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If you’re looking to put together an online shop, WooCommerce is a name you’ll come across within hours of research (possibly minutes!)… It simply dominates* the space: powering approximately 30% of all online shops** in existence! But what is WooCommerce? Is it any good? Who uses it? What can it do, and should you use it?
Allow us to explain:
What is WooCommerce and is it any good?
– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)
Video Transcript:
Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to answer the questions what is WooCommerce? What is it do and is it any good? Well first of all let me just say WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin for selling things. This is a WooCommerce site and they sell these really cool kitchen appliances. But it’s not just a simple plugin for selling things it’s also owned and maintained by Automattic. Automattic is easily the most influential company in WordPress today. They throw an enormous amount of resources at building WordPress and when they acquired WooCommerce they dedicated themselves to making it be the best possible ecommerce platform around. Which is why today WooCommerce runs over percent of all online stores. Not just WordPress stores, ALL online stores. That is an incredible number. When you combine the fact that it’s owned and maintained by Automattic, it has this much size and inertia, you can be assured that WooCommerce is here to stay. It’s going to be around for a long time it’s going to be well maintained. You don’t need to worry about WooCommerce disappearing after you’ve built your store. Let’s take a look at some of the details about WooCommerce. What makes it great? We’re here on WooCommerce,com and if we click on features -> overview there’s an excellent section here that covers a few things that we’re going to talk about. Something significant is that WooCommerce can sell both physical and non-physical products. Non-physical would be things like tickets, or music, or video, or access to training, or things like that. That’s a pretty big deal because that means that WooCommerce can sell just about anything, so you don’t have to look at your Thing that you want to sell and think “can WooCommerce sell this?” Well the answer is probably yes. Another really great feature of WooCommerce is the flexibility of products. Here’s a product entry screen and of course it has the default title at the top and description. But then we get to this wonderful box here where we can choose to sell a simple product, or grouped products which might be a like a collection of photography equipment, an external affiliate product, or a variable product. A variable product could be something like a t-shirt, which has multiple sizes or multiple colors or whatever. And you can choose whether or not your product is virtual and whether or not it’s downloadable. You can set a regular price and a sale price, and you can even schedule your sale prices. It can manage inventory, shipping, linked products for cross selling; all kinds of things it’s really really great at having all the information available about your products. Additionally over here on the right you can see that there are categories and tags. This is really great for organizing your content so that your customers can find your products. And in addition to the normal WordPress featured image there’s a gallery built into every product so that you can put up lots of pictures for the things that you’re selling. Another really fantastic feature of WooCommerce is that it’s free. I’m here on the WordPress.org plugins page and if I search for WooCommerce you can see it right here at the top for free! Not only that there are many many free add-ons; pages of free add-ons. This makes a very low barrier to entry if you’re unsure about whether or not it’ll work, download it for free and try it! If it doesn’t work you haven’t lost a thing. If it does work then you’re well on your way. In addition to all these free add-ons if we go back to the WooCommerce site there’s an extension store where you can buy really solid add-ons that come with support. With a combination of the free add-ons and the paid add-ons WooCommerce is incredibly flexible and can really do just about anything. The last question on our main slide was “Is WooCommerce any good?” Well the answer is yes. It’s quality and stability are unquestioned even by its competitors. It’s just a good product. Whether or not it’s right for you is a different question. WooCommerce is very large and very full-featured. It can seem a little overwhelming the first time you fire it up. If you only have one product to sell or even just two or three WooCommerce might be bigger than you need. There are simpler e-commerce platforms out there. Additionally because WooCommerce tries to be good at everything, there are other e-commerce platforms that specialize in a few things and are better in those few things. For example there are e-commerce platform specifically for selling digital products and they’re better at selling digital products than WooCommerce but they’re terrible at selling physical products. So if you need both WooCommerce is by far the better way to go. If you need only digital maybe you should look somewhere else. But again maybe not it is entirely up to your use case and again because it’s free there’s no harm in trying it. I highly recommend you download it and try it if you have any questions. So let’s sum up. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin for selling things but it’s also owned and maintained by Automattic and that really sets it apart from all the competition. The number of resources that Automattic is putting behind WooCommerce is really incredible. It also runs over percent of all e-commerce sites. Not just WordPress e-commerce all of it. That is incredible as well. And together these mean long-term quality and support. You don’t need to worry about it disappearing on you. WooCommerce can sell both physical and digital products and those products can have lots of product info like sizes and colors etc. They can be easily sorted by the customer for easy finding. It’s free with free add-ons, and there are paid add-ons. All of these things together everything on this slide make WooCommerce an extremely compelling option. There’s really practically zero risk in trying WooCommerce. And for the question of is it any good? Yes it’s good. Nobody questions that but you need to think about whether it’s right for you. Look at what you’re selling, look at the features of WooCommerce, look at the features of some of the other options and see what fits for you. Download it and try it. I think you’ll find that it will work wonderfully for you. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress check out WinningWP.com.
*along with Magento and Shopify.
**more details and stats here
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