What Is WooCommerce? Getting Started With WooCommerce Plugin

When you want to build an online-sale-websites based on WordPress, the first thing you usually do is look for a free plugin which is suitable to your needs. But I bet there is not a free plugin that can fulfill all your requirements like the WooCommerce Plugin can.

I’ll explain how now:

WooCommerce is a free plugin, however, that doesn’t mean it has few functions. In contrast, you’ll probably be extremely pleased when using this plugin. Not long ago, WordPress’s main company, Automattic, acquired WooCommerce; which means the founder of WordPress has acquired all of the WooCommerce source code. So in the near future do you think that the WooCommerce plugin will be integrated into the core source code of the upcoming versions of WordPress?

We’ll just simply have to wait to find out…

After installing WooCommerce on your website, the plugin will turn it into a true sales site: you can sell anything on it such as mobile phones, clothes, toys, food, and etc. The plugin’s UI and UX are visually friendly and you won’t have to take much time to familiarize yourself with it.

 

The Advantages of WooCommerce

  • It’s free: Yeah you heard me. It’s free. And it allows you to create an online sales website.
  • Extensions Support: The plugin supports you with many extensions, bringing new cool features to your site.
  • Themes Support: WooCommerce plugin supports many free as well as premium themes.
  • Easy to install, easy to use with a simple and friendly interface.
  • Multiple Language Support: With the multilingual package in WooCommerce plugin, you can customize the website into virtually all of the major languages of the world.
  • Easy to pay: The plugin is integrated with popular payment methods such as Paypal & Amazon, uniquely it also provides COD payment option as well.
  • Discount support: The WooCommerce plugin also supports discount features for every product or groups of products. It’s completely up to your discretion.
  • Tax support: Tax control features are supported on every product (if you need them.)
  • Warehouse Control Support: The plugin supports you with warehouse control features, helping you to make statistics such as purchasing bills, a list of orders by date, month, and year, making it easy for your to keep track of inventory, but more importantly, revenue.

 

Who Should Use WooCommerce

In Spite of WooCommerce’s flexibility, it still has certain limitations. That’s the reason why I recommend using the WooCommerce plugin for those of you who have small businesses. You can use the plugin to create a website which helps you to quickly and easily sell your products online. There is no need to set up an entirely new website which may eat away your time and money. Or if you want a WooCommerce Theme which has full features to start a business, take a look at DW Trendy – a Fashion WordPress Theme featuring clean layout for online shop and supporting WooCommerce, Bootstrap 3 and Page Builder.

Unfortunately, WooCommerce isn’t without its shortcomings. Depending on several factors such as the amount of data and configuration, your site will probably run well because WooCommerce has been tested by many before you.

However, I’ve seen a lot of sites running WordPress with WooCommerce that also have tons of extensions running in the background, resulting in sluggish performance. That’s okay though because your site doesn’t have to be this way. You can follow a guide on how to fix sluggish performance here; in order to know more about how to properly uninstall a WordPress plugin.

Short and simple, if you merely need to create a small shop, you should use WooCommerce. Conversely, if your needs are higher (e.g: More complicated sites like Amazon.comAlibaba.com, etc.), you should consider other solutions. The decision is up to you, but I’ve seen many websites that are healthy and doing good in business with the bare minimum of WordPress & WooCommerce.

 

Final Thoughts

Although WooCommerce is a stand-alone plugin, that doesn’t mean you can just install it on top of any theme and expect it to work well. Make sure you don’t get drawn in by fancy, unnecessary features. Creating a great shopping experience is about simplicity, great imagery and a shopping process that is as seamless and friction-free as possible.
If you’ve built a recent WooCommerce store using one of our themes, please share the link in the comments below.
What were some of your considerations before deciding a particular theme for your store?