear into the design.
- Best features. The shop presents unique product category choices on the home page, as well as popular products to drive visitor curiosity. The shop also does an excellent job of presenting related products in the right sidebar on the product pages instead of the standard placement beneath the product where it might not be seen.
- Recommendations. When clicking on the product images, the pop up is the default WooCommerce version, which is a bit slow. I’d like to see higher quality imagery and lightboxes for a site of this caliber.
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Wakami
Wakami is a socially responsible handmade fashion accessory company that works with remote women artisans in Guatemala. Its ecommerce shop showcases these accessories, with standout imagery.
- Best features. The product images are large and beautiful. For products that come in different colors, there is a picture for each color, which many online retailers fail to do properly. Wakami also uses the WooCommerce Cloud Zoom plugin for detailed product imagery.
- Recommendations. It would be helpful to show the best-selling products on the home page. Additionally, Wakami should discuss its unique story on each product page in some way.
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Forage & Graze
New Zealand-based Forage & Graze makes a strong first impression on its home page with a unique logo and quality imagery that speaks to its brand. The site has only a handful of products, but presents them well to visitors, using quality design.
- Best features. The site does a good job of integrating the brand story throughout the site and not pushing the product. It also utilizes imagery well on the product page so the visitor gets a better feel for the products.
- Recommendations. The main product image seems small for the space on the page. I would enlarge it. The site should also break out the features of each product to make it easier to read, versus a paragraph of text. Lastly, Forage & Graze should incorporate trust signals into the site.
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Dealotto
Dealotto has a clean and beautiful front page with a singular focus on selling daily designer deals in a unique way.
- Best features. The clear call to action to “Buy Now,” as well as the sidebar explanation of the possible winnings is a well-done design feature. The unique feature of leaving the final price up to chance is a clever tactic to entice shoppers to click.
- Recommendations. An introduction video showing how the process works should be on the home page. When I clicked “Buy Now” it took me to the price page, but I wasn’t sure if the lottery worked or not. I would have liked to see some type of slot machine that spun to show me my final price and whether I was a lucky winner or not. Instead, I was told I was “only paying $12” — but that’s the highest price possible to pay.