WooCommerce and WordPress are good at a lot of things on their own. You can create a simple WordPress order form with little effort at all, and before you know it the orders will be pouring in on your standard items.
However, what if you have items available the user can customize, like t-shirts or other apparel, especially if those customizations come with an additional or different cost? There are a few additional steps you will need to take to make it possible for your customer to make a custom order without contacting you directly. Here are five clever steps to doing so.
The Formidable Plug-In
While WooCommerce does great things on its own, one of the big advantages to it over other platforms is that you can use simple plugins to help you totally customize your site. The Formidable plugin is one of these. It allows you to create customizable forms that allow your user to personalize their items with little effort on your part and only a few fields to fill out on theirs.
Making these forms simple keeps your customer from abandoning their cart and heading for the competition. This plugin will help you set your site apart simply for the ease of the ordering process and the simplicity of determining prices.
Use Drop Down Menus
The first step is to create drop down menus as a part of your form. These can include things like size, color, finish, and even personalization like engraving, lettering on t-shirts, or logos for business apparel and other promotional materials.
No matter what you are selling, it is easy to create the right drop down menus to help them customize their selection, so you can easily fulfill their orders. More on that in a moment, but simply offering the choices via dropdown menu is the initial step.
Assign Values to Each Selection
How does your customer and do you know what each customization costs? Easy. You assign a value to each drop-down selection. This means that in the case of t-shirts, plus sizes may increase costs as will the amount of personalization the user wants to do. Front printing may have one cost, while front and back may be an additional expense.
There are two aspects to adding values to the drop-down items. One is that the customer needs to be able to see clearly what each selection will cost them. If a XXXL shirt is $5.00 more than a standard size, then the selection should look like “XXXL (+$5.00)” in the drop down.
However, your system also needs to calculate the price when it shows the final cost to the customer in their cart. This means you must assign a value to each drop down that will be used later in the process.
You also may have volume discounts, and these can be a part of your drop down menu as well. Just assign a value like “-10%” to the field, and later you can use it to make automatic adjustments to the customer cart.
Use Conditional Logic Fields
These are fields that are only shown as needed based on the selections the customer has made. Using the t-shirt example, if the customer has only selected front printing, then that is the only field that will show. This field can offer the option to upload a logo in various formats or to type in text.
Be sure that the fields are limited to what you can use. For instance, only let the user upload logos or photos in formats you can use. Limit text fields to the number of characters you can print on the shirt or engrave on the product you are selling. Don’t offer customers options you cannot fulfill, and include a form that lets them contact you with questions.
The key is to make the form thorough enough the customer should not have to contact you, but leave openings for them to do so if they feel it is necessary.
Add a Hidden Price Calculation Field
Finally, you need to tell the customer how much their selection is going to cost and give them the ability to add it to their cart easily. One of the keys to this is to add a hidden field, one that adds up the price of the values you have assigned to each field, giving them a total cost.
This field is simply a place to put your formula, and that is all. It is hidden because these formulas often look clunky and large depending on the number of choices the user has. You want the price to look clean and easy, yet logical and reasonable.
If you follow these five clever ways, you customer can create a custom order in WordPress easily, and your ecommerce store will have more conversions and great reviews from satisfied customers.