WooCommerce; A free WordPress plugin and the most customizable platform for running your online store.

Ecommerce is one of the lucrative business in digital marketing. It involves the process of displaying your products on the internet and selling it to other internet users. These products can either be a book, clothing materials, e-resources, and any marketable commodity. The merchandise is usually displayed and sold on an eCommerce platform such as Shopify, Amazon, or eBay, while others prefer to use their own website.

The long process of setting up a website, getting traffic, performing SEO, and writing regular content do make merchants prefer using e-commerce platforms. These platforms have already gotten their name and trust, and they are usually people’s first options whenever they want to buy the product online. Also, there are thousands of affiliate marketers on these sites who are ready to advertise your products on your behalf to get a commission.

However, the cost of securing a space on these sites can be expensive, and that has discouraged merchants with small scale business. Thanks to WordPress, the story of small scale merchants changed since the introduction of the WooCommerce plugin.

WooCommerce is a plugin created by a team of WordPress theme developers. The tool is the most utilized platform as far as eCommerce is concerned. The software once installed on your WordPress hosting website will transform it into an eCommerce store.

Moreover, it is an open-source plugin that implies that any programmer can edit, customize, and upgrade it to their satisfaction. WooCommerce has so much helped small and medium scale merchants to come out of their hiding place and display their wonderful goods on the internet. Examples of such businesses that make use of WooCommerce in launching their online store are Memento, Nuria Beauty, and Mariener among others.

If you already have a WordPress website the installation is simple as you would add it as a new plugin. Or perhaps, you are yet to own a website. The first step is to buy a domain name and a webhosting that supports and is optimized for WordPress. WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows website owners to change the appearance of their web pages, add and delete website pages, and also assist them in managing their files.

Once your domain name and web hosting are running, then you install the WordPress software on your web hosting. You move on by adding some themes and colors to make it attractive and worth browsing in. Then you can proceed to install the WooCommerce plugin to have your e-commerce store.

Moreover, since you have WordPress on your site, you can easily browse through the plugins section and install other plugins to complement the preinstalled WooCommerce and also assist in your eCommerce experience. An example of such is MailChimp that helps merchants collect the emails of anyone that subscribe to their online store.

Having described WooCommerce, and how to install it on your site. Then, let’s see the benefits of launching your e-commerce store with this tool and the reasons for people to prefer it over other eCommerce platforms.

1. It’s free

One advantage that makes it supersedes all other eCommerce stores. The tool is open-source and it is free for the use of everybody. I guess this is a chance for new merchants and small scale businesses to bring their store online and show the world the great products they offer. It’s completely free. No monthly subscription and no maintenance fee.

2. It’s SEO friendly

Since it is powered by WordPress, then you got no problem with search engine optimization. WordPress remains the best CMS when it comes to the issue of SEO. Using the inbuilt WordPress blog, you can upload great content about your products. Product reviews can be uploaded to your satisfaction, and you can’t get this opportunity on any other ecommerce platform.
With WooCommerce on your website, you can easily optimize your online store for keyword ranking and also create a mobile-friendly website. Content is the only leveraging factor that you have as an ecommerce marketer and this platform will allow you to optimize it to the maximum. Moreover, you can perform all these optimizations without stress.

3. Create a great shopping experience for your customers

One of the ways of making more money from your online store is to create a great shopping experience for your buyers. This can be done by showing them closely related products, and products that will complement each other like a toothbrush and toothpaste. The best part of using WooCommerce as your online shop is that you are in full control of it and you decide on the method of arranging your products. You can use it in displaying your products such that your store visitors will spend more time browsing through your products. And who can tell they may end up buying more than they intended.

Meanwhile, you can also create a customized buy me button to converts more visitors into buyers. And the platform will also make it possible to implement the filter feature with which your buyers will be able to search for products based on price, delivery date, ratings, etc.

4. Customization of your online store to your taste

Still on control, you are free to edit this ecommerce store to your taste. Unlike what you get for paying hundreds of bucks to have a store on another ecommerce platform. WooCommerce will give you the full authority to customize the store to your satisfaction. You have a wide range of themes to select from. Meanwhile, the color plate is there for you to edit the theme and make the website more colorful.

Appearance is not the only thing that can be customized in your store when you use this platform. You can also improve its functionality by installing some other plugins that are available in the WordPress admin menu. Try to stick to highly rated plugins available in the official repository.

5. It helps you manage your business transactions better

WooCommerce also possesses some inbuilt tools that can enable you to relate better with customers and keep a record of your stock. The WooCommerce order management is one of the tools that feed you with regular updates on orders received and delivered orders. Meanwhile, the email notification is there for you to send product receipt and shipping details to those who have brought a good from you. Don’t be surprised that WooCommerce inventory management is one of the other tools in your arsenal. This one will help you manage the number of items in your online store. It will keep on notifying you of the need to add more products and also rings you an alarm when your store is running out of most ordered products.

6. It saves time

Upcoming entrepreneurs don’t have the whole time to spend on setting up their ecommerce shop. They still have to manage the financial and administrative aspects of their business since there is no much staff to help in those sectors. Therefore, there is a need for a platform that will save them both time and stress to focus on other things. And this is one of the advantages of WooCommerce. Any person can certainly build an ecommerce store from this platform in 7 to 8 days and 10 days maximum.

7. Support services

WordPress is a community on its own with many programmers and website developer savvy. Therefore, you can rest assured of getting assistance when you are encountering problems. Moreover, there are millions of people utilizing WooCommerce as their online shop meaning that you also have experts to call on. And no matter how it may be, there will always be videos online to watch in setting up your business on this platform.

 

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are ‘affiliate links.’ This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission.