Everything is put on internet today. And we don’t have to go to shop in person if we need anything. We can check plenty of products on our mobile phones or any other devices, We can place order on a single click and we can get them in hand without leaving our home. And we feel much comfortable with online purchasing. So if you are a business owner and selling products (physical/digital), you should definitely own an online store to survive in this digital age.
When you think of building an online store, you will have plenty of options in hand. Those options will make you confuse. There will be number of questions running on your mind. Should I choose the simple and easy one? or Should I choose the one which is cost effective? or Should I go for the one which is capable of growing with my business? You have to analyze the pro’s and con’s of various options on your own and then you have to make the final decision.
We believe that WooCommerce from WordPress is the best choice for ecommerce website. It is best suited for both the beginner and who is already familiar with WordPress platform. We have interpreted the reasons to choose WooCommerce for your online store among all other platforms.
Open Source E-Commerce Platform
WooCommerce is an open source and free software just like WordPress. It is the most popular WordPress plugin used my many. When you start an online store for the first time, price will be the major factor of consideration. Since it is an open source e-commerce platform, you can use it without any worries.
You may think like it will have limited features and basic options since it is offered free. But the reality is WooCommerce free version have all the capabilities to be a fully functional ecommerce platform. And it’s functionalities can be expanded with thousands of plugins and extensions available in WordPress and WooCommerce.
Enormous companies from small scale to large scale have built their online retail store on WooCommerce platform. Whether you are going to sell your products locally or nationally or even internationally, WooCommerce will be a better solution provider for you and your business.
If you are already familiar with WordPress, then WooCommerce is the best choice for your online store. Because, WooCommerce is built on WordPress. So the features and interface will be easier for you to handle.
User Friendly
It is super user friendly and easy to use. It is easy to set up and install an ecommerce store with WooCommerce. You can do it all by yourself without looking for any expert’s help. Here you can cut down the developer costs. If your are a small retailer, you have to cut down the costs and spending in all possible ways.
You can modify and customize anything on your site based on your requirement. You have the complete control. You can edit any part of your website from homepage layout to how your buy button looks.
Your WooCommerce site is completely customizable. You can work on each area to give your site the best look to attract more customers and sell more.
It allows the merchants to handle the products without any technical knowledge. Everything is made simple with this platform. Anyone can learn and start using the WooCommerce platform without putting much efforts and time.
If once the site is developed, you will have work in updating the products area only. It’s as simple as adding your product name, a simple description, adding a featured image for your product and adding the price. Now it is all set, your product will be displayed on your online store. An amazing advantage of WooCommerce is that it’s design is adaptable to any type of online shops regardless of the products and market.
Responsive Design
Smartphone users are increasing day by day. Each and every person in a family has their own smartphone. Most of the people use smartphone to access internet and search for products. Online purchase has become more familiar with all of us irrespective of our age.
And more than half of the website traffic comes from mobile phones. So if your ecommerce site is not well aligned in mobile phones, you will definitely miss out lot of orders. It is important to maintain good design for your ecommerce store on all devices.
Your online store and the way you present your products to your website visitors has huge impact on turning them into customers. If you present well, you can make them buy at the first look itself. So your website in mobile and all other devices should be a great way of marketing your products.
Rather than being online for name sake, If you develop your ecommerce website perfectly with better design, better content and with better marketing startegy, you can get more sales through your ecommece website.
Fortunately, the WooCommerce platform comes with a responsive design. It is compatible with all resolutions from smaller screens to bigger screens. WooCommerce is compatible in all devices and all browsers. You can do the mobile responsive website with ease of right theme which is fast and responsive. That’s why most online retailers choose WooCommerce among other ecommerce platforms.
Safe and Secure
Ecommerce involves online payments and customer’s important credentials. So safety has to be considered before choosing an ecommerce solution. If there is any vulnerability in your site, it will lead to difficulty in shopping and making payments. WooCommerce doesn’t allow those kind of breach and all. It is a trusted platform.
Everything is safe and secure with WooCommerce platform. WooCommerce is regularly updated to ensure high level security for it’s users. That is why it is being the first choice of ecommerce people. Hence it is being updated regularly, it is completely compatible with WordPress’s latest themes and versions.
You can follow the following techniques to protect your WooCommerce site from intruders and hackers
- Keeping everything updated (WordPress, WooCommerce, Plugins, etc)
- Using Security Plugins and Strong Passwords
- Using Secure Hosting
- Adding SSL Certificates
- Changing your Default Username “Admin”
- Having Multiple Backup of your Website
- Limiting Login Attempts
- Some of the security plugins for your reference
- Sucuri Security
- All in One WP Security and Firewall
- Wordfence
Countless Themes and Plugins
You can create an online store just the way you wanted it by choosing the right theme for your site. WooCommerce have plenty of themes and you can pick one from them. After choosing the best theme for your site, you can edit sections like header, footer and products, etc.
If you are a professional developer and you know about coding and you want to add more features and functionalities to your online store, you can do that too. It also provides access to CSS, HTML and PHP.
If you are a beginner and you don’t have any technical knowledge, you don’t have to bother about CSS/HTML, you can develop your website straight away with the theme and other customization options available.
Some of the fastest themes
- Shoptimizer – It is developed only for WooCommerce which is super fast loading compared to others
- Neve Theme – It is fast loading and also SEO friendly
- Generatepress – It is also high speed theme and very light weight one
- OceanWP – It’s a WooCommerce ready theme, easy to use and fast
WooCommerce is developed in order to be friendly for both technical developers and beginners. You can get lot of free and premium plugins to add more functionality to your website.
Some of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store
- Optinmonster – It helps you to convert your abandoning website visitors into customers. You can use it to reduce cart abandonment, increase sales, onsite retargeting and more.
- Monsterinsights – It is the google analytics plugin for your online store.
- Live Chat – It helps you to provide an option for customers to contact your support people from your online store.
- Mailchimp for WooCommerce – It’s an email marketing platform. If you integrate your Mailchimp account with your WooCommerce store, your customers and their purchase data are automatically synced with your Mailchimp.
- WooCommerce Products Slider – It’s an additional feature which you can add in your store to attract more customers and keep them engaged on your online store. You can create beautiful sliders and carousels of your products and you can add these sliders anywhere on your store.
- Order Delivery Date for WooCommerce – It allows your customers to choose favorable delivery date for the products during the checkout. You can check those dates on their order page.
- Yotpo – It allows you to collect reviews and feedbacks from your customers automatically.
Sell Any Product (Physical/Digital)
There is no restriction for your product. You can sell a physical product to your customer. You can also sell digital products which can be sold or downloaded from your site.
WooCommerce is developed to support all products sale. Your products can be physical, digital, subscriptions, appointments and much more. Whether you are going to sell a single digital product or variety of physical products, WooCommerce is the best choice.
Unlimited Images and Unlimited Products
In WooCommerce site, You can add unlimited photos of your products to show them to your customers. You can also set a featured image in order to highlight the best one. Additional Variation Images are helpful for your customers to choose a product by comparing with others. You can add variations based on size, color, style, etc.
You can enhance these features supported on WooCommerce by using any of the following solutions.
- Additional Variation Images WordPress Plugin
- Additional Variation Images WooCommerce Extension
WooCommerce doesn’t restrict you number of products you add to your online store. It allows you to add unlimited products.
Easy Orders and Customer Management
Orders Management – It enables all your process involved in order management like receiving an order, processing it, confirming the order, shipping, payment (Online payment/Cash on delivery) and delivery in a well planned and centralized manner.
You can allow your customers to be notified on the status of their product order. When you notify them with status like product shipped, reached nearby hub, picked up by our agent, will reach you by 11.00 AM, etc, they will more likely to purchase again from your store and become your regular customer.
Customer Management – It is important to have a customer management strategy in order to run your online store successfully. And it is also important to maintain directory of your customer details and reminding them when new product is available. It is a part of marketing strategy and you can achieve it through site built on WooCommerce.
You can allow your customers to register on your site to purchase a product. You can also allow them checkout your products without registering.
SEO Friendly
WooCommerce is built on the world’s best CMS platform i.e.WordPress. WordPress is fully optimized for search engines. Like WordPress, WooCommerce is also optimized for SEO to help you reach your customer when they search for you in search engines.
Content is the important foundation of ecommerce marketing and sales. An SEO friendly online store has high chances appearing in the search results. You have to choose the right theme which is optimized for SEO and fast loading.
It also has built-in blogging facility so that you can publish great content and get more website traffic.
Some of the SEO plugins for your reference
Built – In Features
- Payment Gateway – WooCommerce has in built payment gateways for facilitating payment functions. It has the ability to accept major credit cards, online transfers via various banks, checks and also cash on delivery. It also offers 140 region based gateways to pick from and integrate with your WooCommerce site including Stripe , Paypal and Square, etc.
- Geo Location Support – We usually look for options to detect our current location while placing an order. You can provide that option for auto detection of your customer’s address to make shipping.
- Advanced Inventory Management – Inventory management is a part of online store management. And it’s important to automate it. Because, we can’t count stock availability for each product every time and update manually. If someone has placed an order for a particular product and it’s not in stock, it will lead to tragedy. And even if you arrange stocks and deliver it with little delay, your company will lose it’s name in society. So it’s very much important to automate the updates of stocks.
Here, with the help of WooCommerce, you can track stock levels, hold a stock if the order is cancelled, get notified when the stock is low and out of stock items and hide out of stock items on your site.
The main purpose of ecommerce site is to reduce your efforts and pressure involved in stock management. Once you add a product to your online store, every action taken on that product is tracked and you can get current report and status on stocks and it’s availability.
- Easy Tax Calculation – You can enable automatic calculation of taxes based on your customer’s shipping address. If once you update the tax setting based on your country, your online store will collect sales tax on checkout based on your store address.
Multilingual
WooCommerce also allows you to make your site available on multiple languages so that you can sell across the world. You can make your online store with multilingual content and multiple currencies.
- Multipress Extension
- Multicurrency Extension
Worldwide Community
You can find support easily across world, Hence large number of people are using WooCommerce for their ecommerce website. It’s community of users, developers and contributors is vast and spread across world.
You can also follow the how-to documentation and video tutorials provided by WooCommerce. You can also get support from WordPress help forums.
The best way to get cleared of your problems and technical queries is to approach WooCommerce support forum. You also have alternate options like upload WP community forums, WooExperts who are the people ready to offer in-depth consultation for your big ecommerce projects.
Shopify Vs WooCommerce
Shopify is an all in one package for ecommerce. It allows you to create an online store, accept payments and manage inventory whereas WooCommerce is an open source ecommerce plugin built for WordPress which also allows you to get all the functionalities of an online store.
Shopify basic plan is $29/month whereas WooCommerce is a free plugin and you need the domain name and hosting to install WordPress.
You will have restrictions on customizing in Shopify but in WooCommerce, you own the site and you own the data, you can edit and modify anything.
Shopify has it’s own payment gateway and it also offers plenty of payment gateways. But they charge 2% fees on every transaction made through third party payment gateways.
But WooCommerce doesn’t charge even a single penny for your transactions. It gives you number of payment gateways to pick on your own choice.
You can buy third party add-ons Shopify app store and use them in your store whereas WooCommerce allows you to access more than 55,000 free WordPress plugins.
If you are intended to develop an online store without spending much and also want to add more functionalities, WooCommerce is the best choice for you.
Facts and Statistics
- 42% of the ecommerce site on the internet use WooCommerce
- 3,320,691 websites use WooCommerce and it is 28% of ecommerce sites available on internet
- 6% of websites use WooCommerce
- 5 million active installations as on date
- 98,223,916 downloads so far
- 382 extensions available for WooCommerce
- 2000 WooCommerce plugins available on codecanyon
- 1300 WooCommerce themes available on themeforest
- 980 themes available on wordpress.org
By considering all the above features provided by WooCommerce, It is the best and right option for your online store. Because it is easy to setup, use, more user friendly and completely customizable according to your requirements. You can develop an online store from small size to big size on WordPress’s WooCommerce platform.
WooCommerce is trusted by most of the ecommerce sites available on internet. It is a complete ecommerce solution which can adapt to your business needs. You can add lot of features and functionalities on your site with WooCommerce. If you are looking for an ecommerce platform which is user friendly and affordable with more functionalities, then WooCommerce will suit all your expectations and requirements.