E-commerce development is both an art and a science as it requires creativity with technical knowledge. But it requires quite a bit of planning as well. We have already talked about an Ultimate Guide to creating your own ecommerce store – from the perspective of business owners.
Today we discuss about an ecommerce platform which we really love and consider to be one of the best in most situations.
Yes, the platform we are talking about is Woocommerce : the ecommerce platform to accompany wordpress. It’s no wonder that WooCommerce powers over 28.19% of all online stores and 22% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites use WooCommerce. (Source: Datanyze)
Let’s look at 10 reasons why you should be using Woocommerce for your ecommerce website.
1. Woocommerce is a Free platform
Woocommerce is a completely free platform. It neither has a one time license fee, nor a monthly platform fee. Despite being free, it has great documentation, loads of themes and a lot of community support which makes seeking support and guidance really easy. While Woocommerce does not have a platform charge , you will most likely be paying a ‘hosting’ fee to your hosting provider for your store. But as pointed out later, Woocommerce supports shared hosting so these are nominal costs. Woocommerce development and design is also more affordable, than say, Magento development. An Experienced Magento Enterprise developer is likely to cost much more than a Woocommerce developer.
2. Woocommerce is Open Source
This may not seem to be a big deal from a user perspective but it is. Only because Woocommerce is open-source, is it able to remain free to use and have so much of community support. Because it is open source, its functionality can be studied and extended leading to innovation and addition of new and new features. Being open source has allowed hundreds and thousands of ‘plugins’ to come up to support many new and innovative features in Woocommerce. Woocommerce community is of-course complemented by WordPress community of developers as woocommerce is essentially a large wordpress plugin. And wordpress community of developers, designers is huge as it powers nearly 33% of the internet. (Source: Kinsta)
3. Woocommerce requires less Hosting Resources
Many ecommerce platforms such as Magento require huge hosting resources such that you may need to go in for dedicated or specialized hosting even in the beginning. But not for Woocommerce. You can easily host a standard Woocommerce online store on shared Hosting providers like JustHost, Hostgator and Bluehost. Infact you can get some good referral discount on bluehost here: 
Since woocommerce hosting is well supported on shared servers, most small ecommerce stores starting out can do with spending less than $60 on hosting for a whole year!
4. Woocommerce is Easy to Setup and Configure
For those who have set-up Open Cart or Magento, they will probably agree that Woocommerce is much simpler and easier to set-up. And at no disadvantage as such. All the main functionality required is available in the Core platform and additional functionality is available through plugins. I have worked with multiple shopping carts such as Magento, Shopify, Volusion, Open Cart, Prestashop and found Woocommerce setup to be the most intuitive. Yes, you do need to set-up the shipping and taxes and that takes a bit of thought but the basic setup is easy through the Wizard. Customizing a Woocommerce Store requires lesser technical knowledge than say a Magento Store or even OpenCart
5. Woocommerce is very powerful
Woocommerce comes with all the features that an e-commerce store might need. Ecommerce consultants will of-course agree that it does NOT have all the functionality out of the box. Some of the functionality needs to be added on through plugins; many of which are free. This includes features for Affiliate management, Advanced Pricing, Advanced Shipping etc. However this is only logical and not a disadvantage. This allows a Woocommerce to be relatively lightweight software and allows for easy additions of features which may NOT be required by everyone.
Woocommerce has the main features in any e-commerce store such as:
- Multiple categories and Product – create / edit etc.
- Product description page with multiple images , related products etc.
- Product listing page with List and Grid view
- Setting up products and variants in colors, sizes etc.
- Account setup and Login for customers as well as Quick checkout
- Invoice , email on order, order management etc.
- Shipping, Promo, discounts, Taxes etc.
- Home Page setup, featured products, slideshow setup etc.
- Checkout, payment gateway, review , social sharing etc. Even guest checkout facility provided
Enhancement and addition of features also happens by support from Themes and plugin providers and woocommerce has one of the largest community of such developers and designers.
6. Woocommerce is secure, well maintained and regularly updated
It is a common misconception that because Woocommerce and WordPress are free to use, open source platforms; they may not be secure. The truth is that your online store’s security actually depends on how proactive the development team is. For security, SSL is just the beginning and many other facets have to be kept in mind. Once again, there are specialized FREE plugins for enhancing WordPress (and Woocommerce) security. Some of the security features include Login, Registration Captchas, Brute force Check, Firewall, File Permission checks, Scanning, check on Bots and Comments. Your woocommerce development company should include security enhancement as part of its service during the online store development process.
7. WordPress complements woocommerce features multifold
One of the best things which sets woocommerce apart as an e-commerce platform is that it has wordpress functionality backing it. Which means every woocommerce powered ecommerce store also has wordpress within it providing it with CMS, a blogging platform, and a host of other functionality through wordpress plugins. For instance you can have a special ecommerce store selling digital products, personalized products, a consultation / membership e-commerce store, Catalog only e-commerce store. Dropshipping, Affiliate , Auctions and Booking type of e-commerce stores are also possible. This is only possible because of the great integration between WordPress, Woocommerce and WordPress plugins.
8. Woocommerce E-commerce website can be extended to an App
WordPress and Woocommerce both provide for an open REST API enablement which is very valuable to extend its functionality. The API can even be extended forward and customized as needed. Apart from many 3rd party, widget based services providing Woocommerce App experience , you can use the API yourself to build a mobile app either in Android, iOS or even a cross-platform one. With the API part done, your app development costs will be lower if your plan to build a customized app for your woocommerce store.
9. Woocommerce is Scalable to up-to thousands of products.
One of the concerns many people have when choosing a platform is how scalable the platform is – in terms of traffic and also in terms of products & categories it can support. Woocommerce can support thousands of products, even hundreds of thousands without hiccups. In terms of traffic, it can support heavy traffic with CDN, right caching, optimized database etc. These aspects are actually common across multiple e-commerce platforms. You can find first-hand insights on scaling a Woocommerce store here.
10. Woocommerce allows for Multicurrency, Multi-lingual ecommerce stores.
Did you know that Woocommerce supports more than 56 languages currently. Thanks to it’s large community of supporters and developers, a woocommerce multi-lingual store is easy to build. WPML is the main plugin (a paid one) which supports multiple language and multicurrency feature with advanced configuration options. But other plugins and options are available. Woocommerce also provides for localization of measurements such as inches vs. cms etc.
: In Conclusion, Woocommerce scores very highly on affordability, ease of use, scalability, community support, features as an ecommerce development platform. If you have an online store development requirement, talk to us and we’ll be happy to offer you advice and help select the right e-commerce platform for your online store.
