WooCommerce is a customizable, open-source eCommerce platform built for WordPress or as an eCommerce option by web hosting providers. With it, users can create and manage an eCommerce storefront without the need to do any coding. In addition, the WooCommerce store comes with hundreds of free and paid extensions that let you extend and customize your online store including features such as inventory, tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration.
What is the WooCommerce WordPress Plugin?
WooCommerce is a free customizable, eCommerce platform built on WordPress that helps you sell physical and digital products as well as affiliate products. You get everything you need to set up your store including homepage design, menus, site structure, and payment and shipping options. If you have a WordPress site, adding WooCommerce takes just a few minutes.
By simply adding the WooCommerce plugin to any WordPress site, you can set up a new web store. Established in 2010 WooComemrce has seen more than 150 million downloads in addition to millions of active installations, making it one the most popular platform for e-commerce sites. Similarly, the WooCommerce store boasts of more than 730 official extensions and themes that make selling products online a breeze.
This intuitive WordPress plugin helps configure your online store page with store contact information, product content, payment details, shipping information, automated taxes, and more. The WooCommerce store has hundreds of free and paid extensions that add features and functionality to your online business efforts. They include promotions, coupon codes, inventory management, buyer reviews, and product. With WooCommerce you have the option to install mobile-optimized templates or even develop your template. It comes with third-party integration with hundreds of solutions, including Facebook, Sage, Zapier, MailChimp, ShipStation, Square, Stripe, Fulfilment by Amazon, and more.
What is WooCommerce Used For?
WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress that helps you launch a business or take your brick-and-mortar store online. It is a free plugin for businesses of all sizes and industries where users can add essential features to build their e-store with options to tweak the look and content of their store. These include how products are displayed on pages, shopping cart functionality, and handling payments gateways. This is why it is very useful to ask how to update WordPress plugins as well as how to add WordPress plugin to my website. WooCommerce offers both free and premium paid and free themes in addition to over 500 extensions and thousands of plugins that can help you add more features to your online store to sell both physical and digital products.
Besides being able to sell anything on WooCommerce, it comes bundled with several payment options. And scalability with this plugin comes easy, so you can sell one product or thousands.
Why Do I Need the WooCommerce Plugin?
WooCommerce is popular among users because it is entirely free to install on your site; comes with a vast library of free themes and add-ons; is designed with beginners in mind; makes your store mobile-friendly, and you can add many different features to your website to increase functionality and boost user experience. Other solutions on offer include:
Inventory Management
As a business, you should be on top of your inventory as it saves you money and allows you to fulfill your customers’ requests. Through inventory management, you can control costs related to your operations as you know what you have, what is in your warehouse, and how to manage the supply chain. With WooCommerce’s inventory management plugin, you can manage your inventory by bulk editing stock items; manage and calculate changes in price and stock levels of your products; export product data for further analysis to analyze and other tasks. The ATUM inventory management is a free WooCommerce plugin that lets you have full control of your store’s stock from a single intuitive dashboard.
Unlimited Products
With Woocommerce you can sell anything from physical products, appointments to even digital products such as ebooks. With this platform, you can sell virtually any services or product under several options that include retail, wholesale, and even subscription-based options.
When it comes to payments WooCommerce comes bundled with the ability to accept major credit cards, bank transfers, checks, and cash on delivery. It also seamlessly integrates with Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. Apple Pay, and Google Pay.
WordPress Dashboard Benefits
WooCommerce.com uses WordPress.com accounts allowing you to merge your existing Woo account with WordPress. What this means is that with integration with WordPress the leading content management platform in the market you not only get built-in eCommerce solutions but also a dashboard that is easy to use.
Through the WordPress dashboard, you can activate WooCommerce to open up some powerful features that include setting up product pages, calculating the shipping, making tax calculations, configuring your store’s preferred payment, and more. The dashboard combines multiple reports on one display screen, giving you quick insights into the performance of your store, managing charges, refunds, disputes, and deposits right from your WordPress dashboard.
Easy Shipping Options
When it comes to shipping options WooCommerce Shipping is built right into your WooCommerce dashboard, with everything you need for your shipping delivery and fulfillment needs. In addition, WooCommerce comes with a selection of some 57 WooCommerce extensions for shipping, delivery, and fulfillment that offer options to print USPS and DHL labels, calculators for shipping cots, offer free shipping, guest check-outs, handle bank transfers, and more flexible checkout process.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a key feature in your marketing efforts as it is driven towards getting you lead, sales, and reaching wider audiences. WooCommerce helps boost your content marketing through blogs; product reviews; post your store location; social media integration; and integration with third-party marketplaces that include Facebook ads, Google listings, and ads; eBay, and more.
You can also boost sales by listing products on Google Shopping, promoting your store on Facebook, or emailing customers with Mailchimp. With it, you can also track and report on your marketing efforts with Google Analytics. It also offers email marketing tools that can help you create personalized engagements with customers backing these with rewards and incentive capabilities to let you offer coupons; discounts; points and rewards; and even gifts.
Mobile-Friendly Features
With more and more people using their smartphones to search for products and make purchases your e-commerce store needs to be mobile-friendly. Having a mobile responsive design means that your site adjusts to the size of the user’s device be it a cellphone or tablet. WooCommerce can help you tap into customers who rely on their phones by offering you mobile-friendly themes. WooCommerce has also a mobile app available both in iOS and Android that lets you take control of your e-commerce store from the palm of your hand.
Product-Specific SEO Analysis
WooCommerce is SEO friendly as it offers numerous built-in features that users can use to optimize their online store for search engines including the ability to preview products in search results; product descriptions; image optimization; use product categories and tags and more. WooCommerce’s SEO WordPress plugin comes with a product-centric SEO and readability analysis that can help you write product descriptions, offer short description suggestions that are both SEO-friendly and buyer-friendly.
Easy Tax Management
With WooCommerce calculating taxes comes easy. It comes with inbuilt features that let you handle taxes on sales, apply custom tax rates, conduct major tax rate calculations, factor in geo-location tax rates; billing address; define tax rates, and even manage tax rates assigned to your shipping costs.
WordPress Themes
Since WooCommerce is compatible with WordPress, it easily integrates with most free and premium WordPress themes. Most of these themes are also mobile-friendly where you can choose your storefront’s theme and even add wooCommerce many extensions to get more powerful e-commerce solutions. Some popular WooCommerce WordPress themes include Astra, Shoppe, OceanWP, Neve, and Hugo.
Woocommerce Support
WooCommerce offers support with product installations, configuration, and use. It also has a help desk that operates through a ticket-based support system for technical-related queries and issues. For help and troubleshooting, WooCommerce.com account holders can chat with its dedicated Support team. For customization, one can hire a developer for everything from design tweaks to full builds. Additional support can be accessed through emails, WooCommerce Help Forums, and WooExperts.
Is Woo Commerce Free to Use?
WooCommerce is a free customizable, eCommerce platform to help you build your online stores. It is not only 100 percent open source but you stand to benefit from a global community of more than 350 contributors for a steady stream of innovations and releases. Because the WooCommerce core features come free it competes with leading e-commerce applications by offering users free features with great capabilities without having to commit to expensive subscriptions or proprietary software licenses.
It offers both free and paid add ons that offer different capabilities and complete control over your online store.WooCommerce can cost nothing to use, apart from WordPress hosting. However, there are other costs involved besides the web hosting solution such as getting a domain email and other options that come with additional expenses.
How do I Install WooCommerce?
WooCommerce plugin can be installed with just a few clicks the same as any other WordPress plugin. It is important to first review the server requirements before installation to prevent issues from arising when you use WooCommerce. You also need a website hosting service provider WooCommerce recommends the following web hosting services Bluehost, SiteGround, GoDaddy, WordPress, and others. To install Woocomemrce through WordPress’ administrator take the following steps:
- Go to your WordPress dashboard
- Select ‘Plugins’ and click on ‘Add New’
- Search for ‘WooCommerce’ and click ‘Install Now’
Then click ‘Activate Now’ to prompt the WooCommerce Wizard.
The WooCommerce Wizard will then take you through all the necessary steps to set up your store.
Is WooCommerce safe?
WooCommerce is built on WordPress and is regularly audited by Sucuri, an industry leader in security. However, as a site owner, you will still need to be constantly on the alert against threats from hackers.
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This article, “What is WooCommerce?” was first published on Small Business Trends