Is Woo Commerce Right For Your Business?

The WordPress community is a thing of beauty. So much support, endless plugins to add functionality to your website, and countless themes to style it just how you’d like.

There’s no wonder it is the world’s most popular content management system and why so many businesses choose WordPress as the foundation on which they build their digital presence.

That said, there’s no ignoring the fact that WordPress started as a blogging platform.

Since then, it has gone on to become so much more, but does that mean it’s a good fit for eCommerce?

Adding eCommerce Features To WordPress

It’s common for businesses to want to sell products on their website, and there’s a lot of options to do that. You can go with a third party SAAS platform like Shopify or SquareSpace to compliment your main WordPress website, but then you have a second website to maintain and pay for.

The other option is to add eCommerce functionality right to your WordPress site.

The Most Popular eCommerce Plugins For WordPress

Like all things in the WordPress world, there’s always a lot of options to add just about any feature to your website that you’d like. For eCommerce a few of the most popular plugins are:

• Woo Commerce
• Easy Digital Downloads (digital products only)
• WP eCommerce
• MarketPress

Of those, there’s no question that Woo Commerce is the most well-known and widely used, so it’s the plugin that we are going to focus on in this article.

The Benefits of Woo Commerce

Woo Commerce is well known and widely know for some very good reasons.

• It is completely open source and integrates with WordPress seamlessly.
• It supports the most in demand features by small businesses including multiple payment options, inventory management, and shipping controls. These can be added to with additional plugins.
• It simplifies the regular tasks of running an online store such as adding or removing products, managing orders, and tracking sales.
• You’ll be able to manage your entire online store right from your WordPress dashboard. If you already know how to use WordPress, Woo Commerce makes a great compliment to simplify your workflow.
• It’s highly customizable, with a variety of themes and extensions available to suit your specific needs. This is particularly useful if you’ve already picked a theme for your WordPress site and are now just adding to it with Woo Commerce instead of starting from scratch.
• Like the rest of WordPress, it large user base and a strong community surrounding it. Maybe of the same tools you will use to optimize and improve your WordPress website already will work perfectly with Woo Commerce in many cases.

That said, it has some serious drawbacks as well.

The Drawbacks of Woo Commerce

These are some things you need to consider before jumping into Woo.

• While there are a lot of themes and extensions for it, it is a highly templatized solution meaning that any significant modifications to suit your needs could involve a lot of work, maintenance, and on-going expensive to keep things running correctly.
• Plugin Overload: Stock Woo Commerce doesn’t have a ton of options for things like payment gateways, shipping label creation, specialized pricing models, an products that have unique quirks like funneled upsells, or that need a deeper level of customization before ordering.
• Great Community, But Basically No Customer Support: Being an open source project, you won’t find the level of customer support for it that you might with a SAAS solution like Shopify.
• Developer Oriented: Woo is not for the faint of heart. Unless you are a developer, you may find it difficult to customize if you are regularly trying to add new features to your online store.
• Slower Than Other Options: Woo, and just about every eCommerce solution for WordPress sits on top of WordPress itself. If you have a lot of products or higher traffic, the performance will quickly degrade versus other eCommerce platforms better built to operate at volume.

The Type Of Business That Benefits Most From Woo Commerce

Woo Commerce is a great solution for small businesses that have a few thousand products or less, and process less than 500 transactions a day. Anymore than that and you might run into database issues that lend themselves to finding a better solution for your business.

However, if you are a smaller retailer, and aren’t ringing out thousands of customers a day through your website, Woo Commerce can be a great, budget-oriented way to turn your company’s website into an online retail point.

This is particularly true if you work with a professional WordPress development team that can help you tackle any functionality additions you need to make to the site so that it works best for your needs.