Thousands of new ecommerce businesses are launched every year and new online retailers have no shortage of options when it comes to picking a platform. Should you choose a hosted platform like Shopify or a self-hosted application like Magento or WooCommerce? Should you choose the simplest possible solution or one capable of growing with your business?

Used on about 2.3 million ecommerce stores around the world, WooCommerce is particularly friendly to new ecommerce merchants because it combines ease of use with incredible power, flexibility, and features.

Keep reading to learn:

• What is WooCommerce?
• What does WooCommerce do?
• Why use WooCommerce?
• Benefits of WooCommerce
• How WooCommerce works
• 10 advantages of WooCommerce

What is WooCommerce?

Why Use WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is the most popular and arguably best ecommerce plugin for WordPress, and its integration allows for you to include both great SEO value and ecommerce ability. Below you’ll find 10 benefits of WooCommerce and its advantages over other ecommerce platforms.

History of WooCommerce

Now that you know what WooCommerce is, let’s take a look back at its origins. In 2011, two developers Mike Jolley and James Koster released WooCommerce after having worked on a replica of the ecommerce plugin Jigoshop. In 2015, WooCommerce and its sibling plugin WooThemes were both acquired by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.

When WordPress and WooCommerce joined forces, this only further propelled WooCommerce’s growth. Today, Automattic continues to be the active developer for WooCommerce and is taking the plugin to new heights.

How Does WooCommerce Work?

Now that we’ve addressed how WooCommerce works, let’s take a look at the installation process.

How to Set Up a WooCommerce Store

WooCommerce’s ease of installation is perhaps what has so many site owners asking, “what is WooCommerce?” The four step process is simple: go to your WordPress dashboard, select “Plugin Options,” search for WooCommerce, and download the plugin to your WordPress site. Then, the Setup Wizard will walk you through the quick and easy process of creating your online store.

Why Choose WooCommerce for Your Online Store?

There are plenty of ecommerce plugins to choose from, so why choose WooCommerce? Simply put, WooCommerce offers WordPress site owners unparallel compatibility, flexibility, and ease of use. But let’s dive a little deeper into the benefits of WooCommerce. Here are 10 reasons to use WooCommerce for your online store.

1. WooCommerce Pricing

When a new retailer is choosing a platform, price is likely to be a major factor. Ecommerce applications range from free to many thousands of dollars per year, but that difference in price isn’t necessarily related to the capability of the application. Thus, the first reason to choose WooCommerce that we’re highlighting is that it’s free to use.

WooCommerce is competitive with leading enterprise ecommerce applications, but because it’s free, any business or entrepreneur can take advantage of its capabilities without having to commit to expensive support contracts or proprietary software licenses.

You should note that certain third-party applications for payments with WooCommerce and other extensions may cost money, but this will not be directed to WooCommerce themselves.

2. WooCommerce Is Modular

To really understand what WooCommerce is, we have to examine its modular framework. Just like WordPress, WooCommerce includes a rich set of features that can be extended with the addition of plugins. Retailers who use WooCommerce benefit twice from this modularity: they have access to thousands of WordPress plugins and themes as well as hundreds of ecommerce-specific extensions built just for WooCommerce.

The genius of a modular system is that it helps to cultivate a community of developers who build extensions to add specific functionality, something that isn’t possible with monolithic applications. With the right plugins, setting up a WooCommerce store can be the perfect ecommerce platform for every retailer.

Those plugins may expand functionality in regards to shipping, payments, how products are handled, and more. WooCommerce themselves have developed and recommend several additional plugins when using their store.

3. WooCommerce Is WordPress

“But isn’t WooCommerce just WordPress?”
The implication being that because WooCommerce is constrained by its parent application, it can’t be as good as a purpose-built ecommerce application.

In reality, the link between WordPress and WooCommerce plugin is actually a benefit of WooCommerce. WordPress is hugely popular because it’s so flexible and functional. Millions of businesses choose to use WordPress because it provides the best foundation for their sites. It’s fast, secure, and easy to use. The compatibility between your existing WordPress themes and WooCommerce themes will make for a very smooth integration.

WooCommerce inherits all of the strength and reliability of WordPress and uses it to build a world-class ecommerce experience for retailers and their customers.

4. WooCommerce Can Be Used To Sell Anything

Another fun way to answer someone who asks, “What is WooCommerce?”— It’s a way to sell anything.

WooCommerce is incredibly flexible. If you want to sell something, you can sell it with WooCommerce. That includes physical products, digital products, subscriptions, appointments, and much more. Whether you intend to sell a single digital product or an enormous variety of physical products, WooCommerce is the Swiss Army Knife of ecommerce applications.

Both WooCommerce and WordPress are open source, which means that retailers are free to change or add core features, build new extensions, and create custom themes. For some less popular ecommerce applications, it is difficult to find developers capable of doing that work and if you can find a developer, they are expensive to hire.

WooCommerce advantage here is that retailers benefit from a large pool of developers and WooCommerce professionals. If you need to make changes to your WooCommerce store, it won’t be hard to find someone to do the work for you. And further, its widespread use and network of developers makes achieving optimal WooCommerce security much easier.

6. WooCommerce Includes Powerful Analytics

Another way to address the question of “How does WooCommerce work?” is through analytics. Built-in analytics are another WooCommerce advantage, because the more you know about your customers and the way they interact with your store and its products, the better.

Out of the box, WooCommerce provides an extensive set of analytics displayed in a clear and intuitive interface. Additionally, it’s straightforward to integrate WooCommerce with external analytics services like Google Analytics with extensions.

7. WooCommerce Grows With Your Business

When choosing an ecommerce application, it is a good idea to think about the future of your business. It might be small now, but in time it will grow and you should choose an application that is capable of supporting a busy store without imposing too much complexity in the early days.

One of the benefits of WooCommerce is that it supports stores ranging from the tiny to the immense. It can scale from a few products to many thousands, and from a handful of shoppers a day to hundreds of shoppers per second. As your WooCommerce website grows, so can the functionality of your online store.

8. WooCommerce Provides World-Class Content Management

As you might expect from an ecommerce application based on the world’s most popular content management system (CMS), WooCommerce is no slouch where content is concerned.

Content is an important component of ecommerce marketing, sales optimization, and search engine optimization. Together WordPress and WooCommerce offer a wide variety of content management options, including blogging, landing pages, email marketing, and product descriptions. WooCommerce-compatible SEO plugins like Yoast WooCommerce SEO make it easy for retailers to optimize their content for search.

9. WooCommerce Is Fast

WordPress and WooCommerce can provide a fast and responsive ecommerce experience for online stores of all sizes. This is a key benefit of WooCommerce.

You can also speed up your WooCommerce store by combining it with performance-optimized WooCommerce hosting that’s specifically engineered to maximize performance. Standard web hosting is capable of supporting WooCommerce, but it cannot provide the highly optimized PHP, MySQL, server, and network environments necessary for a responsive low-latency ecommerce experience.

10. WooCommerce Is Made For Selling

Another WooCommerce advantage is that it’s designed for selling. It includes everything a new ecommerce retailer needs to get up and running:

• Over 100 payment gateways that can be easily integrated with your store.
• Multiple WooCommerce shipping methods with configurable shipping zones and shipping classes.
• An intuitive backend for stock management, refunds, order management, email management, and everything else you need to efficiently manage your ecommerce store.
• Choose from thousands of configurable and mobile-friendly free and premium WooCommerce themes or build a custom theme to give your store a unique look.
• World-class documentation that provides the guidance for new ecommerce retailers that need to get up-and-running.

Why Choose WooCommerce?

In short, because WooCommerce provides a complete ecommerce solution that is fast, easy to use, and can adapt to the needs of your ecommerce business.

So, what is WooCommerce? It’s the best way to grow your ecommerce site as a WordPress user.

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