Launched in 2011, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress that allows website owners to manage payments, shipping, inventory, reporting, marketing and taxes without any web development knowledge. WooCommerce currently powers 24% of all eCommerce websites (that’s an astounding 663,153 websites) and certainly, it is popular for a good reason. Here are some of the reasons why you should choose WooCommerce for to create a shopping cart on your WordPress website.
Basic Functionalities are Free
WooCommerce can be downloaded for free with the following features:
- Coupons / discounts
- Product reviews
- Subscriptions / recurring payments
- Flat rate shipping
- Paypal Standard payment processing
There are definitely tons of other affordable add-ons but this is a pretty good start being free.
Endless Product Possibilities
WooCommerce allows you to sell everything and anything. You can add infinite categories, attributes, descriptions, tax classes and images for your products. Attributes allow for different sizes, colors, variations and product bundling. Your products can be physical, downloadable, virtual and even affiliate / external. The options are endless.
Tons of Add-On Features
For a small cost, here are some advanced functionalities you can add:
- Advanced / table rate shipping
- Cross-sell and upsell to generate more sales
- PDF invoices
- Related product suggestions
- Product comparisons
- PayPal Pro payment processing
- Authorize.net payment processing
- MailChimp / Constant Contact email subscription integration
- Shipping integration with FedEx, UPS and USPS
- Invoicing integration with QuickBooks
- Wishlists
- Support forums
The above features do not encompass everything that WooCommerce offers but are the most important and popular functionalities in our experience.
Infinitely Customizable
Because WooCommerce is open-source, the code is available for web developers to build and modify it for their needs. Furthermore, WooCommerce works in conjunction with WordPress, so users can take advantage of the over 877 million plugins out there that can extend the functionality of their WordPress website.
Very Scalable
WooCommerce allows you to infinitely grow your online store and products. You are only really limited by your hosting package. You can easily customize the theme files and there are APIs available for building extensions.
Order Tracking & Inventory Management
Streamline your order tracking and inventory management by integrating QuickBooks with WooCommerce. QuickBooks Online Integration can transfer orders, customers, and inventory to your QuickBooks account and it also ensures that your website’s pricing and inventory levels are current. In addition, QuickBooks POS allows you to manage your customers, orders and inventory levels.
Gain Insight with Analytics
Advanced tracking plugins can track how customers and prospects shop and checkout to how products perform. In addition, integrating your website with Google Analytics will help you gain valuable information about your visitors like where they are coming from, what devices they are using, what they are interested in and there they are entering/exiting your website.
Familiarity & User-Friendliness
Since 50% of the world’s websites are already controlled by WordPress because of its user-friendliness, most people are already familiar with its dashboard so managing your online store with it seems like a no-brainer.
We hope that all of the above reasons has convinced you to create your next eCommerce website with WooCommerce. Here is a recent eCommerce website we just launched using WooCommerce. Please contact us to start on your custom responsive eCommerce WordPress website.