Is WooCommerce good for eCommerce?

WooCommerce is a great eCommerce platform for anyone that is looking to build an online store. It is flexible, scalable, easy to use, and comes with many options that make the life of an average online store owner easier.

With that said, WooCommerce is not perfect. It has its pros and cons just like any other eCommerce store platform.

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In this article, we will discuss some of the pros and cons of building online store using WooCommerce for online store management.

Benefits of Using WooCommerce for Ecommerce

Starting your first eCommerce website is like learning to walk. You will make many mistakes and you need a platform that can reduce the number of mistakes you make. That is where WooCommerce fits the bill. Here are a number of benefits WooCommerce offers to its users.

1. Easy to Use

WooCommerce is really easy to use because it is already built on WordPress. You just need to install WordPress on your domain, find & install an eCommerce WordPress theme suitable for your store and then install the WooCommerce plugin on it. This will set up your eCommerce store.

Since everything on WooCommerce comes pre-designed, you just have to enter your information and the store automatically sets itself up.

WooCommerce also offers a basic theme by default for any eCommerce store. If you want to add a new theme to WooCommerce, you can either install that from the WordPress directory or buy one from a third-party marketplace.

2. Multiple Plugin Options

WooCommerce offers multiple plugins by default. But you can add many other WooCommerce plugins that work for you. These include Google Analytics integration, WooCommerce PDF invoices, Livechat Plugin, Product Import Export plugin, One-step checkout, Product slider, and much more similar.

Most of these plugins are completely free to use and you can simply add them to your website and install them from the directory. No need to pay a single dime. The plugins will work like a charm on any WooCommerce installation.

3. Multiple Payment Gateways

WooCommerce offers multiple payment options to its users by default. You can add the payment extensions that you like to your store from the WooCommerce official extension store.

For starters, WooCommerce offers payment options for PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, WooCommerce Pay, Square, Amazon Pay, and many others.

Since PayPal is the most popular, it makes sense that you use either PayPal or Stripe or a combination of both to many payments easier for your customers.

4. Scalable Online Store Platform

WooCommerce has been tested by many users for at least 100,000 products. So, we can say by surety that it can easily withstand 0.1 million products easily. However, if you plan to create a marketplace or add a lot more products to your WooCommerce store, we don’t recommend it.

The best option available to you is to use an alternative to WooCommerce in that situation.

Note: A lot depends on your hosting provider, the theme you use, and the cache services and CDN you use. These things can directly impact your store performance.

On the other hand, if you only have a few thousand products in your store, then WooCommerce would be the cheapest option available to you. Because Magento costs more in hosting and Shopify charges a lot on a per-product basis.

5. SEO-Focused eCommerce Platform

Online store owners want organic traffic to their stores as well because they can’t only rely on PPC or paid traffic. That is why it is so important for your eCommerce store to have SEO-friendly content. With WordPress + WooCommerce you can easily install Yoast or All In One SEO tool on your website. Because these tools can help you optimize your product pages by adding relevant keywords and enhancing keyword density.

Now consider having thousands of pages with properly optimized content on pages, your site will automatically rank for multiple keywords on decent SERPs. This is the benefit of using WooCommerce because such SEO plugins are not available on hosted eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify.

6. Performance-Oriented eCommerce Platform

WooCommerce is a self-hosted eCommerce platform based on WordPress. This means that the performance of this platform completely depends on the hosting solution and cache services you use. If your hosting stack is powerful, using Memcached, Redis, and varnish, and you are using a cloud delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare, then your WooCommerce store will offer superb performance.

WooCommerce stores that have this technology stack can easily get 1 second load time for each page of the site on the client browser.

To check your site performance, you can use tools like GTMetrix, Pingdom, and Google Page Speed Insights.

7. Easy Analytics Dashboard

WooCommerce comes with built-in order analytics and a tracking dashboard for its users. However, if you are looking to check the traffic and bounce rate of your product pages directly on WooCommerce, then you can install the WooCommerce Google Analytics plugin. It will display the Google Analytics metrics just like the order metrics on your website dashboard.

There are multiple analytics plugins available but you can use MonsterInsights or Analytify analytics plugins for WooCommerce. Both of these plugins can display analytics data directly within your WooCommerce dashboard.

8. Product and Landing page Customizations

WooCommerce also offers product and landing page design customizations for all its users. Anyone that wants to customize the landing pages (product pages) can do that with the help of page builders. The page builder plugins include Beaver Builder, Elementor, and various others.

Those who are not familiar with the use of these page builder plugins can also hire professional WooCommerce management experts that can do the job for them. They will not only design creative pages but also guide the users on what type of product page designs will bring the most conversions.

Is WooCommerce Better than Magento and Shopify?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors.

WooCommerce is great for individuals that have around 100,000 products or less
WooCommerce is free to use and is highly flexible for anyone that is either promoting a single product or a few dozen products
WooCommerce offers multiple plugins for site owners to easily improve the design and performance of their stores
WooCommerce can be used on any self-hosted platform
Anyone that has some experience in site design can create a WooCommerce store and launch it without any help from professional WooCommerce experts
WooCommerce is SEO friendly and offers many CRO tweaks for its users out-of-the-box

With that said, WooCommerce is still not a direct competitor to either Magento or Shopify.

Magento is focused on enterprise eCommerce stores. Stores that have millions of products.

Shopify is focused on small businesses that don’t want to customise their stores and just want a platform where they can launch and scale.

Bottom-line

We hope that you are now clear about when to use the WooCommerce eCommerce platform for your business. If you want to hire Sydney eCommerce Web Design experts that can help you install, set up, and launch your WooCommerce store easily, then get in touch with us. We have the right expertise that you need for a safe, secure, and scalable online business experience.

Updated on: 22 October 2021 |

WordPress

Nirmal Gyanwali

With over 16 years of experience in the web industry, Nirmal has built websites for a wide variety of businesses; from mom n’ pop shops to some of Australia’s leading brands. Nirmal brings his wealth of experience in managing teams to WP Creative along with his wife, Saba.