Woo your customers with WooCommerce in 2021 – features and benefits
According to a statistic, WordPress powers almost 40% of all websites on the internet. The number includes websites without a CMS or a custom-coded CMS. WooCommerce is a popular opensource eCommerce WordPress plugin that turns any website into a fully equipped online shop with a single click and lets users use the power of WordPress for online shopping. The simplicity and versatility of WooCommerce are its standout features. One can talk with expert eCommerce developers to know whether they should incorporate WooCommerce in their website or not. In this article, we will discuss the features and benefits of WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Features to know about
WooCommerce has all the essential features that a new eCommerce store requires to function correctly. WooCommerce allows users to sell everything from physical products to digital downloads quickly. WordPress has ensured to keep the code lean and modular, providing only the essential features users need at any specific time. The idea is to provide WooCommerce with all the necessary features to be expanded as required.
Main features of WooCommerce
• Better customization
• Easy to manage product categories
• Customers can provide product ratings and reviews.
• Built-in blogging feature
• Ability to provide tags and attributes
• Customization of currency, language, and measurement units according to the location
• A feature that allows easy product sorting and filtering
• Limitless product listings
Benefits Of WooCommerce for Retailers and Startups
WooCommerce is free
Keeping costs down is one of the major concerns of any new enterprise. WooCommerce can help keep costs down as it is an open-source WordPress plugin. WordPress is one of the most popular CMS platforms globally, powering a vast number of websites. Hence despite being free, there is no question of reliability regarding WooCommerce as WordPress provides direct developmental support to the WooCommerce plugin. Apart from being free, the ease of starting a WooCommerce store is another significant benefit that WooCommerce delivers to its users.
WooCommerce store is a personal store
Many entrepreneurs do not like the idea of selling their products or services via a third party as they feel that they would be bound to that party’s rules and terms. This is the reason why many of them spend money on building an eCommerce mobile app or website. WooCommerce serves as a perfect solution for such entrepreneurs as it is a platform that allows the entrepreneurs to build a more personal store with minimal intervention from the company. Many entrepreneurs like to keep WooCommerce as a backup store with their main e-commerce store on Amazon or other similar websites. A backup store helps eCommerce stores that have worked on branding in the past as customers can find them through an organic search on Google if they have trouble finding the store on Amazon.
Good support from the company
WooCommerce is backed by WordPress, which happens to be one of the largest CMS systems in the world. Whether it’s an eCommerce store or an m-commerce store, both need a wide range of extensions to perform various functions. In WooCommerce, there are more than 400 official extensions that assist the website in performing various functions like payments and shipping, marketing, accounting, and analytics, to name a few.
Another benefit of WooCommerce is that all the extensions from a web development company would easily cost hundreds of dollars. With WooCommerce extensions, the cost rarely exceeds $20-30 per extension.
Informative analytics
No website can succeed without good analytics, as without proper analytics, it is challenging to create a solid, actionable sales plan. For those who have little or no experience with tracking implementation, it can prove to be pretty challenging to use complicated analytics software. WooCommerce has a very intuitive and simple built-in analytics. The built-in analytics feature of WooCommerce proves to be especially useful for those who have little or no experience with analytics. WooCommerce allows the users to view critical information like most popular products, sales by product and data, and customer information in easy-to-view pie charts. If the entrepreneurs want to get detailed analytics, then WooCommerce is a simple process, and they can gain access to a much deeper level of analytics using WooCommerce.
Cost-effective and flexible
As compared to other platforms, building a solution on WooCommerce always proves to be a cost-effective affair. It can take months to build an eCommerce website from scratch, while a WooCommerce shop can be set up in only a few days. Moreover, design changes can prove expensive with a custom webshop, while WooCommerce can easily implement design changes by purchasing affordable themes. WooCommerce allows the users to implement additional features quickly with negligible costs, while custom-made webshops demand a much longer development process leading to an increased cost.
WooCommerce is a very flexible platform as it easily adjusts itself with all kinds of businesses’ requirements. Whether the business is selling t-shirts, digital downloads, or membership subscription services, WooCommerce supports them all. The same cannot be said about the other open-source platforms out there.
Easy integration
Whether it’s an eCommerce website, mobile app, or aPWA, each one has different requirements. One may need to extend the functionality of WooCommerce to accommodate the requirements of the website. A significant advantage that WooCommerce offers over other similar platforms is that it supports a large number of third-party integrations with its platform. So entrepreneurs worrying whether they will be able to integrate their payment gateway or shipping calculator with their WooCommerce store can relax. Cayman gateway is a new payment gateway in the remote location of the cayman islands. It has developed a WooCommerce plugin to allow website owners from the cayman islands to take payments through their gateway. Such is the popularity of WooCommerce that almost every new plugin supports WooCommerce. Expert PHP developers can help build a WooCommerce plugin that can help a company fulfill its needs.
SEO friendly
WooCommerce is one of the most well-established platforms globally, adapted according to SEO guidelines provided by Google. WooCommerce is an out-of-box SEO-friendly solution, and it is easy to SEO optimize the website with WooCommerce. With WooCommerce, the website owners get an intuitive interface that allows the website owners to store essential product details and any other SEO information. Apart from that, there are great third-party SEO plugins that help entrepreneurs optimize every post and page on the website.
Security
Nobody wants a crashed e-commerce platform during the festive season due to security reasons. WooCommerce development company ensures robust security for its clients by working closely with security experts like Succuri.net. The idea is to provide the safest online experience to the clients. The security updates are regular and quick on WooCommerce, and websites that regularly update their WooCommerce platform and plugins have a pretty reliable and safe platform for conducting their business.
Easily customizable through themes
Once a custom website is live, it is often challenging and expensive to make changes. With the WooCommerce platform, one can easily switch back and forth between appearances. This is accomplished by the use of different themes, either free or paid. Paid themes can cost up to $100 and receive dedicated support from their development team. An excellent place to look for premium WordPress – WooCommerce themes is ThemeForest.
Social media integration
Social commerce is a strong trend as Facebook and Instagram allow users to buy directly from their apps. Ecommerce stores have to upgrade themselves and become social media compliant. With WooCommerce, the entrepreneurs can achieve fast and easy social media integration, helping them reach out to their audiences effectively.
Effective social media plugins will allow the entrepreneurs to take another step towards a better customer experience.
Large community
The support of a large developer community becomes essential even when the entrepreneurs outsource a WooCommerce project. WooCommerce enjoys the help of a vibrant community of users, developers, and contributors. One can find a wealth of information on the WooCommerce community. There are several active WooCommerce forums like the WooCommerce support forum and the upload WP community forum.
It also has several forums specialized in this platform. A good example is WooCommerce Support Forum, but there are many others, such as Upload WP Community Forums. A good community forum is important because the developers can receive help from a large community of active users whenever a problem arises.
WooCommerce vs. Magento vs. Shopify Platform Comparison
WooCommerce development 2021 encompasses using a plethora of themes and plugins available in the best possible manner to ensure that the eCommerce store is the optimum fit according to the products/services it serves. Although many talented wordpress development companies would easily finish the task of developing a high-quality WooCommerce store, it is always nice to compare other popular eCommerce development platforms to know which one is the correct fit. WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify are the three most popular eCommerce platforms in the world today. Let us have a look at the pros and cons of each platform.
Shopify Pros and Cons
Pros
Shopify is an e-commerce first platform.
Shopify has an easy catalog management feature.
Hosting and SSL is included in Shopify.
It is easy to install apps with Shopify.
Shopify has an easy-to-use theme set up.
Cons
Weak CMS capability for larger eCommerce sites
Challenging to do things outside the core app market
Not that flexible
Shopify levies transaction fees in case the site does not use Shopify payments
The usage fees increase exponentially in Shopify.
Shopify is not suitable for large and complex catalogs.
Magento Pros and Cons
Pros
It is easy to find developers for Magento.
Scalability is good with Magento.
Magento can handle large catalogs.
Magento can manage multiple stores and websites on the same installation.
Cons
Higher on-average cost of ownership
Steep learning curve
Complicated themes
WooCommerce Pros and Cons
Pros
WooCommerce has much better CMS capabilities.
WooCommerce is a much simpler platform to learn.
There are no transaction fees on WooCommerce.
WooCommerce offers around 50,000 plugin options.
The users of WooCommerce enjoy the support of a massive community.
Cons
WooCommerce requires hosting
Not so good support through email
Requires constant updates for core software and plugins
Conclusion
The professional look and flexibility of WooCommerce make it the best eCommerce platform for small and medium businesses. WooCommerce provides the users with all the standard requirements for a fraction of the cost compared to most other eCommerce platforms. The massive support community of WooCommerce ensures that the users never have to face a roadblock while working on WooCommerce.
The post Woo your customers with WooCommerce in 2021 – features and benefits appeared first on TopDevelopers.co.