Introduction

eCommerce websites are crucial for every product or service-based company. It helps them promote their business to their target audience and increase their sales and revenue. However, more than 25 Million eCommerce websites exist worldwide, and more are being created every single day. 

If you want to stand out amongst the crowd, you must make sure your website ticks all the crucial boxes, including easy-of-use, excellent UI/UX, nice appearance, great features, perfect placements, etc. But to ensure that, you must first choose the most suitable eCommerce development platform. Now, there are several software and plug-ins available for the development and maintenance of eCommerce websites. But which one should you choose? Should you go for a hosted platform like Shopify or a free, open-source platform like WooCommerce? You might have heard WooCommerce store development services are among the best eCommerce website creation approaches worldwide. But why? 

Before we look at its benefits, let’s understand WooCommerce, its uses, working, and setup.

What Is WooCommerce?

Since its launch in 2011, WooCommerce has become one of the most popular WordPress plug-ins ever. But people often confuse WordPress and WooCommerce. 

While WordPress is used as a content management system for creating, updating, and maintaining websites, WooCommerce is a plug-in on WordPress that can help you buy and sell products and services on these websites. The similarity between the two is they are both open-sourced and free to use. 

Then there is eCommerce and WooCommerce. eCommerce is a process of buying, selling, and trading products and services on the internet. On the other hand, WooCommerce is used to create eCommerce websites. 

WooCommerce is used to create and maintain online stores with some crucial features like secure payments, shipping integration, and tax and inventory management, with high levels of flexibility. 

Why Use WooCommerce?

As mentioned before, WooCommerce offers some of the best features for eCommerce websites, including order tracking, delivery status updates, customer engagement, inventory management, etc. This plug-in controls more than 99% of WordPress-based eCommerce websites. As with WordPress, one of the reasons for WooCommerce’s popularity is user-friendliness. That’s why people prefer WooCommerce development companies for their eCommerce websites. 

Plus, WooCommerce is open-source, which means the room for customization is immense, and you’ll have support from a massive community regarding any issue you might encounter. 

How does WooCommerce work?

WooCommerce is a free, open-source eCommerce plug-in for WordPress. It can help turn any WordPress-based website into a fully-functioning online store, and yet this plug-in will be compatible with any prior functions you might have added through WordPress. 

With WooCommerce, you can add prominent eCommerce functions like a shopping basket or cart, a range of products, checkout, multiple payment outlets, etc. 

How To Set Up WooCommerce?

There are several WordPress plug-ins available for eCommerce websites. But when it comes to increasing business revenue, the choice is always narrowed down to WooCommerce. 

• After downloading and installing WordPress, open the dashboard and click “Plug-in.”

• Go to the search bar, type “WooCommerce,” and select “Install Now.” After the installation, you will see “Activate.” Activate WooCommerce and move to the next step of the process.

• Add business details: This sub-page will be quite straightforward, so you can easily fill it in. There is a checkbox for affirmation on whether you want to sell both physical and digital products. If you select it, you can sell both and visa-versa. Physical products are physical in nature, while digital products are downloaded.

• Choose the means of payment: You can choose from the different modes of payment listed on the page.

• Confirm the shipping particulars: Choose the shipping rate based on your current zone. There is also an option to print the shipping labels at home.

• Choose compatible plug-ins: WooCommerce will offer you some complementary plug-ins you can choose from. You don’t have to feel obligated to choose them right away as it is very easy to select them later. 

• Activate Jetpack: Finally, start Jetpack.

That concludes the installation, activation, and configuration of WooCommerce. This WordPress plug-in can help you create excellent eCommerce websites that are scalable and fully customizable. 

If you are still a little confused about this process, leave it to the experts. If you select among the best WooCommerce development services, your online store will have a great UI/UX and excellent features and will work seamlessly on all devices. 

Reasons to Choose WooCommerce for Your Online Store

As mentioned earlier, WooCommerce controls more than 99% of WordPress-based eCommerce websites. So as you would imagine, there are several reasons for people to consider WooCommerce for store development:

Cost-effectiveness

You might have heard that it takes hundreds to thousands to millions of Dollars to develop and maintain eCommerce websites every year. But this pricing isn’t related to the capability of your online store. Neither is it related to the cost of WooCommerce because you can use this WordPress plug-in free of cost. Although there are several eCommerce plug-ins available on WordPress, thanks to WooCommerce being free, you can use it to create an excellent eCommerce website without having to spend loads of overhead expenses on proprietary software licenses. 

But that’s not all. Like other plug-ins, one of the only issues with WooCommerce is that it doesn’t work with the free version of WordPress. However, you can fix this issue by upgrading to the paid version of WordPress. Another thing to understand is that although WooCommerce is free to use if you want to add more plug-ins to improve your website’s functionality and UI/UX, it may cost you nothing quite a bit. 

Still, WooCommerce by itself is free of cost and can help you create an excellent online store economically. 

Store Customization

Free platforms in the web development industry, especially plug-ins on WordPress, aren’t often customizable. But customizability is the best feature of WooCommerce, which is why the experts prefer this plug-in. It offers a range of customization options that help make your website unique and improve functionality and UI/UX. You will find over three dozen themes, each with its own set of options and settings to ensure the website is exactly how you imagined. Also, check out all the special features across the themes to ensure you take full advantage of the theme. 

User-friendliness

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress plug-in for developing and managing an eCommerce website. Despite this feat, it is prey to a rumor that it is hard to use. But in reality, it is one of the most user-friendly plug-ins available on WordPress. Even if you have no prior training or experience in programming, you can easily set up a WooCommerce store to create, update and maintain an eCommerce website. 

Highly Flexible

If you like your design platforms to be flexible, you’ll definitely fancy WooCommerce. Thanks to WooCommerce’s clear-cut structure and a diverse range of compatible plug-ins, you can sell whatever, wherever, and however, you want without any technical training or experience. WooCommerce lets you sell both physical and virtual products. Moreover, the customers can have membership access to your site, sell third-party products as an affiliate, host online auctions, or rent a room. Plus, WooCommerce offers you one of the easiest ways to make money; it enables you to take commissions on any merchant selling their products on your website. 

Built-in Plug-ins & Features

WooCommerce is a WordPress plug-in to create eCommerce websites. But it offers several additional built-in plug-ins and features to ensure the best functionality and UI/UX. Though you might have to pay for some of these plug-ins, they can help you create, maintain and run the eCommerce website more effectively. Moreover, these plug-ins and features ensure that more products can be added to the online store. Two of the best built-in features of WooCommerce are geolocation support and multiple currencies. 

Geolocation is one of the best WooCommerce services. It allows the website to automatically detect the user’s location and calculate the shipping rate and other taxes accordingly. The multiple currencies feature helps the user choose their suitable currency from the list and set it as the default one. There are several other plug-ins and features, both free and premium, that you can choose to optimize your website better. 

SEO Friendly

SEO is one of the most important things to consider for any kind of website, whether it is an eCommerce one or not. It helps the website achieve better ranking on the SERPs or search engine result pages. As you already know, WooCommerce is a WordPress plug-in. Since WordPress is an SEO-friendly content management system, it automatically makes WooCommerce search engine-friendly eCommerce plug-ins. That’s why so many businesses choose WooCommerce for store development.

Inventory Management

Among the most crucial things for any business to consider is inventory management. It helps the business keep an eye on how many products in what quantities are available in their inventory. MNCs spend loads of money to effectively manage their inventories, which might not be possible for startups or SMEs. So they can use WooCommerce for their eCommerce website, which helps them manage the product inventory and notify the concerned person when the stock for a product is low. 

Powerful Analytics

Although several free and premium tools are available for eCommerce websites to track their customer activity more effectively, they may cost you quite a bit. But these tools are built-in in WooCommerce. They can help the websites check which of the products is the best seller, which will help them keep more stocks of it. Moreover, they can check which of their marketing channels is generating the most traffic, what the average order price is, etc. That’s why developers prefer WooCommerce for creating and maintaining the best eCommerce websites. 

Excellent Customer Support

WooCommerce is a WordPress plug-in, and both are open-source, thanks to which massive communities are available for support at all times. These communities include millions of people, from beginners to experts with years of experience on the platform. They can help answer any kind of question or issue, from installing the software and plug-ins to creating the best eCommerce website. Moreover, both WooCommerce and WordPress offer a range of FAQs and comprehensive video tutorials that may answer all your questions and concerns. 

A Vibrant Community Of Users

As mentioned above, WordPress and WooCommerce are both open-source platforms. Moreover, more than 99% of WordPress-based eCommerce websites are powered by WooCommerce. So you can imagine there are millions of people in the support community, from beginners to developers with years of experience. Any kind of issue you might face with the installation to develop the website must have been dealt with by someone else already. So they can help you solve that issue and create the most feature-loaded and creative eCommerce website possible. 

Social Media Integration

WooCommerce offers you several plug-ins, both free and premium, that can help integrate social media with your website effortlessly. It will allow the users to log in to the website easily through their social media handles and share the product details with their friends and family. These plug-ins in WooCommerce can help improve your brand visibility on social media and promote your products to more people. 

Easy Order Management

Order handling is one of the most challenging yet significant tasks for any eCommerce website. So many orders going to different people in various locations can make the process a little chaotic. But with WooCommerce, you can simplify this process. With its order management dashboard, you can see every order and its payment and shipping status. You can also track the order to see if it reaches the right customer. 

Easy Website Management

Often, businesses have to hire third-party agencies to maintain and manage their website. But if you have created your eCommerce through WooCommerce, it is very easy to handle the different aspects of your website, including software updates, maintenance, security, back-ups, etc. 

These benefits might be enough to show why you should choose WooCommerce to create the best eCommerce websites. If you are a new business looking to start an eCommerce website, get in touch with the WooCommerce development company. They can help you with every aspect of website creation and management quite effectively.

Conclusion

There are several plug-ins available on WordPress that can help you create eCommerce websites. But over 99% of the online stores are created on WooCommerce. So it is quite understandable to wonder why so many people prefer WooCommerce over other plug-ins. Well, the benefits of this plug-in explained above might be enough to show why it dominates the WordPress eCommerce plug-ins market. It is cost-effective, highly flexible, user-friendly, and SEO-friendly, and offers storefront customization, social media integration, excellent built-in plug-ins and features, order handling, website management, fantastic customer support, etc. But if you have any other doubts about why you should opt for these plug-ins, get in touch with the WooCommerce development company and have a chat with their expert. 

Finally, good luck with your online store.