WooCommerce Plugins to Consider when you sell Restricted Items
This list is for a client who sells physical goods from their WooCommerce website. Some items have restrictions that prevent them from being shipped to specific countries and across specific state lines.
Sequential Order Numbers Pro – $49/year (August 2024)
A potential annoyance with WooCommerce websites is how fast the order numbers can grow. I have a website with 126 orders. The first order number was 250, followed by 520. The most recent order number was 6517! The order number may not matter much if you ONLY sell on WooCommerce. But if you plan to branch out to more platforms and/or handle some in-person transactions, it is nice to have some sort of identifier in your order numbers. Sequential Order Numbers Pro allows you to choose a starting order number and add prefixes and suffixes, which can help you quickly identify where the order came from.
Product Reviews Pro – $79/year (August 2024)
There is nothing wrong with WooCommerce’s built-in product review system. But Product Reviews Pro lets your customers add images and videos, upvote or downvote reviews, and more.
WooCommerce Waitlist – $49/year (August 2024)
Do you see physical goods that may run out of stock? The WooCommerce WaitList plugin can collect the email addresses of interested visitors and automatically email them when the item is back in stock! (Requires proper email configuration on your WooCommerce server.) Waitlists can be viewed on the backend product page for an idea of how popular a product is or if you want to contact customers to suggest an alternative for discontinued products.
Conditional Shipping and Payments – $109/year (August 2024)
Conditional Shipping and Payments for WooCommerce allows you to set unique rules per product and customer location. This feature is necessary for selling items prohibited in certain regions or by specific shipping carriers or payment processors.
Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin for WooCommerce – $89/year (August 2024)
PluginHive’s Multi-Carrier Shipping Plugin for WooCommerce combines the power of table rate shipping and real-time rates from major carriers. I have used it on multiple websites.
Table Rates: Require you to break the areas you ship to down into individual shipping zones and create calculations for each shipping method. (Let me know if anybody wants to see an article on how to do this.)
Real-Time Rates: Require you to set up appropriate accounts to retrieve rates from individual carriers.
Downside: I have seen sites get VERY SLOW when you try to retrieve too many live rates. For this reason, I generally create rate tables for the areas shipped to most. And offer a few live rates for the other zones.
WooCommerce also sells plugins that can retrieve live shipping rates AND let you print labels. However, these cost more and my clients prefer to do their shipping through third-party software that connects will all of their websites.
