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WooCommerce is undoubtedly our favorite e-Commerce solution, we love it, and we use it for every shop and online store we create. We build small and medium-sized stores on WooCommerce, and we always enjoy the positive feedback about what we do.
WooCommerce is a free and open-source ecommerce platform that allows you to sell anything, beautifully. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce offers an out-of-the-box solution for online shopping cart and ecommerce website needs.
WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform on the web, powering over 38% of all online stores. It’s also the most translated software in existence with translations available in 54 languages.
WooCommerce was originally launched in September 2011 and has grown to be one of the world’s most popular shopping carts. With WooCommerce, you can easily sell anything you want to anyone around the world with no upfront costs or long-term contracts.
WooCommerce is simple, clean, easy to use, and perhaps the most stable store builder we worked with.
It’s customizable and a platform that grows steadily, but let’s see why we think you should try it for your online store.
1. WooCommerce is Free and Open Source
Like WordPress, WooCommerce is free, Open Source, and supported by the developers’ community at WordPress.org. You can bring your ideas and contributions to the table and even join the developers at the official WooCommerce development blog.
You can also open a WooCommerce fork at GitHub or create your theme at the WordPress themes repository or monetize your work at ThemeForest.
2. WooCommerce is SEO Optimized
It is a well-known fact that WordPress is a pretty stable platform in terms of search engine optimization. Many consider it to be the best one in the market.
That’s due to clean code, fast loading times, well-optimized database performance, and a great collection of plugins and assets to support this.
Since WooCommerce works inside this well-oiled machine, it’s only apparent to get exceptional results when you optimize your store’s products in front of search engines.
3. WooCommerce is Flexible and 100% Customizable
In WooCommerce, you don’t have to bend based on other people’s preferences or tight rules. You are the one who makes the rules because you are the one who develops the store.
WooCommerce is just the solid ground that enables you to grow based on free and premium extensions, plugins, and themes, along with many tips from the community members.
4. WooCommerce Unlimited Products and Categories
In WooCommerce, you can choose how you handle categories and products. You can create an unlimited number of products and sort them into a total number of categories or product tags.
5. WooCommerce is Secure
Is WooCommerce secure? It’s the obvious question every one of us is asking the first time. The answer is definitely yes! WooCommerce is based on WordPress and shares the security aspect and flawless coding.
In my experience, WooCommerce and WordPress are excellent from the security perspective, and not only. If you run an online shop built with WooCommerce, ensure you run a security plugin (WordFence, Sucuri, etc.) + A SSL certificate.
Besides the security plugin, here are some quick tips to secure your site:
- Strong login credentials & keep them somewhere safe.
- Backup! And always keep a backup copy on your computer/USB drive.
- Constantly update your theme and plugins.
- Do not install anything you do not need.
- Never install nulled things. 99,999% are virused.
Learn more here: How to secure WordPress site.
6. Mobile-Friendly Designs
Both ThemeForest and WordPress.org force developers to create responsive, mobile-ready themes and designs for WooCommerce. This and the significant designer competition bring up mobile users’ best, most reliable themes.
This means all WooCommerce themes will display your products and content the right way, no matter what device your customers use.
7. Advanced Reporting and Analysis System
In WooCommerce, you can check out the number of products sales, the number of categories, new users vs. returning users, and generate customer reports right from your WooCommerce administration panel.
Besides that, you can enhance the analytics process using specialized plugins like Smart Reporter, a great plugin that helps you keep each product and sale under watch.
8. Helps You Create Shipping and Tax Classes
The customization process is essential for all WordPress and WooCommerce users. That’s why you can define multiple shipping classes and tax for each of them based on location and the package size.
9. Hundreds of Extensions and Themes
On marketplaces like ThemeForest, where you can find nearly 10000 themes to support your WooCommerce store.
Besides that, you can always find free WooCommerce extensions and themes by checking out the official WordPress repository for themes and plugins.
10. You Own Everything You Create on WooCommerce
The primary benefit that brings WooCommerce on top of every premium e-Commerce solution is that you have complete control over your content, unlike with cloud solutions like Shopify and Magento.
You decide whether or not a product gets stored, displayed, and promoted, and you are the one who has complete control over the hosting platform and how things are handled server-side.
Besides that, you can manage how backups are made and have access to design and code.
11. WooCommerce Advanced Rating System
WooCommerce promotes product ratings and comments from actual customers. This is done through your WordPress commenting system, and you benefit from a star rating so that your customers can order products based on product ratings.
Why User Ratings and Reviews are Important for your online store?
The user ratings and reviews are essential for each brand. I do not mention the importance of a fair five stars review. Locally or globally, these reviews may bring extra sales to your products and services. It is crucial for your online shop and your audience to implement the rating system. It is a strong signal that your online business is legit, and you & your team are willing to adapt to the new market requirements by analyzing, implementing, or solving the issues specified by your actual or potential customers.
Top 5 best WooCommerce rating plugins:
- YITH WooCommerce Advanced Reviews
- Schema — All in One Schema Rich Snippets
- StarCat Reviews
- WP Customer Reviews
- Site Reviews
12. WooCommerce Offers Cutting-Edge Support
People are usually afraid about the support of free e-Commerce solutions, which is an understanding concern. However, this is not the case with WooCommerce.
Thanks to the fantastic developers’ community and the WooThemes team, you can rest assured that you will always be in good hands regarding technical WooCommerce issues.
You can also find a ticket system in the support section that helps you communicate with the WooTeam 24/7.
13. WooCommerce is Friendly and Familiar User Interface
WooCommerce was built on top of WordPress for WordPress users! It’s clean, easy to navigate user interface, and the administration panel makes WooCommerce a child’s play. Everyone can set up their online store within minutes and start adding new products no matter what niche they approach.
14. It’s Expanding Faster Than Any e-Commerce Platform
In 2013 WooCommerce reached 1 million downloads. In 2015 it reached the 7 million milestones becoming the dominant e-Commerce solution. Now, in 2016 the WooThemes team announced over 10 million downloads, and WooCommerce now powers over 30% of all e-commerce websites out there (according to BuiltWith).
Astonishing numbers and incredibly fast rising in popularity. These numbers are growing, and we are expecting more and more great surprises from WooCommerce in the years to come.
15. WooCommerce Brings Multiple Payment Gateways
By default, WooCommerce allows its users to set up payment using Direct Payment, payment on delivery, and payment through PayPal account or to use a credit card on PayPal.
If you, from any reason, don’t want to use PayPal for your WooCommerce store, there is another best alternative: Stripe. In terms of integration, Stripe is easy and their API docs are VERY in-depth that even a beginner programmer can figure out. I recommend starting with Stripe and taking advantage of all you can get with Stripe in your country. Depending on your location, Stripe offers very cool offline payment options. Then, I can recommend adding PayPal if you think this is necessary for your business. Something to have in mind, PayPal fees are a lot more expensive compared with Stripe. Every client who can use PayPal also has a credit card. Fees can be something to watch closely. We do not use PayPal just because we do not like their fees. With Stripe, you also can offer Wallet payments, such as Apple Pay & Google Pay which I think is a lot better than PayPal these days.
WooCommerce Payments is the solution provided by WooCommerce itself, so many people will see this as the main benefit. The massive advantage of using WooCommerce Payments instead of the Stripe extension is that you can directly manage all your payments and payouts (called deposits) in the WordPress dashboard. It still uses Stripe as the processor, but you do not ever have to log into the Stripe dashboard. Furthermore, if you run into any problems, you can contact the WooCommerce.com support team for help.
However, it’s good to know that you can embed many other popular WooCommerce Payment Gateways:
16. Helps You Create Communities and Memberships
Thanks to the WordPress plugins and extensions like BuddyPress, bbPress, and the WooCommerce Subscription plugin, now you can enhance your online store and add support for your community, build user engagement and even create monthly memberships.
17. Lightweight Design & Performance
WooCommerce comes with basic e-Commerce functionality that thousands of great Woo developers have perfected. This makes the platform lightweight and quite powerful in terms of performance on your server.
It’s also worth mentioning that WooCommerce is compatible with WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache, making WooCommerce even faster and offering your customers a great shopping experience.
18. Unlimited Growth Potential
Since WooCommerce is a self-hosted solution and not a cloud-based one, you can choose what you do with files, where you upload them, and how you manage them.
You can start small and grow as much as you want, not having to worry about platform limitation, membership, plans, or packages.
WooCommerce Pros and Cons
The benefits of using WooCommerce include:
- It is an open source, which means it’s free to use and customize.
- It has a wide range of features which includes: product customization, inventory management, order fulfillment, customer management, payment gateway integration.
- The plugin is easy to install and use for beginners.
- You can find thousands of tutorials (articles and videos).
The cons of using WooCommerce include:
- Lack of customer support from the company itself.
- Limited features for more advanced users who want to build their own website rather than customize a prebuilt one.
- Some of the required features costs a lot.
- It is available only for the WordPress users.
Conclusion
These are just a few of the highlights we decided to bring up, but we consider WooCommerce to be the best e-Commerce solution for any online store, no matter if it’s a small shop with less than a couple of thousand products or a large corporation with hundreds of thousands of products and categories.
WooCommerce is scalable and has a lot to offer, and we are expecting the community to grow faster now since it is a part of the Automattic family.
