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Best 10 Essentials to Start Your WooCommerce Store in 2023

WooCommece, being the most popular eCommerce platform for WordPress, powers up almost 23% of all online stores. The number is significantly large for any single eCommerce plugin; earned due to its flexible features and open-source nature.

For years, WooCommerce has been focusing on improving user experience and simplifying store options. From WooThemes to WooCommerce, this plugin went through a dramatic change of modernizing eCommerce. 

Often people who are starting with WooCommerce, may not be aware of other WooCommerce essentials they would need to run their online store successfully. To erase this confusion, WooCommerce suggests a collection of plugins/ themes for monetizing the growth of online stores.

Today, we will talk about such a collection of essentials needed for people who are just starting with WooCommerce. 

WooCommerce Essentials:

Thinking of starting your business with WooCommerce? Say no more! WooCommerce has got you covered with all the essentials you will need to start with. In this collection, you will find 10 essential listings. And we will discuss each one of them separately – about their functions and usability. 

Under WooCommerce Essentials, we will have 10 listings. This bundle consists of plugins, themes, add-ons, and other essentials you will need to power your eCommerce store perfectly. And, yes, not all of them are by WooCommerce. Many of these essentials are developed by other organizations like Jetpack, StoreApps, or other WordPress experts.

1) Luminate:

If you want to offer an eye-soothing smooth theme experience to visitors, Luminate might just be the right one for you. Websites like Lighting Stores, Decorative Lamps, Lighting Accessories, or anything such that, are just the right fit for this theme. Even if not, you can always customize this theme and get preferable results.

Luminate comes with all the pre-built patterns you will need to decorate your store. Including Home, Shop, Product, Collections, About, Blog, and Contact pages, every single one of them shows an eccentric taste of appreciation. All the pages are block-built, hence anyone can make changes to them with Site Editor. Also, create discrete headers and footers using built-in templates.

One of the many reasons you will love Luminate is because of its user-friendliness. This theme Luminate offers an effortless buying and browsing experience for visitors. It’s an ideal theme to make your online store even brighter with a perfectly modern look.

And when it comes to responsiveness, you can seamlessly use this theme on devices including – phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. 

2) Google Listings and Ads:

Setting up an eCommerce platform without being seen has no use, right? The goal is to be seen by more people. Built by WooCommerce, (in partnership with Google), Google Listings and Ads help you get discovered easily. Whether you are just exploring digital marketing or simply a marketing expert – this product listing manager can be your next showstopper to run your business successfully.

This plugin also syncs with Google Merchant Center and manages your product feed. You can reach millions of active shoppers who are using Google with your free listing and ads. With this plugin, you can highlight your products easily, and reach Google shoppers worldwide.

Enjoy full freedom with the product information you are sending to Google Product Feed with attribute mapping. With their full thorough documentation, you can easily create Attributes and make new rules for products. You can set up paid ads to maximize ad response using Performance Max campaigns, gain insight into those ads without having to design them individually, and get free product listings on Google! 

Since your product listings are synced with Google Merchant Center, your job is reduced to a minimum but only to enjoy the privilege of showcasing your collection to the world. Enjoy the ultimate benefits of Google Listings and Ads through your WooCommerce dashboard and sit tight for more sales!

3) Jetpack VaultPress Backup

Planning on developing a WooCommerce store without protecting your store data? That’s not going to happen! WooCommerce essentials offer a real-time backup solution – Jetpack VaultPress Backup. Allow your WooCommerce store to restore data back from any time, and protect your store and customer data from any potential cyber risk to ensure a safe flow of data.

WooCommerce stores are often vulnerable to poor site performance. Even a minute of downtime can award you a business loss of $9000. To ensure that doesn’t happen, Jetpack VaultPress Backup saves your data to different corners of the world. When the time comes, you can restore your store from any previous state it was in with just 1 click away.

With Jetpack VaultPress Backup, you can protect your customer information at any moment under GDPR guidelines. This plugin also allows you to set custom WooCommerce table backups to make sure a safe and feasible flow of information. You can enjoy a 14 days trial service before purchasing this backup plugin.

During this period, you will enjoy real-time backups, one-click data restoration, get a 30-day archive with an activity log, and a min of 10GB of extendable storage. You will also have additional features and support when switching to the pro version of VaultPress. Besides, real-time reviews from actual users will automatically remove any kind of confusion if you have any regarding VaultPress.  

4) Gift Cards

One of the main reasons why customers will get back to your store is to offer them lucrative digital gift cards. People love gift cards! Sharing and receiving them is even more convenient and ensures a secure and quick payment policy. To ensure you have all these features integrated together, use Gift Cards for your WooCommerce store. 

Gift Cards is a multipurpose natural, safe, and intuitive gift voucher for your WooCommerce Store. It offers an excellent pre-paid payment system for gifts that users love to share and be shared with. Let your customers forget about their cards, and place orders spontaneously. Existing customers can make payments using the funds from the Gift Cards; available in their accounts.

Not only that but returning customers can also collect gift certificates in their accounts for the future. They can also check the total balance to ensure to buy the right gift items at the right time. You can refer to Gift Cards as a secure digital wallet for your customers; which can be easily integrated into your WooCommerce Store. 

Customers can enjoy the privilege of a custom delivery date, sending personal gift messages to the receiver, having multiple receivers (based on the gift fund), and allowing gift card variation as well. 

Gift Cards ensure all the benefits of coupons but they are more than coupons. Store owners can audit general balance reports (issued, purchased, and expired codes), get detailed transition logs, and get information on senders and recipients for specific gift certificates. Retain your customers for a long time with Gift Cards and get more customers in return! 

5) WooCommerce Payments

Having a WooCommerce store with no Payment Solution is like a room with no door, right? This is why WooCommerce Essentials suggest this fully integrated payment solution for WooCommerce with local payment options – WooCommerce Payments. WooCommerce Payments accepts doesn’t require any additional setup or monthly payment. It accepts both credit and debit cards making it easier for domestic payments. 

WooCommerce Payments allow a seamless payment option for more than 16+ countries. With no hidden charges for you, you can monitor cash flow, and manage disputes, or recurring profits. All these things can be easily managed and monitored from your WooCommerce dashboard. Besides ensuring payments in multiple currencies, customers can also use Apple Pay®, Google Pay, giropay, Sofort, iDeal, SEPA, P24, EPS, and Bancontact.

On the other hand, store owners can set custom deposit schedule and ensure a safe channel to their accounts. While reducing cart abandonment, you can always stay on top of chargebacks, disputes, and refunds. WooCommerce Payments is an all integrated solution for different payment gateways that uses a single dashboard only. To enjoy and let your customers have a trouble-free payment experience, download WooCommerce Payments for your Woo-store!

6) AutomateWoo

Marketing is a key to promoting and boosting your WooCommerce sales. However, it requires a lot of effort in action. Often store owners can’t invest a significant amount of time to start the wheel. They have other things around to manage such as business deals, store management, and customer service overall ensuring the performance of the store. 

However, you shouldn’t forget that a stable platform for marketing automation can grow your Woo platform and help you make more money. AutomateWoo works as a powerful automation marketing tool for WooCommerce. Hence, securing a place under WooCommerce essentials, this automation plugin has all the tools you need for a successful marketing boost. 

AutomateWoo is rich in features and allows you to create an infinite number of automated workflows for marketing purposes. Using different combinations of Triggers, Rules, and Actions, you can set up a network of promotional activities within your WooCommerce platform. Enjoy the full benefits of scheduling your workflow anytime, changing order statuses, or triggering specific scenarios.

Other features include: setting up follow-up emails, reminding customers of abandoned carts, helping to get inactive customers back, SMS notifications, sending review rewards, card expiry notifications, business referrals, sending birthday emails, Wishlist marketing, and many other exclusive features to keep customer satisfaction in good health. 

7) Composite Products

Around 7.9 billion people buy online daily which is almost 27% of the world population. Online shops are becoming a major source of revenue day by day. Hence, it’s a challenge to impress customers and stand out from the competition. When you are struggling with such a situation and can’t prove to be different, Composite Products can offer a beautiful interactive product composite platform for your audience.

People are eager to customize their preferable products. Hence, interactive and customizable product kits can engage them for a long time in your store – preventing bounce rates. A platform where interested buyers can customize computers, skateboards, furniture, or made-to-order jewelry. Composite Products offers you such an amazing interactive play-and-get platform for your customers.

Utilize your existing products with Composite Products and develop the most irresistible product kits with configurable products. You can also use this plugin to group products with advanced capabilities, enjoy flexible pricing and shipping features, customize flows and layouts, and support conditional logic as well. 

This plugin is an all-in solution to streamline your workflow. Allow your visitors to use the catalog for building blocks and develop the best custom product they wish to purchase from your store. It’s fun to engage and spontaneously efficient to showcase your store’s potential.

8) Product Add-Ons

Managing a WooCommerce Platform and have not heard of Product Add-ons? You will now! Product Add-Ons is a must-have WooCommerce Add-on for Woo-store. Using this add-on, you can allow your customers to provide custom information about the products they want. You can also add variable products maintaining the same list of the highlighted product on sale.

There will be plenty of products in a WooCommerce store. A single product can have multiple varieties – such as in colors, fabrics, discounted prices, and other factors. If you are planning to add these products separately, your product list will be messy. In fact, it can also drag down your site performance. This will disturb the customer interest, discouraging them to purchase.

Product Add-Ons help you to guide buyers with all the included variables for products in a single place. Offer your customers more options with image-based solutions, including flat fees (quantity-based or percentage based), add a drop-down menu for products, set custom prices, and do more with Product Add-ons. Your customers can also request customization using Text Input. Enjoy and let your customer enjoy the flexibility with product variables and put this add-on on your bucket list.

9) Smart Coupons

Now, you might confuse Gift Cards with Smart Coupons. Smart Coupons is solely made for featuring coupons, discounts, BOGO deals, giveaways, offers, and promotions. Plenty of WordPress coupon plugins are available online. But Smart Coupons is the most original and advanced WooCommerce plugin for coupons.

When starting a WooCommerce store, it is mandatory to have this coupon plugin like Smart Coupons. Some other major features of this plugin are selling store credits, gift cards, restricting advanced coupons, issuing automatic coupons, generating bulk coupon codes, placing URL coupons, importing and exporting coupon results, and many more. 


Does Smart Coupons slow down your site performance? This is often mistaken by many store owners. No, this WooCommerce Coupon plugin doesn’t slow down your site performance or checkout process. In fact, it is easily integrated with any business type throughout the season. Even if you don’t want to add offers or discounts, Smart Coupons will smartly bring back customers to your platform with gift cards and credits. 

This coupon plugin is easy to use and flexible. Anyone – from clients to store managers can use it without any coding needed.

10) Product Bundles

Being a WooCommerce store owner, you might often have to plan products in bundles to promote sales. This can often initiate bulk discount packages for assembled products. To ensure you can plan and put bundle products in sale in front, Product Bundles is the right WooCommerce essential for you. Sell custom skateboards to personalized cupcakes, this bundle plugin can bring your every bundling requirement under the hood.

People are encouraged in sales when you take one step forward to suggest useful essentials. Product Bundles allows you to upsell products through product recommendations, develop assembled products, offered customized boxes, and generate bulk discount packages. These buying options are important to engage your customers and generate buying interest in their minds. Customers often appreciate how flexible options they are being offered in an online store. 

With this plugin, you can also associate with in-depth revenue analytics for bundles, group simple, variable, and subscription products together, tailor pricing and shipping setups, improve bundle appearances separately and do a lot more surpassing your imagination. Create your virtual, physical, and downable product bundles now if you haven’t yet.

Final Words

WooCommerce Essentials pave the way to building full-featured standard WooCommerce stores. If you are just starting out with WooCommerce, having these essentials can save you a lot of time and effort. Invest your time in developing important strategies for your store, and let these essentials manage your online platform.  

We will keep updating our blogs with more collections like this. Keep an eye out for useful WooCommerce collections. Also, for any kind of inquiry, reach out to us here.

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Francisco Opazo C.
Francisco Opazo C.

Founder of The WooLauncher Community, Formerly Marketing Director at BuddyBoss, Happy Husband and Father, WordPress Jedi and Growth Marketer. (Currently Marketing Director for WishList Member)

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