What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is essentially the open-source platform for WordPress. It is supported by Woo and has a large global community of developers. WooCommerce adds e-commerce functionality to your website allowing you to sell everything from simple products to downloads and customisable bundles. Due to WooCommerce being open-source, unlike other e-commerce platforms, you actually own your store and the data. Designed to be flexible and scalable, WooCommerce can grow with your company storing all the data.
WordPress powers success for more than 4 million online stores.
How to set it up
WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. This means that Woo is added to your WordPress website. This means although you have a WordPress website and can edit it through this, new functionality is added through Woo.
For more support on setting up a WooCommerce site, Woo has many ways of supporting you further through self-service articles, a great support team, and recommended developers who can help you. You can find more information on their website.
Installing WooCommerce
Before installing WooCommerce you will need to consider your hosting provider. A web hosting provider is a type of online service that allows you to publish your website files onto the internet. There are multiple different types of hosting services. For example, Managed hosting, Self-hosting, and Cloud hosting. For WordPress and WooCommerce your hosting choice determines how you build your site with them. If you are working with a website design and build company, they will most likely have a hosting price involved.
Once you have chosen your hosting provider you are ready to install Woo. Once this is installed, a Setup Wizzard will show on your WordPress Dashboard. You will start with the store profiler where you add your details such as location, industry, and product types.
Initial set up
After the store profiler, the Setup Wizard will take you through the different setup stages on your checklist ensuring you have imputed information regarding your products, payments, taxes, shipping, and marketing tools. This will help later on with customisation.
Features of WooCommerce
Adding and managing products
Anything that you sell with WooCommerce is considered a product. You may sell 1 product or multiple different types of products on your website. Woo allows you to set up six different product types ‘right out of the box’.
- Simple: These are physical goods offered as a single option.
- Variable: These are physical products that offer different options for example size or colour.
- Grouped: A set of simple products that are bought together. For example a set of plates, or glasses.
- Virtual: These are products or services that don’t require shipping.
- Downloadable: Again these are products that do not require shipping, they are entirely digital. These products could include ebooks or articles.
- External or Affiliate: These are products that can be listed on your site even if they are sold on another site for example a third-party retailer or marketplace.
These are the main product categories however with free or paid extensions you can also include these features on your website:
- Subscriptions
- Memberships
- Bundles
- Courses
- Bookings
Payment and shipping
WooCommerce allows you to select one or more options to accept payments on your website.
There are multiple card payment processors available with Woo. We tend to use Stripe and this allows customers to pay with their credit or debit cards. However, WooCommerce also allows for alternative payment providers for example methods like PayPal or Amazon Pay. This can boost customer trust and streamline the checkout process. Adding a buy now, pay later option such as Klarna is helpful for customers who would rather make several payments towards their purchase.
WooCommerce provides several built-in shipping methods for you to choose from. The core shipping methods in WooCommerce include:
- Flat rate shipping: Set a fixed price per item, per shipping class, per order
- Free shipping: When certain conditions are met
- Local Pickup: Allows customers to pick up their items from a physical location
- Zone-based shipping: This allows you to define regions and configure specific shipping methods for each zone.
These are just a few of the methods that come with WooCommerce however, there are several more that are available with extensions or integrations. These include table-rate shipping, real-time shipping rates, weight-based shipping, per-product shipping, and distance-based shipping.
Customisation
One of the great things about WooCommerce is the customisation and personalisation. It allows you to customise almost every aspect of your online store. There are thousands of pre-made themes, both free and premium available. These themes can be customised using WordPress too which allows for changes involving layout, colours, and fonts, to suit your branding. Tools such as Divi and Elementor are also compatible with WordPress, offering drag-and-drop customisation without needing coding skills. If you are an advanced developer, however, WooCommerce is super flexible when it comes to custom coding to add functionality.
WooCommerce also allows for the addition of custom post types. This lets you organise your product into the categories you want them displayed in.
Customer management
As WooCommerce is an e-commerce-focused platform customer management is not as extensive as dedicated customer management systems. However, with the right configurations and extensions, you can build a comprehensive management system within WooCommerce.
When looking into the basic customer management features, WooCommerce offers customer accounts, saves order history in the admin panel, and stores essential customer data such as billing and shipping information. You can also edit these details manually if needed. This information is very accessible and can help with any inquiries. In terms of communication, you can communicate with clients through email notifications that are triggered by specific events for example, order confirmations, shipping requests, and password resets.
For more advanced customer control, there is a wide range of plugins and extensions that are compatible with WordPress and WooCommerce. WooCommerce can integrate with popular CRM tools such as HubSpot, Freshworks, and Salesforce. You can sync your data from your e-commerce platform with data in your CRM. This is crucial for tracking and researching customer interaction and marketing activities.
Analytics and Reporting
There are a variety of built-in analytics and reporting tools within WooCommerce as well as additional options available through extensions and plugins, depending on your requirements and scale.
WooCommerce has a built-in analytics and reporting feature that has a user-friendly interface and a broad range of reports that cover key aspects of store performance including:
- Sales reports: total sales, sales by date, product sales, and category sales
- Orders reports: order status
- Customer reports: new vs returning customers, average order value, customer lifetime value
- Stock Reports: monitor inventory levels
- Coupons reports: which vouchers, discounts, or coupons are being used
With this data, you can export it as a CSV file and analyse it in external tools such as Excel. Monitoring your analytics is so important when analysing key performance indicators. You can use customer behaviour data to refine and improve your marketing efforts and ultimately get more leads, sales, and revenue.
Like most of the other features although there are built-in features within WooCommerce, if you are looking to scale up your research and reporting there are multiple extensions that you can use to connect tools such as Google Analytics. With the help of various plugins, WooCommerce also allows you to set up performance tracking alerts. These could include when certain KPIs are met or if there is a significant drop in performance.
Security
Security is one of the most important aspects of ensuring that WooCommerce is the correct platform for you. It is incredibly crucial to ensure that customer information is secure. WordPress and WooCommerce include multiple features that will help to protect your content and also your customer data. These security features include SSL encryption, strong authentication, firewalls, regular updates, and website monitoring. It is really important to ensure that you choose a secure hosting provider. Backups are another feature that is important to include in your website. This means that if anything goes wrong, you can restore your site in full.
Conclusion
WooCommerce is a powerful tool, that we can completely vouch for for all WordPress e-commerce websites. With its product listings, secure checkouts, and customisation, the flexibility of WooCommerce means it can help with all of your requirements. Ultimately, you can create exactly the store you need, and fully own your site, without being stuck with only what is offered from subscription platforms such as Shopify
