As any trip to a local shopping mall will demonstrate, it’s never too soon to begin thinking about the holidays. If you’re one of the millions who have entrusted your website to the WordPress platform, you’ll find a raft of great options for enhancing your online business during the busy holiday season. Let’s take a look at some wonderful plugins designed to optimize your business and bring a little holiday cheer to your valued customers.
Ecommerce WD by Web Dorado
Successful retail sites depend heavily on a reliable online store and shopping cart solution, and there are few to rival the intuitive, easily customizable, and feature-packed Ecommerce WD by Web Dorado.
5 customizable themes allow you to customize the appearance of your site, including options for style and color of buttons, headers, navigation bar, and user and product panels with no expertise required. You can arrange, filter and display product groups in a number of different views, and easily insert products into pages and posts using shortcode. Email templates make it is easy to send custom emails to your customers, including order details and status updates, notice of failed, completed, and refunded orders, and product invoices. You’ll be able to set up a number of shipping options, and arrange for any taxes due on purchases to be configured automatically. Custom configurable reports will help you analyze the results of promotions and campaigns, and reports will help you monitor business performance. Products and categories are unlimited, a guest checkout option is included, and Ecommerce WD is compatible with PayPal.
Ecommerce WD is available as a free plugin, and additional benefits are available when you purchase a license. Options include 1 domain for 6 months for just $30, 3 domains for 1 year for just $45, and unlimited domains for 1 year for just $60. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better overall online store solution than Ecommerce WD, and with a busy holiday season upon us, you can’t afford to settle for second best.
Ecard Seasonal Greetings
During the holiday season, your site visitors may be looking for a convenient method to convey holiday greetings to friends and family via email or social media. The tradition of holiday cards has many warm and wonderful connotations, and this concept has been embraced in the digital era with e-cards.
E-Card Seasonal Greetings allows you to create unlimited albums and multiple layouts for each e-card. E-Cards can be set up in advance to be sent on a specific date, and users can preview the card before it’s sent. There is an option to include background music, and background color can be changed on some e-cards. You can include your own shortcode into each e-card page, and a link-back URL will bring the recipient to your site to view the card.
Christmas Music
Add Christmas lights and music to your site to elevate your customer’s holiday spirit. Flexible settings allow you to add music and lights to individual pages and posts, or the entire site. A conveniently located play/pause button allows visitors to disable features at will. The background color and play/pause button are customizable. Available languages include English, Russian, and Croatian, and this plugin is available for free.
WP Event Calendar by Web Dorado
With the impending holidays, chances are your site may be hosting some special events, such as Black Friday sales, or last minute deal-buster buys. You need a way to alert customers of the last day for purchase to receive items before Christmas, alert them to the end time of special offers, and remind them of the date of any special events you may be hosting. WP Event Calendar allows you to represent these events to customers in a manner that is friendly and attractive.
It takes only a few minutes to create and publish events. 5 customizable themes are available, and the number of events unlimited. Users can add their own events from the front-end. This responsive and SEO friendly plugin includes Google Maps integration, making it easy for visitors to locate venues at which you’re hosting events. Site visitors can easily locate the events they’re interested in with the Filter Add-on, filtering events by day, event, category, or organizers.
WP Event Calendar integrates with iCloud and Google Calendar, allowing you to easily export and import events to and from your WordPress site in just a few easy steps. You can add a subscribe button that allows guests to receive updates and notifications on all your events.
WD Event Calendar is available free, and you can purchase a license that offers additional benefits. A 6-month license for 1 domain is available for $25. You can purchase a 1 year license for 3 domains for $40, and a 1 year license for unlimited domains for $60.
Random Christmas Fact Widget
This simple widget displays any one of 40 random Christmas facts in the sidebar each time a visitor refreshes the page, and non-CSS formatting allows it to blend seamlessly into your site.
Xmas Widget Little Elf
You can increase customer engagement by decorating your site for the holidays, and Xmas Widget Little Elf is a lightweight and simple way to do that. Xmas Widget is easily integrated with email, social media, and ad campaigns. It can be installed in just minutes. You can personalize the appearance for every customer, and an unlimited number of style and design possibilities are offered. There are dozens of background images, icons and fonts, add your own custom designs, and customize CSS code and colors. A snow effect can be customized by style and intensity. Get your customers excited about the holidays with Xmas Widget Little Elf.
Invite Referrals
During the holiday season, you’re going to see increased site traffic, including long-time loyal customers and many first-time visitors. Take advantage of the additional traffic to launch a customer referral campaign. You can set up campaigns that reward customers for referrals, registrations, sales, and/or mobile app installs. Campaign views, invite content and email templates are fully customizable, and multiple referral options are available, include all popular social media sites. A basic subscription costs just $49 annually for up to 500 referrals per month.
