Hundreds of E-Commerce businesses are launched every day. E-commerce business owners have no shortage of options when it comes to picking the right platform for their business. Is it suitable to choose a platform like Shopify or to choose self-hosted platforms like Magento or WooCommerce? With so many varieties available, you can easily get confused, and it can become challenging to decide which platform is best for your business.
In this article, we will discuss why you should choose WooCommerce to set up your e-commerce business and what benefits it provides to the business owners. There are around 2.1 million e-commerce stores around the world that are based on WooCommerce. It is very friendly for new merchants because it provides you with flexibility and powerful features. Let’s start with a basic introduction to basic WooCommerce.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that makes it easier to create and manage online E-Commerce stores. It provides flexibility to the store owners with several amazing features like inventory and tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration, etc. It is one of the best plugins for WordPress because its integration allows you to improve your SEO and add E-commerce functionalities to your website.
The following are the reasons that you should choose WooCommerce for your e-commerce business.
1. WooCommerce is Free
Woocommerce is an open-source and free WordPress plugin. Anyone who wants to start an ecommerce store can easily access it. WordPress itself is the world’s larger website development and CMS platform. With WooCommerce and WordPress, you can frequently change the appearance of your store, and you can choose both paid and free themes for appearance. WordPress also provides direct development support to the WooCommerce plugin. You can quickly set up your e-commerce store in a very short time with the help of WooCommerce.
2. Appealing Features
Woocommerce comes with all the features that are required to operate an e-commerce store. You can do everything from new product listings to billing and order management. Store owners can sell anything from physical products to digital downloads. Its code is kept modular to provide you better performance. It means that WooCommerce will perform faster with the basic features you can expand according to your needs.
Some highlighted features of WooCommerce are:
- Built-in blogging support
- Flexible Customization
- Easy to manage products and categories
- Option for product ratings and reviews
- Support different currencies, languages, and measurements.
- Easy to Redesign your website
- Upgrade your website with hundreds of additional add-ons.
Many other features are not mentioned here. These are just highlighted ones.
3. Secure Platform
WooCommerce is a highly secure platform. The WooCommerce team continuously works to improve the security to provide the customers with the safest online experience possible. Security updates arrive on a regular basis, and you can install them with a single click. This is the reason that WooCommerce is a go-to choice for many retailers.
4. A large number of Extensions Available
There are hundreds of extensions available for WooCommerce that extend its functionality to a huge extent. They include extensions for analytics, payments, and shipping, to marketing and accounting. These are official extensions created and supported by WooCommerce and WordPress, such as Product Addons for WooCommerce, WooCommerce Checkout Field Editor free, and “Dynamic Pricing With Discount Rules for WooCommerce” etc. There are countless third-party extensions and plugins also that you can integrate and use with WooCommerce.
Like 3rd party themes, some of these extensions and plugins are free, and some of them are paid. These extensions and plugins have made life much easier for the retailers because they can perform massive tasks with just a single click If you compare the extensions of WooCommerce with other platforms you will discover that the paid extensions of other platforms can cost you from hundreds to thousands of dollars while the extensions of WooCommerce hardly exceeds $50. For example, the premium version of WooCommerce checkout manager plugin costs $39 only, and if it was to be custom coded by a programmer to achieve this functionality, it would take months of effort. This plugin is really helpful in managing the form fields in the Woocommerce checkout page. The premium version even has options for setting conditional checkout fields based on various parameters.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As we know that WooCommerce is running on WordPress, which is one of the most optimized platforms from a search engine optimization’s perspective. It is highly adapted to SEO guidelines provided by Google itself. The whole platform is SEO friendly. It also makes it easy to optimize your products according to SEO guidelines. WooCommerce also supports some excellent third-party plugins that help in making your store SEO optimized on every page and post.
6. Analytics And Tracking
If you are new in the e-commerce business, then analytics and tracking can help you a lot in keeping track of every sale that you make and every customer that makes a purchase on your store. WooCommerce has a very useful and easy to understand analytics system. If you are a novice and don’t have any experience in tracking implementation, then this is a very useful tool for you. You can track your sales day by day, keep an eye on most selling products, know in which products customers are interested mostly, and much more using the built-in tracking. You can also integrate google analytics with WooCommerce if you want to analyze traffic on your website.
Conclusion:
There are many other benefits of WooCommerce also that are not included in the list. Overall, WooCommerce is a great platform for retailers as it provides you with great flexibility and a perfect solution for small and medium-sized businesses. As it is an open-source platform, so it is free to be used by anyone. If you are a small business and want to step into the e-commerce industry, then you can set up your store on WooCommerce at just a fraction of the price. Its additional plugins and extensions enable you to make your store most advanced according to the latest standards. So, if you are confused about which platform is suitable for you, then you can go with WooCommerce and start taking advantage of its seamless features.