WooCom­merce is one of the most favoured and com­mon­ly used eCom­merce solu­tions today on the Inter­net. Based on the Word­Press plat­form, and devel­oped by the same team, it pro­vides a sim­ple, pow­er­ful and fea­ture-rich dig­i­tal shop­ping solu­tion. WooCom­merce is suit­able for any­one who wants to sell their prod­ucts online.

Learn more about the main ben­e­fits of using Woocom­merce as your eCom­merce plat­form of choice!

Benefits of using WooCommerce

#1 WooCommerce is free

WooCom­merce is a free, open-source Word­Press plu­g­in. It is eas­i­ly acces­si­ble for every­one who is just start­ing out in eCommerce.

Word­Press is by far the most pop­u­lar CMS plat­form in the world – the esti­ma­tion is that 25% of web­sites are run­ning on Word­Press – and pro­vides direct devel­op­men­tal sup­port to the WooCom­merce plu­g­in. A WooCom­merce store can be installed and opened for busi­ness in a very short amount of time com­pared to cus­tom-made web shops or more com­pli­cat­ed CMS solutions.

#2 Easily customizable through themes

Once a cus­tom web­site is live, it is often extreme­ly dif­fi­cult and expen­sive to make changes. With the WooCom­merce plat­form, one can eas­i­ly switch back and forth between appear­ances. This is accom­plished by use of dif­fer­ent themes, either free or paid. Paid themes can cost up to $100, and receive ded­i­cat­ed sup­port from their devel­op­ment team. A good place to look for pre­mi­um Word­Press – WooCom­merce themes is The­me­For­est.

#3 Available Features

WooCom­merce comes with all the fea­tures a new web shop requires to func­tion prop­er­ly, from list­ing of new prod­ucts to orders and billing. It enables users to sell any­thing, from phys­i­cal prod­ucts to dig­i­tal down­loads. How­ev­er, the code is kept lean through its mod­u­lar nature, pro­vid­ing only the essen­tial fea­tures users need at any spe­cif­ic time. This means that WooCom­merce will work fast and reli­ably with the basic fea­tures, but can be expand­ed as needed.

WooCom­merce main features:

• unre­strict­ed customization
• built-in-blog­ging
• eas­i­ly man­age­able prod­uct categories
• tags and attributes
• prod­uct rat­ings and reviews
• prod­uct sort­ing and filtering
• loca­tion cus­tomi­sa­tion: cur­ren­cy, lan­guage and mea­sure­ment units

There is also no lim­it on the num­ber of prod­ucts you can sell or images you want to use for each.

#4 Your WooCommerce store belongs to you alone

Sell­ing prod­ucts or ser­vices via a third par­ty is sub­ject to that par­ty’s rules and terms. This is a prob­lem many online sell­ers expe­ri­ence, so it is good to have your own web shop, even if only as a back­up, in case there are issues with your Ama­zon (or sim­i­lar) store. If you’ve worked on brand­ing in the past, cus­tomers will find you through organ­ic search if they have trou­ble find­ing you on Amazon.

#5 Security

The WooCom­merce devel­op­ment team works close­ly with secu­ri­ty experts, such as Sucuri.net, to pro­vide their cus­tomers with the safest online expe­ri­ence pos­si­ble. Secu­ri­ty updates arrive quick­ly, and you can imple­ment them with just one click. If you reg­u­lar­ly update your WooCom­merce plat­form and plu­g­ins, you will have a very reli­able and safe plat­form on which to do your business.

#6 Large number of official extensions

There are over 400 offi­cial exten­sions for WooCom­merce, rang­ing from ana­lyt­ics, pay­ments and ship­ping, to mar­ket­ing and account­ing. These are offi­cial exten­sions, cre­at­ed and sup­port­ed by the WooCom­merce devel­op­ment team, and count­less oth­er third-par­ty exten­sions. Very much like themes, third-par­ty plu­g­ins are either free or paid, and are often sold on mar­kets along with the themes. These exten­sions, or plu­g­ins, make life much eas­i­er, as they are usu­al­ly eas­i­ly inte­grat­ed into an exist­ing web shop. Bear in mind that all exten­sions you would order from a web devel­op­ment agency could eas­i­ly cost you hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of dol­lars, where­as WooCom­merce exten­sions and plu­g­ins rarely exceed $20–30.

#7 Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WooCom­merce is run­ning on one of the most well-estab­lished plat­forms in the world, which is high­ly adapt­ed to SEO guide­lines as pro­vid­ed by Google. Aside from the entire plat­form being “out of the box” SEO friend­ly, it also makes SEO opti­miza­tion of your prod­ucts much sim­pler. WooCom­merce pro­vides an intu­itive inter­face, where the main prod­uct details and any infor­ma­tion regard­ing SEO can be entered and stored. On top of that, there are excel­lent third-par­ty SEO plu­g­ins which can help you opti­mize every post and page on your website.

#8 Informative analytics

With­out prop­er analy­sis of your efforts, it’s dif­fi­cult to cre­ate a sol­id action­able sales plan. WooCom­merce has very intu­itive and sim­ple built-in ana­lyt­ics. For those who have lit­tle or no expe­ri­ence with track­ing imple­men­ta­tion, built-in ana­lyt­ics make things espe­cial­ly easy. Sales by date, most want­ed prod­ucts, cus­tomer information…all of these are view­able in pie charts and under­stand­able graphs. Beyond that, it’s a sim­ple process to acti­vate Google Ana­lyt­ics in WooCom­merce, for addi­tion­al data and deep­er analysis.

#9 WooCommerce simplifies your work process

WooCom­merce facil­i­tates up-sell­ing and cross-sell­ing, the entire plat­form being built to sim­pli­fy these process­es. It has incred­i­ble sup­port from a large com­mu­ni­ty of users who are work­ing in online sales and are improv­ing and stream­lin­ing WooCom­merce on a reg­u­lar basis.

#10 Extremely affordable and flexible

Com­pared to most plat­forms, a WooCom­merce solu­tion is always sig­nif­i­cant­ly more cost-effec­tive. Design, pro­duc­tion, and instal­la­tion of a cus­tom web shop can last for months. A WooCom­merce shop, depend­ing on its size, can be set up in a mat­ter of days. Design changes can be very expen­sive, and gen­er­al­ly also take longer with a cus­tom web shop. With WooCom­merce this is a ques­tion of imple­ment­ing afford­able new themes. Addi­tion­al fea­tures can be imple­ment­ed quick­ly, with neg­li­gi­ble costs, where­as cus­tom-made web shops demand longer devel­op­ment process and, there­fore, larg­er investment.

Conclusion

There are many oth­er ben­e­fits to using WooCom­merce, which are not on this list. The pro­fes­sion­al look and flex­i­bil­i­ty make the plat­form a per­fect solu­tion for small­er and medi­um busi­ness­es. With WooCom­merce you will get all the stan­dard require­ments for a frac­tion of the cost of most oth­er eCom­merce plat­forms. If you are just start­ing your online store, and would like to get some help, check out our pur­ple­cart WooCom­merce store devel­op­ment ser­vices.