The Power of Exclusivity: Building a Purchasing Club with WooCommerce
Failing to meet customer expectations inevitably leads to decreased loyalty, loss of repeat business, and brand damage. Online stores face even greater challenges in avoiding underdelivering when compared to traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
The primary challenge for online retailers is the lack of physical interaction. Online customers can’t touch, feel, or try products before purchasing. It is almost impossible for online retailers to convey product quality, color, size and texture precisely just through text descriptions, images or even videos. After all customer expectations may still vary based on screen displays, regardless of the quality of product presentations. This limitation extends beyond tangible aspects to face-to-face interactions as well.
Online retailers must rely heavily on algorithms and data analysis to understand customer preferences. Providing personalized recommendations, building trust and rapport without in-person/ face-to-face interactions requires a lot of additional effort. And in today’s highly competitive environment where competitors are just a click away, online retailers face constant pressure to offer the lowest prices and free shipping while maintaining minimal profit margins.
Collectively, these factors contribute to potentially higher sales return rates for online stores. And this is not just about sales returns. It is because the process of returns and exchanges in e-commerce is often more complex and costly for both customers and retailers. This can further squeeze the already thin profit margins of online businesses.
What can online retailers do to minimize the possibility of underdelivering?
Beyond improving shipping, delivery, quality control, and general customer service, online retailers can take several steps to minimize underdelivering. First, they need to ensure their website is easy-to-navigate with a smooth and secure checkout process. The loading time of the website must be fast. And the website has to be mobile-friendly that users can access, use its functions and interact with the content easily regardless of the device they’re using. Product-wise the website has to provide clear, accurate, and honest descriptions with high-quality images from multiple angles. Other product information such as size guidelines, measurements, user instructions must be made available where appropriate.
The next thing online retailers can consider is to implement a purchasing club in addition to a customer loyalty program. These exclusive membership-based systems offer a more unique and privileged way to foster customer loyalty, boost sales, and create a brand community. When combined with WooCommerce’s versatility, purchasing clubs offer endless possibilities. This article explores how to harness exclusivity by building a purchasing club on your WooCommerce store, covering benefits, best practices, and step-by-step guidance to transform your online shop into a thriving, members-only shopping destination.
What is a Purchasing Club?
A Purchasing Club, also known as a buying club or discount club, is a membership-based organization that allows its members to buy goods or services at reduced prices. Members typically pay a fee to join and use the club, which usually grants them access to exclusive items, new products, pre-sale, special discounts, bulk-buying opportunities, or special offers that not available to the other general customers. Purchasing clubs can operate in various sectors, including retail, wholesale, and even services.
The primary benefits for members are obvious. They include significant cost savings, access to a wider range of products, and sometimes limited items or first hand product test.
For businesses, purchasing clubs offer numerous advantages beyond increased customer loyalty, lower marketing costs, and easier upselling. They can improve cash flow through recurring income streams and create a more stable clientele, thus reducing susceptibility to seasonal variations. These ongoing customer relationships also provide with them more valuable data, offering better insights into customer preferences and behavior for personalization and improvement. And with a relatively more stable and loyal customer base, businesses can leverage its collective buying power to negotiate better deals with suppliers, manufacturers, service providers or when collaborating with other businesses.
As you can see this membership-based retail model does not simply reward frequent customers or create a VIP shopping experience, it also makes resource allocation easier for businesses to do growth planning and business scaling.
How do you implement a Purchasing Club with WooCommerce?
The WordPress + WooCommerce combination stands out as a comprehensive, adaptable, and user-friendly platform suited for a wide range of web and e-commerce projects. With its ease of use and massive library of themes and plugins, this combo remains a top choice for creating and managing websites and online stores in today’s digital landscape.
To transform your WooCommerce store into a purchasing club, practically all you need are these two plugins: WooCommerce Membership and WooCommerce Subscription.
Plug-in #1: What does the WooCommerce Membership do?
Simply speaking, WooCommerce Memberships is a plugin for restricting your site’s content. We can use it to power your membership association, online magazine, e-learning sites, and access control to content/ products and member discounts. When used for a purchasing club, it lets you to create members-only products. You can restrict product viewing to members, which means these products will be hidden from non-members in your online store. You can also restrict purchasing, which means that products are publicly accessible, but only members can buy them. While non-members can enjoy free shipping when certain criteria are met, you can offer free shipping unconditionally to your members with Memberships.
Plug-in #2: Why do you need WooCommerce Subscription then?
While the WooCommerce Membership plug-in lets you to create member-products and contents, The Subscription plugin lets customers subscribe to your member’s program and pay it automatically upon renewal.
With Subscription, you have the options to introduce a variety of subscription programs for physical or virtual products and services. You can use it to create product-of-the-month clubs, weekly service subscriptions or even yearly software billing packages. Adding sign-up fees, offering free trials, or setting expiration periods are all at your fingertips. You also have the flexibility in offering variable subscription and different billing schedules for the customers to choose what best suits their needs.
Manual and Automatic Recurring Payment
There is one key point to take note. Although all WooCommerce payment gateways can be used to process manual subscription payments, where Subscriptions creates a pending order for the renewal that can be paid with any gateway. Not all of the payment gateways support automatic recurring payment. Make sure you use the right one. You can find all the compatible payment gateway extensions here on this page.
Automatic recurring payment is crucial. It is because it improves customer retention by reducing the friction in the renewal process.
Expanding the Horizon of Exclusivity
We always emphasize how powerful and flexible WordPress + WooCommerce is. Notably the offerings of your purchasing club do not end here. If you want to expand your program and give your members more privileges beyond typical discounts and free shipping, literally all you need is creativity.
There is a number of other plausible options to enhance your purchasing club’s value. Loyalty Point System and Buy X Get Y Free/ Cheaper model are perhaps two of the most popular choices.
With a plugin like SUMO Reward Points, you can create on top of a pretty standard WooCommerce loyalty reward points program a tiered rewards that escalates benefits based on membership level to incentivize increased engagement. Give out referral bonus points to the referrers and/ or the referees to promote referrals and help grow the club’s membership. You can also celebrate with members at their birthday or any other special days with gift reward points. This will not just foster a more personal connection with your customers, but will also attract and draw more non-members to join your purchasing club.
Loyalty programs tend to encourage more consistent, long-term engagement. On the other hand, sometimes you may want to drive quick sales increases, particularly for certain products/ product categories. Then you can consider to use the Buy X Get Y approach. There is a few plugins to choose from. Flexi BOGO for WooCommerce is one of them. Buy X Get Y provides immediate, more tangible rewards. The offers are straightforward and easy to understand. Members receive instant gratification by getting Y for free or at a discounted rate.
Wrapping Up
Creating a positive customer experience is crucial for the success of any online retail business. It drives customers to share with others their joy of shopping at your store. Doing it right could turn a one-time buyer into a lifelong advocate of your brand.
The collective benefits of setting up and running a Purchasing Club provide businesses with a larger room to grow and improve. The stable revenue and ongoing customer relationships inherent in the subscription model allow for more strategic, long-term planning and investment in innovation, customer experience enhancement, and overall business development. This model shifts the focus from short-term sales to building lasting customer relationships and continually adding value, which in result can lead to more sustainable and robust growth over time. How to do it though, depends entirely on your product/ service type, customer base, pricing strategy and available resources.
For a demo or more information about a starting or revamping your website/ e-Commerce store, contact us today. Our e-Commerce team does not just help you to implement your storefront, we have helped hundreds of other clients to optimize their online store for SEO, improve product showcase, and streamline the order fulfillment process.
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