WooCommerce
Is This Your Business?Author: Kalicia Bateman
LAST UPDATED: November 25th, 2019
WooCommerce is the top commerce provider for WordPress websites. It is intended for small- to large-sized online merchants. It was designed as a plug-in for WordPress and was released in September 2011. It quickly became popular for its simple installation and high number of themes that can be purchased through its website. As of 2014, over 380,000 websites used WooCommerce, making it the most widely used e-commerce solution in the world. The basic plug-in doesn't cost anything and can be downloaded and integrated to your website for free. However, there are many things about this e-commerce solution that you should be aware of before deciding on using it.
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The Good
- Pricing
- One-page checkout
- Templates
- Knowledge base
Pricing
We like the price tag associated with downloading WooCommerce for your WordPress website: it's FREE. The open source plug-in costs nothing to download. This means that your development team can easily download the core code and develop a theme free of cost.One-page Checkout
There is a simple one-page checkout for customers. This is an important feature for customers who want to checkout quickly after filling up their shopping cart on your e-commerce website. Another important feature is that things are validated in real time as your customer checks out.Templates
WooCommerce only has a few free templates, but there are several clean, attractive themes to use on your website. WooCommerce makes most of their money from selling templates. Though they tend to be a bit on the expensive side, . Here are some of our favorite templates:- Canvas and Jotter: $39.00
- Fashionable: $39.00
- Spectrum: $79 to $139.00
Knowledge Base
We did like the knowledge base. This is an important feature because there is minimal support with WooCommerce. We would like to see some development solutions and other services offered for WooCommerce, but we saw that questions on the community knowledge base were answered quickly and effectively.The Bad
- PCI compliant
- Analytics
- Social media
- Plug-in driven
- Extensions
PCI Compliant
For example, you have to go through a lot of work to make your website PCI compliant. WooCommerce is not in the business of providing hosting solutions or SSL certificates, so your security is only going to be as good as the hosting solution that you choose to get. If you can't get PCI compliance in a one-stop shop, getting your website ready to do business will end up costing your small- or large-sized business a lot of overhead.Analytics
There are also not a lot of options in terms of analytics for WooCommerce. When we went online to see if there were any plugins and extensions, the only real functionality we saw with WooCommerce was Google Analytics.Social Media
We also had some concerns about the role of social media within WooCommerce. In the most basic templates, we only saw the ability to embed Facebook, Twitter, and other buttons. Some users, in the forums, had tried to figure out how to embed a Pinterest button, also. We also saw some plugins for social media. We found one that enabled social login on your e-commerce store. But there is a downside to this great tool. At $79, it is more expensive than some of the WooCommerce themes themselves.Plug-in Driven
Another thing that we found was that the WooCommerce paradigm is a little bit too plug-in driven. If you want to expand your functional payment gateways, you need to tweak your code or add more payment methods with plug-ins. Even though WooCommerce is one of the largest global e-commerce solutions, the service is not as robust as some of the other solutions out there, such as Demandware, X-Cart, and others.Extensions
The extensions (we weren't quite sure how these were different from plug-ins) add some more functionality to WooCommerce, such as appointments and bookings, but drastically increase in price. WooCommerce bookings extension starts at $299 and drastically goes up from price in there. Also, the table rate shipping feature extension is expensive. With other e-commerce platforms, these features are often built in. Even though WooCommerce is open source and free, it would take a long time to add these features to your WordPress e-store by integrating code.The Bottom Line
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