Online stores with Woocommerce in Elche

Online stores with Woocommerce in Elche

Advantages of WooCommerce

WooCommerce has been with us since 2008. I started working on WordPress since 2009 (so I was lucky enough to know WooCommerce since it was in its infancy).

It is very nice to see the evolution that the platform gives each year, and what it has become is as satisfying as seeing your own child grow year after year.

In case you were wondering, WooCommerce was created by a company called WooThemes, and was bought by the company behind WordPress: Automattic, in 2015.

Completely free and Open Source

When I say that you can create a fully functional WooCommerce online store in less than 2 hours, I am not exaggerating.

WooCommerce is a package of HTML, CSS, PHP and JS code, organized in folders, which you install on your server, completely free of charge.

As soon as you “open that package” on your WordPress website, everything automatically works. You will only have to upload a product and connect a payment gateway.

And not only that; Being Open Source, you can “tweak” its base files (or core files in English) as you please, according to the needs you have for your online store.

Adaptable to the image of your website

If in the previous advantage, we focused on the part of the technical changes that you could make on your own in the WooCommerce base files, the advantage here lies in the “aesthetic” part, also 100% customizable on your website.

And furthermore, this advantage of WooCommerce is given in a way that is very focused on the non-technical user, since, depending on the template or page builder you use, you will be able to do authentic wonders with WooCommerce, from the personalization panel of your website.

And in this sense, I am referring to modifying the Checkout pages in WooCommerce, the Cart, the individual product, and in general all the pages that are added to your website after installing WooCommerce on it.

And if you have a slightly more advanced level at a technical level, you can always use CSS and HTML to go a step further with the level of customization of your online store.

Flexibility

There are several types of online store:

  • Traditional online stores, with tangible products in stock that are sent to the end user after making a payment.
  • Online stores with digital, intangible products that are downloaded by the end user, after making a payment.
  • Online stores in catalog mode, which do not allow orders to be placed, but which show existing products, with a reference number per product.
  • Marketplaces where anyone can register on the web, and sell their products within a “general online store” already created initially. (Such as Wallapop, eBay, Amazon, etc).
  • Subscription services that allow access to an online product or service, through periodic payments by the user.
  • Membership services of various levels, where to access certain sections of the web, you have to buy one membership or another, each with its own privileges within the web.
  • An online store based on the dropshipping business model, which you have to connect with a certain supplier.
    Etc.

As you can see, WooCommerce not only allows you to create a “typical” online store, which we all know, but also completely adapts to the business model and type of products you want to sell on your website.

This adaptation, yes, is usually done with addons or plugins for WooCommerce, but let’s not anticipate events…

It is a safe environment for your sales

The company behind WooCommerce takes the privacy and security of everyone who uses their plugin very seriously, so from the looks of it, you can rest easy.

However, and we will see it in the next section, there are very necessary elements that WooCommerce does not include in its initial package.

A huge community, with great resources and support

And I wish all neighborhood communities were as great as the community behind WooCommerce.

Being such a widely used and well-known plugin, every time you have a problem or a specific question related to WooCommerce, all you have to do is do a simple search on Google, to immediately find an answer that has already been given to other users, but that also helps you. you as a solution.

Sometimes I have even copied the error that WooCommerce gave me on a page, directly in Google, and I have gotten the same error, just the same, with a solution included.

And not only will you be able to find answers or solutions to the possible problems you have, you will also be able to find many tutorials, guides, documentation, and many elements related to the world of WooCommerce.

In the end, you will find many resources to carry out a correct installation and configuration of WooCommerce on any website.

Scalable through extensions and plugins

Here we go back a bit to what we mentioned in the WooCommerce security part.

In itself, newly installed and activated on your website, WooCommerce offers a lot, in many areas at a technical and usability level.

However, and this is still considered an advantage of WooCommerce, you can still achieve much more with third-party extensions and plugins, which integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce.

For example, if you use PayPal or Stripe in your payment gateway, you must download the specific extension of the specific platform you use, in order to “connect” both accounts in your online store.

Designed for non-technical users

The initial configuration of WooCommerce is usually done by whoever makes your website, since you have to connect several services, and make the content of your store appear on the public part of your website just as you want.

However, the fact of using WooCommerce itself, either as an administrator of the online store, or as a client, is very simple and intuitive.

It will not be necessary, in the vast majority of cases, that you have to read the WooCommerce documentation when uploading a product or making a payment in the online store, since it is very intuitive and easy to use.

That is why when I start a website with an online store for a client, they are always reassured by the idea that once it is done and configured, he or she will be able to connect and manage their products and orders in a simple way. , and without a lot of headaches like other platforms out there.

Possibility of automations

When you have an online store, there are different aspects that can be automated.

You can automate simple actions (such as sending a thank you email after purchasing a product), to more complex actions (such as automatically adding the email of the buyer who has agreed to be added to a newsletter to an excel sheet and sending them a discount of 10 % for their next purchase, at the same time that you send an email reminding them to leave an opinion on the product purchased in your store after a month and a half).

If you use online marketing funnels to have everything under control from when a potential customer is captured until a discount is sent after the first purchase, WooCommerce is not going to let you down.

Product and sales analysis

Recently WooCommerce has integrated in one of its updates a powerful new control panel, which allows you to see all the activity of your online store at a glance.

Obviously, at first it will not seem so powerful, since you will not have sales, but when your online store is fully operational, you will notice the difference.

Also, it goes without saying that WooCommerce integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics, although this is thanks more to WordPress than WooCommerce itself.

Mini CRM for your sales and your customers

If you have a relatively small online store, and you provide customer support in a much more personalized way, you may be interested to know that WooCommerce offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to “managing internal notes” from customers, responding to their questions or opinions in product feedback, make full or partial refunds, activate or deactivate licenses for intangible products, etc.

It is a mini CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) integrated into WooCommerce, in its own administration panel and individual orders, that not many people know about, and that has always been there available to everyone.

And in order not to make the article excessively long, those presented above are the advantages that I consider the most important to use WooCommerce.

There are many more, but we would already go into very specific cases depending on the type of product you sell and the functions you want your website to have.

We are now going to see a couple of disadvantages, which although they are not negative in my opinion, they do have to be taken into account so as not to be surprised when paying for a service where WooCommerce is present.



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