If you are looking into selling products online, you may have heard about WooCommerce. What is WooCommerce and will it serve your business needs? We’ll answer your question in this overview of WooCommerce and its features.
WooCommerce is a plugin that adds eCommerce functionality such as product display pages, shopping carts, and payment gateways into your WordPress site.
What’s good about WooCommerce is that if you already have an existing WordPress website with a good following, you can turn it into an eCommerce website by just installing the plugin.
But what if you are planning to create an online store from scratch? You can also do it with WooCommerce but you have to install WordPress first and then install the WooCommerce plugin.
Another great thing about WooCommerce is that the plugin is free and open source. Other eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Wix eCommerce, and BigCommerce charge a monthly fee. While the WooCommerce plugin is free, you may have to spend on premium themes and extensions, depending on what you need.
With WooCommerce, you get basic store functionality right out of the box. You can sell anything using this plugin: physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, memberships and more.
What are the features of WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is packed with many features that make it one of the best ways to create an online store.
Wide Variety of Themes
You can create a look that is perfect for your online business by using the available themes. Need a more unique look with more features? You can create a bespoke theme that will suit your needs with the help of a developer.
Built-in Blogging
WooCommerce has a built-in blogging feature that allows you to publish great content to drive more traffic to your website.
Customer-friendly store
You can add tags and attributes to your products to make them easier to find. Customers can sort products by popularity, newness, rating, price, or attribute.
It lets you show customer feedback directly on the product page to guide customer decision making.
WooCommerce also allows customers to register and automatically generate usernames and passwords. Guest checkout is also available for those who don’t like to register as a user.
Sell any product
WooCommerce allows you to sell physical and digital products or a combination of both. You can even sell affiliate products through affiliate links on your website.
WooCommerce lets you offer any number of variations like colour, size, style, and so on for a product. You can even set prices, stock, and images for each variation.
You can also add and update product information such as the name, description, regular and sale price using a CSV file.
Unlimited images and galleries
You can use as many images as you want to show off your product. This is especially helpful to your customers as they can’t see the products in person.
Built-in payment processing
Flexible Shipping
You can give customers the option of pickup, local delivery, or shipping. You can restrict these options based on customer location.
You can also set a flat rate for shipping or define specific rates for different products. Customers can see shipping calculations right at the checkout.
WooCommerce allows you to automatically detect your customer’s location to make shipping calculations simpler.
Easy inventory and order management
WooCommerce lets you track stock levels, hold stock after an order is cancelled, and hide out of stock items. You also get notifications for low and out of stock items.
For orders, you can add customer notes, edit stock manually, mark items that you have shipped, and manage the fulfilment process.
Send customer notifications
Add shop managers
More ways to sell more
WooCommerce lets you offer coupons to your customers. You can do various coupon offers like fixed amount off, percentage off, special offers like free shipping, and more.
You can show related products to help customers find complementary products or encourage them to buy more items. You can also highlight important products in your store like top-selling products, items for sale, featured products, or recently viewed products.
View reports
Get extensions to expand functionality
WooCommerce is packed with features out of the box. But if you ever need to do more with Woocommerce, its base functionality can be expanded through extensions.
You can choose from more than 700 official extensions available as of this time. There are free and paid extensions for all kinds of needs.
Here are some of the things you can do with WooCommerce extensions.
Extensions for every type of business
We’ve already mentioned that WooCommerce lets you sell both physical and digital products. But what if your business is service oriented? Or what if you want to try a different business model? WooCommerce extensions can help with that.
If you are selling a service instead of physical or digital products, you can get a booking extension that lets your customers book appointments or make reservations without leaving your site or picking up the phone.
If you want to turn your website into a membership site, you can get a membership plugin. Want to start a subscription-based business? There’s also an extension for that.
Better customer service
You can add live chat and/or customer support extensions to your website to better manage your customers.
Additional checkout features
Offer to switch currencies for international customers by using extensions such as Multicurrency Switcher and Currency Switcher for WooCommerce.
Want to offer gift wrapping, engraving, and other product customisations? You can use an extension like Product Add-ons.
Upsell and cross sell
Boost your sales by adding extensions such as Cart Upsell, Frequently Bought Together, or Sales Booster to recommend related products on the cart page.
Marketing
Payments
Do you want more ways to accept payments? You can add extensions for other payment gateways such as Stripe, Square, and BrainTree. Want a buy now pay later or an instalment option? You can add extensions like Klarna Payments and Afterpay.
Business insights
Find out which marketing initiatives bring in the most revenue, know which products are top selling, and gain insights from other metrics so that you can make better business decisions. Extensions such Google Analytics and Kissmetrics can help you in this aspect.
Customisable
Customisation with WooCommerce doesn’t end with extensions. WooCommerce is an open-source software which means it can be modified according to your preferences. If you have a specific need that existing extensions cannot address, you can work with WooCommerce developers to create a bespoke solution just for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will WooCommerce host my website?
No. Unlinke other eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce does not host or store any of your files or information. You will be responsible for getting a reliable hosting service or infrastructure for your website.
How much does it cost to build a website with WooCommerce?
The plugin itself is free and so is WordPress on which it is built on. WooCommerce doesn’t get a commission from your sales. However, there are other costs in building your eCommerce website. This will all depend on what kind of features you want on your website.
At the minimum you need to pay for a separate hosting provider for your website. You can also use many free extensions for your store to keep your costs low.
But sometimes you might need additional features that are not provided by the free extensions. In that case, you can get premium extensions from the WooCommerce Extension Store. The price range of premium extensions in the official store could be anywhere from $49 to $299 billed annually.
If you need a bespoke solution for your website, you may need to hire WooCommerce developers. The cost of hiring developers will depend largely on the complexity of the project.
Do you need to know how to code to use WooCommerce?
With WooCommerce, you can create and manage a fully functional online store without having to learn to code. Having coding knowledge is an advantage if you want to customise your website with more advanced features. But you can also hire a WooCommerce developer to do that for you.
To sum up
WooCommerce Developers in Queensland
If you are wondering if WooCommerce is right for your eCommerce website, why not contact the Mettro team to discuss what you are hoping to achieve? We have a dedicated website design team who can help you to create a fantastic online store.
Mettro is a proudly Queensland, independently owned and operated digital agency that has been delivering award-winning website design & development and digital marketing for over 20 years. We are dedicated to solving our client’s business problems with smart, simple digital solutions and have the testimonials to prove it.
We’ve built thousands of digital solutions including apps, eCommerce websites, custom software, eLearning applications, WordPress websites and Shopify Websites.
Where to from here?
Contact us or book a one-on-one to discuss your web design and development project!