If you are looking for simple and robust open source platform to start your own eCommerce business, then WordPress can be an ideal choice. As we all know, it initially emerged as a blog publishing platform but with the time gone it has evolved as excellent CMS and eCommerce Web Development platform too. There are several eCommerce plugins for WordPress available through which managing store become easy however WooCommerce stands out of all.
WooCommerce is the most popular and powerful eCommerce plugin for WordPress website that is available for free and developed by WooThemes which is well known for selling premium eCommerce themes and extensions. WooThemes also specializes in building WooCommerce Front End Ecommerce Website themes which has an outstanding collection of Front End Designs for Ecommerce Stores. The beauty of this technical platform is that it can offer excellent Front End and Back End which can be easily customized in the most user friendly manner.
Below are some key features which makes WooCommerce standout.
Strength and Flexibility
WooCommerce is built for WordPress websites making it easy to sell products online with less technical knowledge. This makes it an efficient, robust and reliable plugin.
Customizable
WooCommerce is designed to work with any theme, including the default WordPress themes. If you don’t want to use theme offered by WooTheme then you need to read their theming docs to getting your own theme work nicely.
Smart Dashboard Widgets & Reports
In order to see your business grow, sales and store performance reports are very important. With WooCommerce you can keep acute attention on incoming sales, stock levels and general store performance statistics that all from the WordPress dashboard or from the reports section ( to view stats in more details) easily accessible.
Whether you want to own a store with few hundreds or rather thousands of products or just a sole trader selling limited products WooCommerce is for you. You can sell out anything.
WooCommerce can be integrated with all major shipping and payment systems such as PayPal Standards for accepting Credit Card and PayPal account payments, Simplify Commerce – a US gateway backed by Mastercard, BACS, Cash on Delivery, Flat rate shipping and free shipping and many more.
Extensions
There are range of further extensions available which can be used for further enhanced functionality like shipping options, payment options and many other features. There are numerous ones you can check out from below links.
Is WooCommerce a complete Ecommerce System and able to manage complex Enterprise level Shopping Websites?
When it comes to building an eCommerce website the very first thing that need to be considered is, which eCommerce platform is good. There are several popular options available like Magento eCommerce, Big Commerce, Joomla Virtu Mart, CS Cart and the list goes on. Magento Ecommerce is the top Ecommerce platform however WooCommerce seems to be picking up the pace and we want to find out if it has been made capable enough to compete with the most popular Ecommerce platforms with ability to offer solutions from simple to complex Ecommerce store requirements.
Being reputed WordPress development company and having delivered successfully many eCommerce Website projects using WordPress WooCommerce, in our opinion WordPress is great solution for small business with limited number of products. You may come across many discussions in forums about the number of products supported by WooCommerce where many say it can support up to 30K and more and many say that they have found it difficult to manage products after some limit. So there are mixed reviews. For web store with standard settings and features, it is very easy to set up and have basic features such as products with optional attributes and price, categories, shopping cart, basic shipping methods, payment, configure tax rates and so on.
If you want to add additional functionalities such as customer levels with separate pricing levels, offers like buy 1 get 1 free or if you want to use coupons, each of these features will require additional plugin with additional cost which can be developed from scratch or you may be able to find a readymade plug in. The solution definitely exists.
On the other hand if we mention about a popular system like Magento, it has many out of the box and powerful eCommerce features and functionality which may not be available with WooCommerce. One of the powerful features if we discuss about Magento is its native ability to run multiple store on different URL’s and on entire different themes through one consolidated admin panel. Moreover, it has ability to organize and filter the product through attributes and stores. This feature could be more important when a store possess thousands of products with variations.
When it comes to complexity of website, compared to WooCommerce, Magento considerably take more time to understand the system and manage sites and products. It is bulky and often we get complains about the loading time being very slow. Moreover, Magento extensions compared to WooCoomerce are significantly more expensive. Magento’s giant and complex structure makes it challenging to customize and it often incurs higher development cost compare to similar work in WooCommerce. So cost, speed and userfriendliness can give advantage to WooCommerce.
Finally, What Is The Best Choice?
As mentioned above, if you are running an eCommerce business with limited range of products, WooCommerce is definitely an excellent choice. Medium sized businesses with large product catalogue and greater financial resources are better to go with Magento.
Because of WooCommerce’s agile open source development status and popularity, it has emerged as a modern and trustworthy eCommerce solution and because of competition in the market, new updates and additional functionalities are constantly being produced in order to keep WooCommerce at front of the pack and reliable solution.