E-commerce has a lot of promise nowadays. Your goals and ideas may reach a whole new level thanks to today’s digital world and the wide range of chances it provides. You already know that, and I won’t try to pretend otherwise. However, the essential thing that the majority of individuals don’t know is “Where should I start?”
You may discover a wealth of useful articles about growing your online ideas and operating a profitable ecommerce business on our blog. We strongly advise looking at those topics immediately after this one if you are just starting to take baby moves in this area. Because we will discuss your business’s starting point in this post, i.e., the platform you should employ to play the e-commerce game, You may enter the amazing world of ecommerce by utilising WooCommerce for the eight reasons listed in the following paragraphs.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is one of the top ecommerce plugins for WordPress. It is a fantastic free application that makes it incredibly easy to set up and run an online business. With a wide range of services including safe payments, shipping, inventory control, and tax management, it makes the entire process simple while maintaining professionalism. Remember that WooCommerce is powered by WordPress, thus your data belongs to you alone.
WooCommerce currently powers over 82.5 million WordPress online shops and accounts for 93% of all their downloads. These figures clearly show that WooCommerce is the finest WordPress e-commerce plugin for balancing usability with professionalism.
How to Install WooCommerce and How Does It Work?
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress, as was already explained. WooCommerce will therefore instantly connect with your current framework when you download it.
There is undoubtedly no better way to design your e-commerce website if you utilise WordPress. The primary cause of this is the fact that WooCommerce was specifically designed for WordPress. It is therefore ideally tailored to fit your already-running website.
The installation procedure is really straightforward. You can easily integrate this plugin by going to your WordPress Dashboard, looking for WooCommerce under “Plugin Options,” and then clicking the download button. Yes, it is that easy, and it appears that we have already begun to discuss the benefits of using WooCommerce to create your online store.
Is WooCommerce the right choice for me?
We’ll now look at 8 reasons why WooCommerce is a great option for creating your online store.
1. It is completely free.
You’re probably interested in evaluating different possibilities since you’re searching for a platform to launch an online company. Pricing is most likely the square one of any such investigation, and we shall begin there as well. As previously said, there are several systems for developing an ecommerce business, with WooCommerce leading the pack with about 3.8 million users. Shopify, which has over 1 million members, is the closest replacement to this platform. Shopify has three membership levels, the most affordable of which is Shopify Basic, which costs $29 a month. Aside from that, $29 is a lot of money for a new business; this plan has extremely minimal functionality and just 10 themes. The rest is an additional charge.
Because you are a new ecommerce firm, startup fees are an important issue to consider. Obviously, success should be your primary goal. However, investing additional money in your establishing process when there is a free option is not a good idea. WooCommerce, unlike Shopify, is free to install.
Furthermore, with WooCommerce, you can install a variety of paid extensions that allow you to track orders, analyse client involvement, alter tax settings, manage inventory, and much more. One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of those extensions are cheaply priced. This implies that you can construct a working store at a reasonable cost. What else do you require to run a professional and efficient ecommerce business?
Remember that WooCommerce is not a beginning kit. It’s a professional platform that will ideally match your business once you expand and secure your market position.
2. It Grows With Your Business
When launching a new firm, you must consider its future. Remember that success and expansion should be your primary goals. When selecting a platform, you should take this “minor” issue into account. So, while it is now little, it has the potential to expand. As a result, when selecting a platform to fulfil your ideas, choose one that is scalable and will support your business as it expands.
So, if you are a newcomer in this industry with great goals, WooCommerce is just what you need. With this plugin, you can go from selling a few things to selling thousands, and from serving a few clients per week to serving hundreds every second. All of this without any additional complication or effort.
As stated in the above paragraph, WooCommerce is not a novice starting pack, but rather a fantastic tool that develops with your business without becoming a limitation. We feel that this is just another compelling argument to utilise this plugin as you join the world of ecommerce.
3. It’s Open Source
One of the nicest aspects of this plugin is that it is open-source. This implies that users may add new features, update current ones, and build new custom themes and extensions. This is unusual for most ecommerce systems, including Shopify. As a result, with WooCommerce, you can profit from the enhancements made by a huge pool of specialists without having to pay for third-party developers.
Furthermore, there is no need to hunt for WooCommerce web developers for hire if you have any questions. In many forums and Facebook groups, you may easily communicate with a large community of WooCommerce web developers. These include the “WordPress Online Forum” and the “WooCommerce Help & Share” Facebook community.
4. It provides strong cyber security.
As we highlighted in one of our earlier posts, the security of your website should be your first priority. As a result, while establishing an ecommerce business, you should select a platform that provides optimum security and safety. For this reason, we believe it is critical to emphasise that WooCommerce provides uncompromised cybersecurity, prioritising the safety of your customers’ data.
This is especially true in the case of transactions and payments. WooCommerce never keeps the payment method number and security code of your consumers on your website. This implies that even if your website is targeted and hacked due to the flaws discussed in this article, the hacker will not be able to access the payment information given by your clients.
Furthermore, if you want to provide a more comfortable payment procedure for your consumers, you may install various integrated payment gateway plugins that allow users to store their data via tokenization. The real payment information will be saved on the payment processor’s servers, and the only information stored on your website will be tokens. These tokens are unique to each of your clients and the payment channels used. As a result, when examined outside of the context for which they were developed, they become entirely worthless and ineligible.
As a result, we can confidently state that your clients’ payment information is safe and secure with WooCommerce. However, it is equally critical to protect your clients’ personal information that is maintained on your website. These details include their name, email address, shipping address, and order history. As a result, we strongly advise reading this post to understand how to increase the overall security of your website.
5. There are no transaction fees when using third-party payment gateways.
One of the most significant advantages of WooCommerce is that, unlike many other ecommerce systems, such as Shopify, it does not impose transaction fees when utilising a third-party payment gateway.
Shopify, for example, charges 2% for each transaction unless you utilise Shopify Payments. This amount can be reduced by moving to advanced subscription levels, however this comes at a cost.
It is crucial to remember, however, that in some circumstances, such as PayPal or bank transactions, WooCommerce will also charge a transaction fee.
6. It Provides Powerful Email Marketing and SEO Extensions
In a few of prior blogs, we discussed the significance of SEO to your business. The primary purpose of SEO is to guarantee that your website ranks well in Google’s search results. If you don’t do this, there’s a very little chance that your target audience will jump from page to page looking for your store after inputting keywords related to your product. As a result, SEO is one of the most important regulations in this online game.
WooCommerce is a fantastic ecommerce platform that will ensure your business and items are seen by the correct people. It is built with SEO-friendly code and includes a plethora of plugins such as Yoast SEO. Furthermore, WooCommerce lets you provide descriptive titles and meta descriptions to your pages.
The ability to have customizable URLs is another outstanding SEO tool provided by WooCommerce. This will make it easier for potential clients to locate your website. Another advantage is that you will have access to important SEO instructions and prompts when establishing your business using WooCommerce.
Hopefully, you remember how important email marketing is in your marketing plan. Simply read this article to brush up on your expertise. WooCommerce will also be of assistance in this regard. This platform offers a surprising number of extensions, including Mailchimp. These extensions allow you to engage with your consumers via customised emails and take your email marketing efforts to the next level.
7. It’s Customisable
One of the most crucial aspects of WooCommerce is that it is completely customizable. To design your business, you can use an existing theme and customise it to your liking. Go to the “Customizer” area of your WordPress dashboard to get started. You will be able to make some basic adjustments here without any coding skills.
You may also take the customization to the next level if you have any coding experience and are comfortable with HTML or CSS. So, if you are a newbie searching for something simple, we would strongly advise you to select a theme from the existing pool. However, if you want expert assistance in creating a bespoke website, we are here to help. The Passionate team includes seasoned WooCommerce web developers that will work with you to build a bespoke website from the ground up that is tailored to your specific needs.
In one of our recent projects, for example, a customer sought assistance moving from Shopify to WooCommerce.
Type Department had previously functioned as a Shopify website and wanted us to create a seamless multi-vendor solution for their ecommerce site. The obvious choice was WordPress as the CMS with WooCommerce, with merchants able to establish their own accounts and handle their own items. WordPress also allowed for the inclusion of font samplers across the site, allowing users to input anything on the product pages to test the typeface before purchasing.
8. It Offers Built-In Analytics
Last but not least, WooCommerce not only allows you to develop and operate a shop with your own rules, but it also has excellent built-in analytics. With this additional feature, you will obtain useful statistics regarding the success of your business with less effort. You will get access to your total sales by date as well as other shopping statistics. This is really beneficial since you will be able to enhance your performance and increase your business with this knowledge.
It’s also worth mentioning that WooCommerce has a plethora of other complex plugins that can be purchased separately.
