What makes a good ecommerce platform? Making sales is the end result we’re all looking for, but what about the path to get there?
There are 5 key factors that make WooCommerce a great platform:
- Storefront
- Store Management
- Shopping Cart
- SEO
- Extensions
Storefront
Storefront is an obvious one. You need a storefront to promote your products. No storefront. No Sales.
WooCommerce offers a free Storefront theme with deep integration to their core product. Although many themes can be modified to create a great storefront, the Storefront theme they offer provides a wide variety of customizing options for the user interface – all responsive and customer-friendly.
Store Management
The ability to customize your store is probably the most important aspect of an ecommerce platform. Due to the shear volume of customizations available with WooCommerce, I’m going to list them grouped by the tab WooCommerce uses in the admin section:
General
- Enable/Disable tax rates and calculations
- Enable/Disable coupon codes
- Calculate coupon discounts sequentially
Products
General
- Enable product reviews
- Show “Verified Owner” on review
- Enable reviews can only be left by verified owners
- Enable star ratings on reviews
- Enable require star ratings on reviews
Inventory
- Enable stock management
- Hold stock for a timeframe for unpaid orders
- Enable low stock / out of stock notifications
- Set amount threshold for low stock / out of stock notifications
- Hide out of stock items from shop
- Show quantity remaining or low stock quantity remaining
Downloadable Products
- Set file download method
- Set download requires logging in
- Set granting access to download after payment
Tax
- Enable/Disable automated tax calculations
- Set whether prices are inclusive or exclusive of tax
- Set tax calculation based on source or destination address
- Set display prices in shop, cart, and checkout inclusive or exclusive of tax
- Set displaying tax as a single amount or per line item
Shipping
- Enable/Disable shipping calculator on cart
- Set default shipping destination: customer shipping vs billing address
- With an additional plugin, setup and print shipping labels
Payments
- Setup payment methods
- By default, WooCommerce comes Square, PayPal, Cash, Check, Direct Transfer
Accounts & Privacy
- Allow guest checkout
- Set login to existing account at checkout
- Allow account creation at checkout
- Set upon account deletion, remove personal data
- Setup privacy policy
- Setup data retention days
Emails
- Configure all email notifications for your shop
- New Order, Processing Order, Failed Order, New Account, etc
Integrations
Certain Payment methods (like Square) allow for synchronization to WooCommerce – including products, categories, inventory, and images. You can manually start a sync in either direction.
Advanced
Advanced allow for configuration of the URLs for all WooCommerce pages
Shopping Cart
The shopping cart WooCommerce has integrated comes with many effective features.
Preinstalled payment gateways are simple to setup and you can drag your preferred option as the default for checkout.
With the auto-calculations, it makes the shopping cart pricing a walk in the park and customer friendly.
The WooCommerce cart also keeps checkout secure with security certificates.
SEO
WooCommerce is built with code optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). As long as you put in quality content on your products, WooCommerce will do the rest.
Simply put, WooCommerce is recognized as one of the best platforms for SEO practices in the industry.
Extensions
WooCommerce extensions range in price. From free to approximately $300, you can extend your ecommerce site with varying features. These extensions range in type from Google Ads, to booking appointments, to memberships. You’ll almost always have an option for whatever customization you’re looking to implement.
Overall
As you can see, WooCommerce has so many options out of the box that you can be up and running quickly. However, setting everything up may take some time if you have rigorous business practices. Outside of the out of the box functionality, there are hundreds of WooCommerce extensions to meet your needs.