Are you thinking of building an eCommerce website suiting your business needs but are not sure how to? Are the crunching numbers of expenses worrying you? Well then, there is a perfect solution awaiting you! Creating websites on WordPress is now a universal trend; yet creating an eCommerce platform remains tough. We’ll consider how to conquer this task.
The Benefits of Using WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular CMS that attracts a million users for its simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Among benefits are the simplicity of the interface, SEO-friendliness, and flexibility. Also, it is an attractive base not only for a blog, or a corporate site but for an eCommerce store. WordPress has a lot of plugins for its stable work and extended functionality.
A WordPress plugin makes this job easier than you can imagine. Such is the task of WooCommerce. WooCommerce is essentially a WordPress plugin, which lets you create a useful eCommerce website. With this, you can easily generate and manage an online store.
Let’s Start with WooCommerce Features
WooCommerce provides you with many features and opportunities. These features include:
- Mobile-friendly design
WooCommerce is not only easy and user-friendly on your desktop and laptop but also on your mobile phone or smartphone. - Search Engine Optimization
As WooCommerce runs under WordPress, it can enjoy all the features of WordPress. One such important feature is SEO tools and plugins. It has built-in SEO plugins like Yoast and offers well-structured CMS that can boost your online presence with its SEO tools. - Discounts
Running an eCommerce website is not an easy task. WooCommerce makes this task as facile as possible. With it, you can create discount coupons and cards for your customers to enjoy on the website. - Analytics
Assessing the performance and statistics of your website is essential. WooCommerce allows you to assess these data using analytics. You can also integrate your site with Google Analytics for free. - Stock level tracking
With the help of WooCommerce, you can keep track of your stock and inventory levels accurately. - Sales Report
The website will design for you a report by calculating the number of sales you generated from the eCommerce platform. - Product data panel
A separate panel for the display and information about products will make your customers’ experience very smooth and easy going. - Automatic tax calculations
With WooCommerce you no longer have to care for calculating taxes on the products bought. It automatically calculates taxes such as GST and VAT. - Geolocation support
This is an advanced feature of WooCommerce site that connects your store’s location and provides support to customers. - Store management
Online store management cannot be seamless than this. The various features of WooCommerce mark your store management as noteworthy.
Pros and Cons of WooCommerce
- Free to download: The biggest benefit of WooCommerce is that it is completely free! The base plugin is freely downloadable. However, later if you purchase additional premium extensions you will have to pay for them.
- Professional look: If you are intimidated to design your eCommerce site then WooCommerce will do the work for you. With its design interface, your website will boast a professional look.
- Flexible: The interface of the website is highly flexible. You can customize features according to your needs such as categorization, sales price, independent attributes, order panel, invoice generation, and tracking.
- Simple to use: Despite WooCommerce having the outlook of a professional website, it is relatively simple to use. It is a user-friendly eCommerce solution. It has all the features needed for a professional site to operate and write blogs.
- Popular: According to BuiltWith, WordPress generates about 84.14% of all websites on the Internet. This gives them a massive platform, increasing the popularity of WooCommerce site which occupies 4.17 % of websites that use it in the Entire Internet.
Despite all the pros, WooCommerce has its cons too, which are:
- Learning curve: As WooCommerce is generated by WordPress, you have to be familiar with the main website first. Your ability to learn and ease of use depends on your understanding of WordPress.
- Additional work: WooCommerce is not exactly an independent website; thus it has some more work involved. These are web hosting, maintaining site security and the implementation of extensions and plugins.
- Negative reviews: Not all reviews of WooCommerce are positive. Some people who reviewed the site complained about the API, website issues and glitches, mounting costs and lack of customer service.
Apparent Ease of Use
WooCommerce is notably a website, which is facile to operate despite its professionalism. The product information panel is very straightforward, and so is the website navigation. With a little bit of surfing, you can be an expert too.
Server Requirements
The list of requirements to run a store on WooCommerce successfully is the following:
- PHP version 7.3 or greater
- MySQL version 5.6 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.0 or greater
- The WordPress memory limit of 128 MB or greater
- HTTPS support
How Much Does WooCommerce Cost?
Initially, you can start using WooCommerce free of cost. It is freely downloadable from various sources given you have WordPress.
However, later, you will have to pay for some charges. These include:
- Extensions,
- Plugins,
- premium features,
- domain name,
- SSL certificate,
- web hosting costs.
WooCommerce Templates
There is an abundance of templates and themes available exclusively for WooCommerce users. This is perfect for an eCommerce platform. You can adjust accordingly to the type of product and service you are providing with your website and according to your level of professionalism. The price varies from free options and up to $130.
WooCommerce Plugins and Extensions
You have all the extensions available on the WooCommerce website. Choose between simple and free to use extensions or paid ones. The cost of the paid extension is up to $299. With these, you can enhance the already existing features of accounting, payment gateways, marketing, reporting and more.
WooCommerce Marketing and SEO
WooCommerce has fantastic SEO tools. This means there is a higher chance of your website to appear when people search. Not all other eCommerce platforms provide such facility. This automatically enhances its marketing capabilities and reach. Great SEO tools like Yoast or all in One SEO Pack can help you to make your store visible on the web.
Payment Processing Options
After providing the information regarding your location and currency, you will get many options to make payment. WooCommerce has such out-of-the-box payment capabilities:
- Direct Bank Transfer
- Cash on Delivery
- Check Payment
- PayPal
- Stripe
Businesses in the U.S. typically pay by PayPal, Stripe or Square as their merchant agent. Third party payment options are also available such as Authorize or Amazon. It also accepts bank transfers, check payments, or cash on delivery. WooCommerce has added Apple Pay by users’ request. Payments with Apple Pay will be processed through Stripe. Besides, you can choose any payment processors among 100 available on the WooCommerce site.
Another popular payment system is QuickPay. This plugin works well with WooCommerce and allows you to secure capturing of the payment from order overview. You also can return money or cancel the order from one place.
Security Level
The security level of your eCommerce site will depend on the security offered by WordPress and your web host provider. You can enhance the security levels by purchasing an SSL certificate. It will ensure secure connections from a web server to the browser. The CMS itself is safe. However, for more robust security, you need to look at security patches as additional protection of your store data.
WooCommerce Customer Service Quality
Customer support options in WooCommerce are limited, such that there is no option for live chat or call. Furthermore, customer support is not available to third-party products. However, there is an option to send emails to clients. You can also refer to the WordPress development agency to get WooCommerce paid support. However, the rate may differ from the service range and company.
We’ve considered all the main WooCommerce features, pros and cons as well as some advanced characteristics. We hope that it will help you to decide whether it is suitable for your business or you need another platform. In the end, we want to highlight what customers say about WooCommerce in action:
