If you are considering launching an online store, you’ll be presented with many software options for building out your storefront. These choices, while initially will feel like a windfall, can quickly feel overwhelming due to the multitude of ecommerce options available.
Today I’d like to walk through one very popular solution and present an overview of what is WooCommerce and why you might want to consider it for creating an ecommerce website.
Sincerely ,What is WooCommerce Really?
WooCommerce is a free plugin, or functional extension, for WordPress. Hence, a WooCommerce page builder plugin is used to enhance the look and feel of your website. When installed into a WordPress website, WooCommerce adds in basic product management, order processing, and shopping cart functionality.
WooCommerce can create a basic online store and sell a variety of products and services that include physical goods, digital goods, affiliate transactions, and ongoing memberships. The core software can manage essential ecommerce features like international customers, inventory management, sales tax management, shipping cost calculations, and coupons.
Top WooCommerce Competitors
Like other platforms, WooCommerce also has its Competitors or Alternatives. As WooCommerce is a widely popular e-commerce platform is home to nearly 400,000 sites.
In today’s E-commerce market, there are other WooCommerce like software available that can make you analyze the market with the best price selection, functionality, as well as user comments and reviews
- X-Cart
- PrestaShop
- Volusion
- BigCommerce
- Shopify
- Magento
- JumpSeller
- OsCommerce
- Shopkeep
- Bigcartel
You can learn more about additional ecommerce software package and usage statistics at themedev
WooCommerce Developers
There are over 350 contributors to the WooCommerce code base. These developers are part of the Automattic team, as well as independent programmers in the greater WordPress community.
This diverse group of WordPress developers is actually an even larger number. There are many WordPress agencies and developers working along side the Woo team to build plugin extensions and stock website templates for storefront presentation, performs storefront installation and set up for clients, as well as offer custom code and theme tweaks.
WooCommerce’s Pros and Cons
WooCommerce was utilized to build popup shops online for various opportunities where a pre-existing online presence was in place using WordPress sites. The platform provides an extremely short setup process to get your store online and start selling. These were short-term sales that focused on moment-based marketing, so the longevity of the storefront was not important
Pros
- Very fast to implement if you have an existing website, especially WordPress.
- WooCommerce software is open source and free.
- Offers a well-rounded suite of tools.
- The plugin is fairly easy to installed into WordPress
- There are over 300 extensions available for making the base functionality more robust.
- Competitive pricing makes it attractive to small businesses
- The software is frequently updated for new features and functions.
Cons
- Improvements in mobile UI.
- Virtually every storefront will require an extension and these plugins cost money and require an annual license purchase.
- Software updates can be major endeavors which can sometimes require a developer to assist in execution, testing, and troubleshooting.
- Not all developers who say they know WooCommerce are of high quality.
- Sometimes slows down websites when loading info.
WooCommerce Extensions
Our online stores use a variety of extensions to help increase the basic feature set and improve overall customer satisfaction. Our WooCommerce extensions include:
- AutomateWoo – Sends follow up emails with coupons for theme license renewals.
- WooCommerce Subscriptions – This extension is used to set up annual theme licenses and generate recurring income.
- Follow-Up Emails – Sends automated emails for customer on-boarding.
- Genesis Connect for WooCommerce – Connects WooCommerce with the Genesis theme framework.
- Web Savvy WooCommerce Bridge – A custom plugin that connects WooCommerce to the Simple:Press forum.
- WooCommerce PDF Invoices – Provides a downloadable or printable invoice for customers.
- WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration – Connects WooCommerce to Google Analytics and allows for more advanced website reports.
- WooCommerce MailChimp Subscribe – Connects WooCommerce to MailChimp to automatically sign users up for our newsletter. This is permission based.
- WooCommerce Menu Extension – Adds additional menu functionality to the store area of our website.
- WooCommerce Stripe Gateway – Connects WooCommerce to the Stripe payment gateway. Stripe is a very easy to set up credit card processor.
- Yoast WooCommerce SEO – Sends schema data for products to search engines like Bing and Google.
The above extensions are only a sampling of what is available. WooCommerce extensions allow website owners to take a basic store and convert it into a robust, highly functional portal.
