Want to sell your services directly through your WordPress website? Luckily this is totally possible. WordPress could be the perfect vehicle for selling any number of types of services including design services, web development, marketing, photography, consulting, coaching mentorship therapy/counseling tech support and audio or video production.
The first thing you need to do is identify if you’re going to productize your services and how far: Are they a one-off type of service (such as a photoshoot) or are they something that can be sold on an ongoing basis (such as monthly coaching sessions)? Once you’ve figured out your pricing strategy then it’s time to start looking at plugins and solutions that will work best with what you.
Three ways you can approach this:
- Custom quote and price for each customer
- Set prices for individual services, customers can pick and choose what they want
- Completely productized service offerings
Let’s look at these options and what plugins are available.
Custom quote and price for each customer
For some service providers, every order is completely unique. You can’t sell a “one size fits all” approach because each customer needs something slightly different. Some examples of this include website development, video production, custom animation, etc…
In this situation, you’ll work with the customer directly to establish a statement of work and the final price. Once agreed upon, you’ll need a method of accepting payment and that’s where WordPress comes in.
You’ll need the ability to create an invoice with the specific details needed for that job such as project name, deadline date, hours of work required, and hourly rate.
You can use a plugin like Sprout Invoices to deliver the custom quote directly from WordPress.
Sprout Invoices is the most fully-featured invoicing solution for WordPress, and has several capabilities that will make selling services easier. The more notable features include:
- Custom estimate and invoice templates
- 300+ app integrations with Zapier (for additional automation)
- Payment scheduling
- Custom notifications
- Client dashboards
- Lots of integrations
If you have the pro version you can also accept payments directly through your WordPress website.
Custom quoted services offer the most flexibility but are the least automated. You’ll still need to work with the customer to put together the quote. Once the quote is generated and invoice sent, you can quickly get payment and take advantage of all the other payment and automation capabilities that Sprout Invoices provides.
Set prices for individual services, customers can pick and choose what they want
With this strategy, you’ll create a list of all the individual services you offer and assign a price for each one. Customers will then be able to pick and choose which services they’d like, creating their own custom package.
For example, a graphic designer could provide the following services:
- Social media avatar
- Social media banner
- Tri-fold brochure
- Logo
- Social media graphical post
- Instagram carousel (up to six slides)
- Letterhead
- Business card
A customer could then review the list of services and decide which they’d like to purchase, creating their own custom package tailored to their specific needs. This approach cuts out the back and forth required to prepare a custom quote, cutting down on the effort required to buy and sell. At the same time, this approach also gives the customer more flexibility than a completely productized service offering which we’ll discuss later.
For this approach, I find WordPress form plugins like Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms are simpler to set up and provide a better user experience compared to full eCommerce solutions like WooCommerce.
These two form plugins allow you to create payment forms that are connected to your payment gateway of choice like Stripe, PayPal, or Authorize.net. Once connected, you can create a single form with a checklist of all possible services. Users select which services they’d like, check-out, and you can take it from there.
Gravity forms has a great tutorial on setting up your first payment form to sell products or services, and even covers some of the additional capabilities you might want to take advantage of like connecting to an email marketing solution, offering coupons, or integrating with your CRM of choice like Hubspot, Zoho, or Capsule CRM.
Ninja Forms has a similar tutorial, and make sure to check out their add-ons section to see all the different integrations and capabilities you can add to your service payment form.
Completely productized service offerings
If you’ve completely productized your service offerings, you’ll want to take a slightly different approach. Productized service offerings are services that are pre-packaged and priced. An example of this would be if you offer a three-hour workshop for $1,000, or have a five-page website design package for $3,000.
There are many benefits to productizing your services. First, it takes the guesswork out of pricing your services. It also helps you package and sell more products because now you have a complete service or product rather than just individual items i.e., a very strictly defined 5 page website vs a custom quoted website with a variable number of pages, features, etc…
While they won’t work for everyone, productized services are easier to buy, deliver, and automate.
If you’re selling productized services I recommend using a full eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce.
WooCommerce is free (if you don’t need any add-ons) and will allow you to create a product for each service. If you need some flexibility you can easily create variations or parent/child product relationships. For example, if you’re selling branded social media assets, you could allow customers to select how many networks they want assets for.
WooCommerce allows you to accept payment, customize your emails, choose when to charge the client (immediately, or upon delivery or order completion), and has plenty of powerful integrations and capabilities including subscriptions, memberships, and the ability to sell digital assets.
Like the other plugins mentioned earlier, WooCommerce integrates with dozens of platforms including email marketing, accounting, and client management.
Want the best of both worlds? Completely custom and completely productized? You can set up WooCommerce to sell hours – that way you could provide some customers a custom quote with a total amount of hours, they can then purchase the hours and you can get started.
Wrapping up
There are many ways you can sell services through your WordPress site. The first, and most important, step is to decide how productized or custom you plan on selling your services. Once decided, your plugin selection will be easier as it will reflect the style of service that is offered.
A short plug, many of the plugins mentioned here integrate directly with Project Panorama. If you’re looking for a way to manage the delivery of these services after the sale – check out Project Panorama. You can automatically generate a new project from a template after the sale, and use it to keep your clients in the loop as you deliver the service they paid for.
What are you waiting for? Get started today with these WordPress plugins.