As WordPress has become a leading web building system across various fields, it was obvious that it would extend its outreach to e-commerce. But as flexible as WordPress is, it’s not enough to fulfill all requirements of an online store website. This was solved by the creation of WooCommerce - a WordPress plugin that helps to easily and quickly build out e-commerce platforms.
How exactly does it work? Can you do it yourself, or do you need to hire a professional development team? How is WooCommerce helpful for business owners? Let’s examine its benefits and learn how to operate it.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open-source WordPress plugin that assists and boosts the creation of e-commerce solutions. With WordPress as its foundation, it sets up the store that allows you to sell and buy goods and services, supervise the payment, delivery, and shipment processes, and provide users with a secure and positive customer experience.
It was developed by the WooThemes team in 2011 - and since then has gained more than 80 million downloads. It has pushed most other e-commerce builders back with 23% of the market share of these platforms. Such popularity is owed to the fact that WooCommerce allows you to integrate and mix extensions and can provide users with unique and exclusive solutions.
WooCommerce possesses an unparalleled level of flexibility and customization: with more than 1,000 plugins, themes, and templates under its belt, it can take care of all technical issues and bring your e-commerce business to the next level.
Why WooCommerce?
There are tons of reasons why WooCommerce rocks but let’s examine the top 10 of its main advantages.
1. Free of charge
WooCommerce is 100% free to download and try out. It’s not completely cost-free since you will have to pay for certain features, but still, it’s an amazing option for teams on the budget that know their way around basic web development and can experiment with it. It’s also a great solution to see how e-commerce websites operate overall and define what you need before spending money.
2. Easy-to-use nature
Even though setting up an e-commerce platform seems challenging, it’s actually not that hard: you download it from the WordPress directory, install and use it like any other program you’ve ever been using. Of course, it will take some time to get adjusted to the interface and arrange a bunch of issues with hosting, but since WooCommerce is super popular, you can find all the answers to all your questions on the web.
3. Functionality
There’s hardly another e-commerce builder with so many features: from plugins, extensions, themes, and templates - WooCommerce presents a vast range of components to choose from. Whatever you might need for your website, you can find a feature to create it with. You can add filters, tags, categories, orders, payment and shipping management systems, and many more. It allows you to take care of every possible issue that might arise when dealing with e-commerce platforms.
4. Flexibility
WooCommerce can help to sell anything - from physical products to services and anything in between. Its capabilities to create an exclusive solution are superlative: by combining different add-ons, extensions, and integrations, every WooCommerce-based website comes out to be unique. Also, you can change things up when the website is already launched and completely revamp it if you feel like it - easily and swiftly.
5. Smooth payment process
Any e-commerce website has a bunch of functional issues that need to be dealt with. One of the most important ones is the checkout process. WooCommerce provides a super-efficient mechanism that ensures that users won’t have any problems with payment. There are no additional steps between choosing products and paying for them. Users don’t have to go through registration necessarily, and they can safely enter their personal data since the process is secure.
6. Full product descriptions
Today, customers are not satisfied with simple product listings that present only the most basic information. They want to read the fullest set of details, see the high-quality images of the products, maybe even try to experience the product or service with the help of augmented reality tools. WooCommerce can cover all of their requirements and provide you with an extensive list of categories, filters, inventory tools, as well as possibilities to manage the stock.
7. Easy shipping
Various payment options and thorough product descriptions are not the only elements of a wholesome e-commerce website. It also needs to have a functioning shopping management system to deal with a flow of orders. WooCommerce provides several different options, such as international/flat shipping, local pickup, and various tracking tools, to ensure that the user experience is stress-free and as seamless as possible.
8. Customization
One of the most crucial benefits of WooCommerce is its exceptional capabilities to personalize the shopping experience. As we’ve mentioned, it has loads of themes, plugins, and extensions that can be modified and combined however you want. The only factor is your needs and tastes, which means that your website will be one-of-a-kind and totally exclusive.
9. Familiar interface
WordPress is loved and used by lots of companies and experts throughout the world, so having a plugin that runs on an already known and trustworthy platform is a huge plus. This kind of shorthand with WordPress allows teams to quickly master WooCommerce and get to the creation process much quicker instead of losing hours trying to figure out how to operate in a completely new and unfamiliar interface.
10. Results
Even though WooCommerce is mostly free, it shouldn’t be regarded as something that needs to be ”integrated” with something else. It’s 100% efficient and can cover all your technical needs in terms of creating an e-commerce website. With myriads of tools and features at its disposal, it’s fully capable of bringing a highly functioning solution that can boost your business in ways you can’t imagine.
With all those points taken into consideration, let’s study the steps on how to set up a WooCommerce-based store.
How to build a WooCommerce store?
Before jumping into building an online store, you need to understand how it works to avoid unnecessary struggle and time and money expenditure. There are several steps to follow to ensure you have a remarkable e-commerce website.
Research
It includes learning about your competitors, studying your target audience, and seeing what they like and dislike to establish a clear idea of how you would like your business plan to develop.
Preparation
To have a website, you will need to get a domain name and a web hosting service. You can look through the most popular hosting/domain providers, for example, Bluehost, and pick one to your liking. You should also set up your WordPress account and download a WooCommerce plugin from a WordPress dashboard.
Design
Once your blank web pages are already there, it’s time to fill them with color and images. Pick a theme that you like, and let the fun begin! Go for mobile-friendly themes that can ensure that your visuals are consistent throughout the whole website. Configure the standard pages that are obligatory for any e-commerce website: Shop, Cart, Checkout, My Account, Registration/Login. You can add more if you like but without those, your online store won’t be efficient.
Functionality
Configuring payment, shipping, and delivery settings is another essential component. Pick options that suit you and your audience - for example, different payment gateways, units of measurement, shipping rates, bulk sales, etc. WooCommerce plugins can fully take care of all those issues for you. With that being done, it’s time to include products or services, their photos/descriptions on your platform. Choose product categories, set up prices, texts, visuals, and everything else you want to make your customers happy. If you want even more customization, you can download extra add-ons and features on a WooCommerce dashboard that can fulfill those requirements. Bear in mind that any third-party integration should provide maximum security.
Finishing off
Building an online store is difficult but not impossible: with tons of programs, it’s never been as easy to do as it is now. There are tools that can take care of most issues, and WooCommerce is one of them. Its exceptional customization capacities allow it to create a powerful and effective e-commerce platform.