What Is WooCommerce? Know All About It

When taking your business online and building an ecommerce store, there are many different options available for ecommerce platforms, one such popular ecommerce development platform is WooCommerce.

In today’s time, WooCommerce is powering more than 25% of the ecommerce stores which come in the top 1 million sites worldwide vis à vis other ecommerce platforms. After the coronavirus worldwide pandemic, the ecommerce store numbers have only increases which in turn make these platforms more popular. In this article, we will go through many different aspects of WooCommerce, what it is, why it is so popular, what you can see, and much more.

What Is WooCommerce

WooCommerce is basically a plugin that gives ecommerce features to a normal web application built on WordPress CMS. So, if you have developed a WordPress web application and now planning to sell products on it you can simply implement the WooCommerce plugin. It will add all the features & functionalities to sell your stuff online. The best thing is that it is a very light plugin which even WordPress developers can integrate and set up your online ecommerce store. Also, just like WordPress, WooCommerce is an Open-Source plugin. It includes all the essential features every online store needs, including shopping carts, payment gateways, and a streamlined checkout process.

Brief Market Stats Of WooCommerce

A few interesting stats of the WooCommerce in the ecommerce market are:

• According to Builtwith, there are more than 3.8 million ecommerce stores globally that are using WooCommerce as their ecommerce platform.
• The WooCommerce plugin has been downloaded 86.3 million times.
• 93+ % of WordPress online stores choose the WooCommerce plugin.
• Currently, there are more than 2000 WooCommerce themes available in the market.

Reasons Behind Popularity Of WooCommerce

The connection of WooCommerce with WordPress is one of the foremost reasons for its popularity. It has hundreds of paid & free themes available along with a plethora of plugins that you can use to extend the functionality of your store. Some other reasons behind the popularity of the WooCommerce are

• WooCommerce and WordPress both are free to use
• WooCommerce is open-source, i.e. the development team can audit, modify or extend the code
• It is easy for beginners to use WooCommerce, they don’t need to be technical or coding savvy to create an online store
• WooCommerce is also very flexible i.e. you can add all kinds of functionality using plugins.

Why Choose WooCommerce For Your eCommerce Store?

Just installing a WooCommerce plugin in your WordPress gives it instant functionality of the ecommerce right out of the box. WooCommerce offers some incredible functions that you can leverage. Let’s know about them…

1. Easy Installation, Setup, And Integration

WooCommerce is specially designed for beginners and it is easy to start with. A simple installation and Setup Wizard will make your store up and running up with your WordPress theme.

2. Installation

WooCommerce plugin is like any other plugin. You just need to search it in the Plugins option of your WordPress dashboard and after a few clicks, it will get installed and activated.

3. Setup

During the WooCommerce installation, the Setup Wizard will take you through the basic steps of configuration. There are endless ecommerce options and the Setup Wizard cuts to the chase and shows you important options.

4. WordPress Theme Integration

Since WooCommerce is fully compatible with WordPress, it can easily work with most of the WordPress themes. You can also select the Storefront theme if you want to use the official theme and it is also free of cost.

5. Comes With All Necessary Features

You can customize the whole buying process from checkout to payment. You can set up the site in your own way.

6. Payment Gateways

WooCommerce gives you the flexibility to accept the various types of payments such as checks, cash on delivery, bank transfer, or you can use 3rd party payment gateways such as PayPal to accept credit cards or debit cards.

7. Geo-location And Automatic Taxes

You don’t need to worry about the taxes with WooCommerce. There are options for geolocation and automatic taxes so you will not show any incorrect tax or price to your customers, regardless of their location.

8. Customizable Checkout Process

You can control the checkout process from start to finish. It allows you to customize the steps, what details you should take from customers, and many other options. You can also use guest checkout or force secure checkout.

9. Control On Products

Whether you are selling a single product, a product with multiple options, or hundreds of products or services, WooCommerce gives you complete control.

10. Limitless Products

Add a product and keep adding. There is no limit on adding products or you can add as many products you like in the WooCommerce store. The only constraint is your hosting capability.

11. Types Of Products

Whether you want to sell e-books, affiliate products, or one-of-a-kind stock, you can sell any product type on WooCommerce. You can set your product as Simple Product, Grouped Product, External/Affiliate Product, Variable Product, or Virtual/Downloadable Product.

12. Product Options

Products are the cells of an ecommerce store. In WooCommerce, you can sell any type of product or service. You can add product attributes, tags, and categories. WooCommerce also allows you to add reviews to your products. The site visitors can filter the products by product type, star rating, etc.

13. Easy Shipping

After easy selling of the product, WooCommerce also makes it easy to ship it to the customers. There are different shipping options available on your WooCommerce store.

14. Shipping Options

WooCommerce gives you shipping options of flat rate shipping, International Shipping, Local Delivery, or in-store pickup. You can also set the shipping rate to Automatic, and give your customers the lowest rate based on their address – or even offer Free shipping.

15. Calculative Shipping, Display, And Destination

It is also possible to hide the shipping rate if the customer hasn’t entered the address. There is also a Shipping Calculator in the shopping cart.

16. Tax Management

Taxes are also a part of the ecommerce business and you have to manage them efficiently for avoiding any legal tussle. WooCommerce makes it easy to handle even the stressful taxes.

WooCommerce has pre-built features for handling the taxes. Custom tax rates, major tax rate calculation, and geo-location tax rates are a few of the available options. It is also possible to manually define tax rates, and control the tax rate assigned to your shipping costs.

17. Marketing & SEO

Regardless of how intuitive and attractive your ecommerce store is, you wouldn’t be able to bring a lot of traffic to it without digital marketing and SEO. WooCommerce utilizes the existing power of WordPress SEO to help get the word out and let your audience about you.

Since WooCommerce plugins run on WordPress, you would be able to leverage the SEO options of WordPress. WordPress has very granular SEO options, by which your store will get a significant SEO boost.

18. Coupons and Discounts

Easily enable discounts and coupon codes, without ever discounting tax.

19. Reviews

Reviews on the products help you gain the trust of the site visitors and credibility to the products. In WordPress, you can enable them right from the dashboard or you can also allow reviews to be verified only from the verified customers and display a label of verified customers.

20. Reports and Analytics

While selling, it is also important to know which products are selling most and what is the audience demand, which audience is getting converted to, and many other things. With the proper analysis of data, you would be able to make better business decisions.

21. Store Dashboard

You can check the traffic, orders, and status summary from the WooCommerce dashboard.

22. Reports

The WooCommerce reports and can help you to view your sales (gross and net) and print reports.

23. Analyzing

Track the trends in growth and sales to take future business decisions.

24. Customer Management

Whether it is a first-time visitor, customer, or repeat client, WooCommerce customer management tools make it easy for your site visitors to take the next step.

25. Accounts and Passwords

It should be easy for customers to create accounts to retain them in your store. In the WooCommerce installation, you can give the option of auto-generate passwords and generating the customer account username using the e-mail address of customers. This will ensure a smooth flow of account creation.

26. Easy M-commerce

Consumers now prefer to shop anytime and anywhere, even on the go, thus mobile ecommerce applications are more in preference vis-à-vis websites. Hence, eCommerce is turning to mobile commerce or M-commerce.

Woo-Commerce is mobile-friendly so that you never miss out on a sale due to a customer’s device.

27. Fully Extendable

With WooCommerce, Sky is the only limit. With 450+ extensions you can configure your shop in virtually endless ways. The extensions will not be added to the core plugin but will work only if WooCommerce has been already installed.

Wrapping Up

Now, after reading this, you would have understood many different aspects of WooCommerce. In simple words, WooCommerce is simple and yet effective to take your business online and build and reliable ecommerce store. It has been powered by the open-source WordPress software, which powers many leading websites. It is fast, powerful, and free.  You can extend its functionality as per your requirement. All combine to deliver the ultimate ecommerce solution and much of it is free. At Emizentech, the best WooCommerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing ecommerce stores from scratch. Let us know your requirements.