If you ask the question “What is WooCommerce?”, most probably you will get this answer: “It is one of the best e-commerce platforms out there” – and that’s right.
Basically, WooCommerce is a free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It allows your basic WordPress website to transform into a fully functioning online store, complete with all the necessary e-commerce features. Users can easily download the WooCommerce plugin from the official WordPress plugin directory, since it is free to use.
WooCommerce is an open-source, highly customizable and flexible software solution. With this e-commerce plugin, you can create an engaging and successful online presence.
In our last article, we briefly mentioned WooCommerce; but in this one we will give more details.
Why should you use WooCommerce?
With 5 million active installations, WooCommerce is by far one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. There are many reasons why WooCommerce is such a popular way to build an e-commerce store:
- It is a free plugin. Without spending any money, you can download and install it on your WordPress website.
- It is easy to set-up. It only takes minutes to get crucial aspects of your store sorted, with the help of inbuilt Setup Wizard. Your online store should be available for visitors in less than 30 minutes.
- It is beginner friendly. To create a store, you don’t need to become an expert developer.
- It is well documented. WooCommerce has extensive instructions and documentation covering a variety of topics that will be particularly useful to web developers.
- It is open-source software, that means any developer can audit, modify, or extend the code based on business needs.
- It is extensible. There are a numerous of ways to expand the functionality of WooCommerce and improve the performance of your online store via themes, plugins, extensions.
- It has community support. In case of any problem, WooCommerce has a growing passionate global community ready to help you out.
- It is secure. Because of its regular updates, WooCommerce is highly secure. Also, the development team works closely with some of the biggest security providers to enable a more secure online experience.
Some drawbacks of WooCommerce to consider:
- It is only suitable for WordPress.
- Relies on third-party plugins for extended functionality. You need to use free or premium extensions to grow beyond core functionality.
- While you can download WooCommerce for free, you still need a domain name, hosting and often a paid theme to build a WordPress website.
- WooCommerce and WordPress require some technical knowledge. Even though out of box solution should be good to start with it, for extended functionality can be challenging to work with without this knowledge.
- There is no customer support offered by WooCommerce itself. You need to rely on wide range of community support online. Plenty of talent available as freelancers to support as well if you don’t mind paying.
WooCommerce Key Features
WooCommerce plugin comes with many great features users can take advantage of; here are some of them:
1- You can sell anything: WooCommerce allows you to sell pretty much anything online. It is widely used to sell physical products like clothes, jewelry, books and so much more. You can also use WooCommerce to sell digital products, make bookings, provide services or charge for appointments, reservations, etc.
2- Product management: WooCommerce gives you the option to add as many products as you’d like, limited only by your hosting solution. With WooCommerce, adding, editing, and deleting products or services is possible.
If you are a new online business owner,it is hard to decide how to best sort and manage the inventory on your website.WooCommerce helps with this case and makes product management easier by enabling users to add types and categories for each product or service they sell. You can create a user-friendly online shop via categories, tags, and product properties – you can set attributes like size and color.
3- Integrations: Running a successful online store requires more than just your website or your online catalog. You need many more tools that work in perfect sync with each other to manage your business efficiently: CRM system, email marketing software, order management tools, social networks, third-party shipping services, etc. When it comes to integrating any third-party software system with your online shop, WooCommerce is flexible. And we have good news! Our customer engagement solution Herogi, is now fully integrated with WooCommerce. This integration empowers e-commerce brands to take their customer engagement to a whole new level, leading to increased conversions and revenue like never before. You can check all the details here.
4- Flexible payment options: WooCommerce provides a variety of payment methods such as direct bank transfer, check payments, cash on delivery, and accept payment from all credit cards. The payment methods WooCommerce offers are fully compatible with other popular payment gateways like Amazon Pay, Doku, PayPal, Square, and Stripe – and Amazon Pay. Apple Pay, Google Pay, subscriptions, and deposits are also supported.
5- Powerful analytics: WooCommerce has in-built analytics, which will help you to get useful data about your e-commerce store, your customers, and the way they interact with your store and its products. WooCommerce comes pre-installed with a comprehensive set of analytics (such as total sales by date, average order value, individual customer shopping stats, etc.) that can be viewed in an easy-to-understand manner. Plus, it can be easily integrated with external analytics services like Google Analytics.
6- SEO: A successful business needs a robust SEO strategy to get its products noticed on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). WordPress is the best platform for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and since WooCommerce runs on WordPress, you can get advantages of this SEO-friendly platform. When used together, WordPress and WooCommerce, provide a customized solution for content management that includes product descriptions, blogging, landing pages, email marketing, and user reviews.