WooCommerce: a definition of a worldwide success
Let’s start with a fact. When it comes to e-commerce plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce is definitely the world’s most popular. There’s no doubt about it, since it powers about 30% of all online stores out there. That’s huge! And if you wonder where all this success comes from, we’ll let Tuts+ instructor Rachel McCollin answer for us in her course A Beginner’s Guide to Using WooCommerce:
“Combined with WordPress, it gives you a free way of creating your own store and has loads of great functionality right out of the box.”
Let’s take a closer look at that sentence and see what makes WooCommerce great.
- “Combined with WordPress”. As we said, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. This means that if you have a WordPress site, installing WooCommerce will be as easy as adding any new plugin from your dashboard. “A couple of clicks“, and it will create all the key pages and features you need to start your online store. Yes, it’s that simple.
- “A free way of creating your own store”. Just like WordPress, WooCommerce is free and open source. This makes it perfect for anyone who wants to set up an e-commerce site, including a very small business. Plus, a large community of expert developers are willing to help out if you have issues.
- “Has loads of great functionality”. Oh well, where do we start! Not only is there a large amount of functionality—the quality is also very high, from analytics dashboards to high-standard security. Want to create a subscription-based payment model? No problem. Your business is expanding and you’re thinking of expanding your catalogue as well? Easy peasy.
- “Right out of the box”. If you’re not a developer, or don’t have time to build and set up a whole e-commerce site, WooCommerce is perfect. Its pool of out-of-the-box features is really wide, and will allow you to start your online store in no time and with as little effort as possible.
But wait, there’s more! There are also loads of plugins available for WooCommerce. Adding even more features to your e-commerce site will be just a matter of choice. You can import products from your Amazon shop to your website, allow users to track their shipping from your online store, add social coupons… and a lot more. You can find plugins on CodeCanyon, our marketplace for all things code. And make sure you check out our post 10 Plugins for Extending WooCommerce or the tutorial 20 Useful WordPress e-Commerce Plugins Available on CodeCanyon to get an idea of what you can do with these extensions.
So let's recap. If you want to open an online store but don’t have the skills or the time to build it yourself, you can set up a WordPress site and then install WooCommerce on top of it. But what about the design? Well, that’s where our WooCommerce themes come into play! The collection includes multi-purpose themes, built to suit any kind of online business, as well as market-specific ones like Fashion and Furniture.
Created by a talented community of professionals, they all come with detailed documentation on how to install and use them. And if you need some extra help with that, you’re going to love this tutorial How to Install and Set Up a New WooCommerce Theme.