WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce technology.
WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that can turn your WordPress site into an enormous online store, using its built-in features such as plugins, custom themes, modified sales features, SEO support, and security. Hence, this makes WooCommerce the perfect third-party e-commerce platform for your WordPress.
Free and open source
Popular and user-friendly
A vast array of plugins
Limitless customization
Flexible
Safe
1. Free and Open Source
It won't cost you anything to add WooCommerce to your WordPress website. There are no hidden fees on transactions except payments to the service provider; this makes WooCommerce the most affordable platform in the market.
Additionally, because it's open-source, you'll have complete ownership of your online store. You can customize or code the platform into what you like, which means you can integrate with any virtual service while accessing data from the platform anywhere, anytime.
2. Popular and User-friendly
Popularity means the platform is easily accessible and acceptable by any website and serves its customers well. Popularity also attracts developmental support; if you need help with using the e-commerce plugin, there's a support team and public support forum dedicated to helping you out.
WooCommerce also provides extensive documentation on how to use their products if you need help or while troubleshooting the platform.
The plugin is intuitive and straightforward; you don't have to be a programmer, coder, nor technician, to navigate the platform. Installing, managing, and configuring the plugin is as easy as setting up the homepage site structure, menu, shipping, and payment plans.
3. Plugins & Extensions
Plugins and extensions are vital to extending the reliability and functionality of the e-commerce platform. The WooCommerce marketplace offers a myriad of over 400 free and paid plugins which provide additional features to the store, including multichannel and point of sale features, store enhancements, and marketing integrations.
Plugins available include Mailchimp, Conversio, Beeketing, one-page checkouts, Smart coupons, product add ons, social login, multi-lingual, dropshipping, and product search.
All these plugins can help you add additional features into your online store, including:
Payment processing either in person or through their available payment platforms
Reports and analytics
Gift certificates
Memberships and Recurring subscriptions
Appointments - you can add booking schedules for your business such as salons and barbershops, home improvement services, or fitness training.
Shipment tracking
Bulk discounts
CRM integration
Fulfilment
Ticket sales for events
Subscriptions services
Postage
Tracking EU VAT rules
Furthermore, you can find additional WooCommerce extensions on the WordPress repository site, such as affiliate programs, invoices, and Google Analytics.
4. Limitless Customization
As you set up your WooCommerce platform, you can customize your store using the extensive customization options. WooCommerce builder's settings allow you to customize such features:
Sale features — you can sell physical products, services, and digital downloads.
Payment options — the site offers over 100 payment choices, including major credit cards, bank transfers (BACS), checks, cash on delivery (COD), and PayPal. The payment options are also flexible to allow different online platforms like stripe, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Square, and Google Pay.
Tax collection — WooCommerce allows you to configure your tax settings to adjust for store location, billing, or shipping addresses.
Discounts and coupons — you can add, deduct, or limit how you offer coupons and deals.
Shipping options — you can calculate shipping costs based on free, flat, and real-time rates. Plus, you can also restrict shipping geographically.
Customer service — you can automate follow-up emails to your customers.
Analytics — WooCommerce will align your data as you please. You can customize data like sorting between orders or product types and categories.
Storefront — you can add the storefront theme, which optimizes the plugin, further enhancing speed and performance.
Tools and templates — you can select whichever theme you like from the multiple types available in the marketplace.
5. Flexible
WooCommerce is flexible to all industries from beauty and hair care, fashion, finance, and industrial supplies. Moreover, the plugin applies to small, medium, and large enterprises. All other flexible features are present with structural changes and additional plugins.
6. Safe
The WooCommerce development team works around the clock to ensure the safety of the plugin using security experts like Sucuri.net and Jetpack. Jetpack precisely aids you to secure the site with increased speed, authenticated customer logins, and prevention of spam and brute force attacks.
Besides offering your customers a secure platform to transact and pay, WooCommerce safe measures also maintain privacy on your customers' shipping details and provide the site with backup and downtime alerts.
Additionally, every so often, there are security updates and WordPress maintenance checks that could update the platform's security.
About Fraser Clark
I've been a professional developer for over 10 years. I've been consulting and developing websites & software for small businesses, multi-nationals & governments.
I'm an expert in WordPress, Drupal, Laravel & a whole host of other platforms.