E-commerce with WordPress + WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular online shopping cart

WooCommerce is one of the largest e-commerce platforms and one of the most popular. In just six years of the e-commerce solution’s existence, the enterprise has reported 2 million downloads of its e-commerce cart to end users. By the time Q4 arrives in 2014, they expect downloads to exceed 2.25 million. WooCommerce allows users to create a convenient and secure shopping cart on their website and is fully compatible with the WordPress plugin. WordPress accounts for about 20 percent of new back-ends on websites, making WooCommerce a very popular combination for online stores that are just getting started.

Over 10 percent of all e-commerce sites use WooCommerce

According to the WooCommerce Usage Statistics report, they are currently used by over 10 percent of all electronics retailers who oppose the big guys like Magento and end up wearing the crown as one of the most used platforms in the world. electronic commerce; other than wildcards like Amazon and eBay, of course. Among the most important reasons why people choose this platform are pricing, ease of use, integration options, plugins available, and a feature rich toolbar at the top of the list.

How service numbers are used

A blog posted by WooThemes on the WooCommerce app marketplace titled “Monitoring the Growth of WooCommerce in the Open Source World” has published usage statistics that help us better understand how popular the platform has become.

• 80 percent of eCommerce merchants use WooCommerce.
• Magento is in second place with a share of 10.07 percent.
• ZenCart comes in third with 9.60 percent.
• Over 15 percent of WooCommerce powered websites sell digital goods and services.
• Over 2 million users have downloaded the WooCommerce software.

Finally

Whether you choose to use WooCommerce to power your solution or one of the many other vendors available, one thing is certain: the eCommerce industry is growing by leaps and bounds. Making the decision to start your own online store is a great idea that could lead to another big online success story. Useful software solutions like WooCommerce provide better store management and management with carefully designed and tested tools that make eCommerce transactions easier. With e-retail sales down to $400 billion by 2018, there has never been a better time than now.

Despite the fact that initially WordPress was created and was exclusively a blogging platform, today it has developed to such a level that almost anything can already be created on this engine. Moreover, in many cases, you can even do without knowledge of web programming, you just need to choose a good template and select the necessary plugins.

Popularity of WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a plugin that runs on WordPress. Today, this is the best solution for those who want to create an online store on this platform. The plugin has been downloaded over a million times. WooCommerce is very flexible and easy to use, any user can get the hang of it, and it has hundreds of add-ons. More than 30% of online stores worldwide are powered by this plugin.

If we take the world statistics, WooCommerce is the absolute leader.

Features of WooCommerce

Sale of any goods: using the WooCommerce plugin allows you to sell both physical and electronic goods in any shape and size in the online store, offer product variations, composite configurations.

Flexible delivery settings: the plugin provides very flexible settings for delivery options. You can set up free shipping, flat rate shipping, or provide instant billing. It is possible to limit the delivery of the store to certain countries.

Multiple Payment Methods: WooCommerce comes bundled with the ability to accept most credit cards, PayPal, BACS (bank transfers), and cash on delivery. Need more options? Over 140 regional gateways are integrated with WooCommerce, including popular ones like Stripe, Authorize.Net, and AmazonPayments.

Full Control: WooCommerce gives you complete control over your online store, from tax calculations and inventory levels to managing user accounts. Allows you to add and remove extensions, change the design and change settings, as required by the functionality of the store.

Design Creation: Storefront is a free WordPress theme available for any WooCommerce store. Along with deep integration with WooCommerce, Storefront prioritizes speed and uptime, eliminating conflicts between theme and plugin after major updates. Define your style by customizing Storefront to your liking, or choose one of the Storefront child themes. It’s all up to you and open source.

Scalability: No matter what size store you want to create, WooCommerce will scale according to your needs. With a growing collection of over 300 extensions already, you can customize each of the store’s features to suit your customers’ unique needs, or even create your own solution.

Extensibility: For WooCommerce, a large number of extensions and add-ons have been created:

• Google Analytics
• Shipping Notes
• PDF invoices and order sheets
• Light affiliate program integration
• New product emblems
• And most importantly, today WooCommerce allows you to create very large online stores with thousands of products located in dozens and even hundreds of categories.

WooCommerce Plugin Benefits

Since WooCommerce is a plugin for the WordPress engine, the online store will have all the advantages of this engine: security, constant updates, Russian language, unlimited functionality, usability, excellent indexing, freedom to grow, thousands of plugins and templates, independence and autonomy …

But in the article I want to reveal exactly the advantages of the WooCommerce plugin itself:

• Free. For many, this factor is a weighty argument, especially if you have not yet decided on the subject and you have no experience
• Easy installation – in two clicks (activate the plugin, then click the “Install” button to automatically create the necessary pages).
• A full-fledged powerful online store on WordPress – after installation, it is already ready to sell, you don’t even need to install anything else. All the basic functions of a standard online store are present and even more.
• Clear, user-friendly admin interface — quick, clear and logical store setup.
• Ability to add an unlimited number of products and product categories.
• Many plugins – paid and free. Support for various plugins for WordPress, for example, integration with the store of various social add-ons for WordPress (likes, comments via social networks, etc.)
• A large number of templates (designs), both paid and free – new high-quality, stylish themes for online stores on WordPress are published daily.
• Built-in several payment gateways ready to work.
• Detailed information about the order. History of changes in the order. Editing orders.
• Built-in several different delivery methods with support for a shipping calculator, flexible setting of shipping costs.
• The ability to create and apply discounts on coupons (promotional codes) on the site both for all products and for selected ones.
• A convenient analytics system is built in – detailed charts and sales reports.
• Built-in marketing elements – Upsell, Crosssel, Discount coupons, Sale, various widgets – recommended products, bestsellers, etc.
• Buyer’s personal account – profile, order history …
• Customer reviews for products.
• Automated email notifications about new orders, changes in their status, low or no stock, and after a product review has been posted.
• Inventory control of goods and notification by email about a low level.
• Set up taxes at country rates.
• Separation of user rights – the ability to organize the work of several store employees with different rights and separate access for each of them.
• SEO optimization. Like WordPress itself, Woocommerce has no problem with this. CNC, site map, meta tag markup (titles, descriptions, keywords) for each individual page, the ability to connect analytics – all this is there;
• Usability. The product catalog, product card and various elements of an online store on Woocommerce are understandable for any user, since everything is implemented quite simply;
• Integration with external services

Cons of creating an online store on Woocommerce

Of course, like any system that has such wide functionality, there are some shortcomings and shortcomings.

Orientation to the West. The payment options and delivery methods available by default are focused mainly on the Western market, therefore, you will have to work on your own with adaptation to a specific region. The situation is similar with the available currencies, far from all countries the display of local money is available;

Requirement for resources. After installing the plugin on WordPress, the load created on your site will seriously increase. When using a weak hosting or low-quality site optimization, this will lead to an increase in page loading time;

Possible conflicts. The need to install different plugins, as with any system, can cause one plugin to conflict with another. So when customizing and expanding the functionality, most likely, you will have to turn to specialists.