Ecommerce is a very hot topic these days in the web industry! As we transition from desktop to mobile browsing and websites to apps, we deeply analyze the differences between the various solutions that businesses have to sell their products. As huge proponents of WordPress and open source solutions, we must touch on the most popular ecommerce solution for WordPress, WooCommerce.
As with WordPress, the only cost to keep a store up and selling on WooCommerce is your small hosting fee, thus making this solution very feasible for all businesses! WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress, which means no paying fees per item or for the amount of traffic you receive, as is the case with hosted solutions; Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
Features
- It’s Free – Not much more to say but that there are hundreds of thousands of businesses selling their products on WooCommerce which make the development input massive. Great for you!
- Flexibility – Already have a WordPress Website? Great, no need to get a new once made up, simply install the WooCommerce plugin and away you go. Products can be categorized, given sale prices, independent attributes, and more. Additionally, WooCommerce stores are capable of selling physical, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate/external products.
- Customizable – Keep your brand identity intact and seamless with the rest of your website, simply add shop page with a few featured products on the homepage and your ready to go.
- Analytics – A core tool used by any website owner, is their analytics tool. Many ecommerce businesses may not know how to apply an analytics system to their website, nor will they know what statistics need focused analysis. Thankfully, WooCommerce has such merchants covered. The built in analytics system makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. Figures like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all neatly presented via graphs, without the user ever having to leave their admin panel.
- Room for Growth – One of any business owners’ main concerns, growth! Like we mentioned before, hundreds of thousands of businesses are running on WooCommerce which grows the development list and the community around it. With hundreds of plugins, from payment solutions to shipping, most any feature that you need in an ecommerce store is most likely already out there or being developed as you read this post!
- Security – According to WooCommerce, these guys hired Mark Jaquith (the WordPress core developer) to tighten up any vulnerabilities. On top of this if you want to make you’re customers feel safe when making a purchase you can raise the security of your store by forcing SSL.
- Operations – WooCommerce runs just like any ecommerce solution that you could think of. From order placement, emails being sent to store manager and customer, to update emails with processing information to tracking information to final invoice. Everything is stored in the backend of WordPress, which you can review through your dashboard!
These are just a few of the main reasons that our team relies heavily on WooCommerce as an ecommerce solution. Everything from ease of use fro beginners to being a robust platform housing thousands of products, the plugin really is the best way to go when working with WordPress Ecommerce. If you have any questions about getting your store off the ground, contact our team!
