What is WooCommerce? Your Guide to the WordPress eCommerce Platform

Mar 21, 2024 | Dev & Design, WordPress

What is WooCommerce?

If you’re looking to build or redesign your eCommerce website, you have probably heard of WooCommerce. So, what is WooCommerce? It is a powerful and customizable eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. The plugin’s ease of use and scalability have made it a popular choice for many eCommerce businesses! In fact, 29% of all eCommerce websites use WooCommerce.

With WooCommerce, sellers can build and take ownership of their eCommerce stores. They can setup product listings, track orders, manage inventory and shipping, create payment gateways, and seamlessly sell their products or services online. The platform offers a wide range of themes and extensions that allow businesses to build a very tailored digital storefront.

In this guide, we explore the benefits of WooCommerce, popular extensions, and web hosting options.

What is the difference between WordPress & WooCommerce?

A common question people ask is – what is the difference between WordPress and WooCommerce? The answer is simple. WordPress is a user-friendly content management system (CMS) that allows users to design, edit, and manage websites. WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a plugin for WordPress. By enabling the WooCommerce plugin in WordPress, sellers can turn their website into an eCommerce store.
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why choose WooCommerce to build your eCommerce store?

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WooCommerce is powered by WordPress.

The connection between WooCommerce and WordPress is a big advantage for online retailers. WordPress is a highly popular content management system (CMS) because it’s fast, user-friendly, and customizable. In fact, over 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. With the WordPress and WooCommerce integration, you can leverage this best-in-class duo to build an intuitive, responsive website to start selling quickly and deliver a smooth eCommerce experience for your customers.
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WooCommerce is highly customizable.

Much like WordPress, WooCommerce is a highly customizable platform. With over 800 extensions and 80+ themes to choose from, you can really tailor your eCommerce store to mirror your unique branding. Using WooCommerce’s myriad extensions, you can customize every aspect of your online store – from the checkout to payment and shipping. As a seller, you have more control over the design and functionality of your online store with WooCommerce.
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WooCommerce is cost-effective.

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, which means you don’t have to pay to use the platform. This is especially great for smaller or nascent businesses that want a more cost-effective eCommerce platform. Most other eCommerce platforms charge a subscription fee. For instance, Shopify’s Basic plan starts at $29 per month. There are costs for WooCommerce hosting and any premium functionality, however, sellers have the flexibility to choose what they pay for.
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WooCommerce is a seller’s playground.

WooCommerce is a seller’s best friend. It is extremely flexible, giving you a lot of opportunities to sell whatever you want; in any manner you prefer. With the platform’s many extensions, you can offer products, subscriptions, gift cards, and even appointments. Further, you can seamlessly manage dropshipping, inventory, orders, label printing, and much more, in WooCommerce.

The platform is similarly easy-to-manage in the back end, allowing you to easily update and track inventory, upload or edit product catalogs, and more.

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WooCommerce is great for marketing & SEO.

Once you build an online store, you have to make sure customers can find your business. And, WooCommerce has some great tools to support your eCommerce marketing efforts. Plugins for MailChimp and Yoast can power your email marketing and SEO. WooCommerce also offers connections with popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest so you can advertise and showcase your products to these audiences.

Given WordPress’ history as a blogging platform, WooCommerce offers sellers a great foundation for eCommerce content marketing to engage customers.

Besides marketing tools, WooCommerce also provides robust resources for analytics, such as a plugin for Google Analytics, allowing sellers to track the performance of their eCommerce store and make strategic decisions to drive revenue.

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popular WooCommerce extensions for your online store.

WooCommerce offers over 800 extensions to enhance and extend the functionality of your online store. Below are some popular WooCommerce extensions for payment gateways, shipping and fulfillment, checkout, and marketing.

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Stripe

WooCommerce supports many commonly used external payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, and Square. Our WooCommerce web developers typically use the Stripe extension for our clients’ websites to facilitate easy online payments.
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Table rate shipping

This extension allows you to define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, weight, shipping class or item count.
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Yoast WooCommerce SEO

Yoast is a powerful SEO plugin that takes some of the guesswork out of creating search-friendly content for eCommerce stores. The WooCommerce extension assists with technical SEO and helps optimize the SEO of your product pages.

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Google Analytics

This free plugin allows you to leverage the leading analytics tool, Google Analytics, to gain valuable insights into how customers find your eCommerce website, which products they’re interested in, and other key data to drive revenue.
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WooCommerce Subscriptions

With this extension, you can offer subscription services on your website, allowing customers to access your products or services with a weekly, monthly, or annual payment.
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AliExpress Dropshipping

With this extension, you can integrate your AliExpress account with your WooCommerce store to import and publish new products, automate price, and more for your dropshipping business.
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Product Recommendations

This extension is a great resource to promote upsells or cross-sells on your eCommerce website. Using this extension, you can automate product recommendations such as ‘recently viewed products,’ ‘more from this category,’ and ‘frequently bought together’ to enhance the customer experience and grow your sales.
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WooCommerce Shipping

This extension allows you to print USPS and DHL labels from your WooCommerce dashboard.
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WooCommerce vs. Shopify: Which one is better?

For any retailer looking to launch their eCommerce website, the choice is often between WooCommerce and Shopify. While both platforms do offer similar functionality, there are a few reasons to pick WooCommerce over Shopify.

One of the major advantages of WooCommerce is that it offers many customization options, giving sellers a lot more ownership over the look, feel, and functionality of their eCommerce websites. As a free and open-source platform, WooCommerce also benefits from a vibrant community of developers who continue innovating on the platform, adding to its vast selection of extensions and themes.

Further, if you already run a WordPress website, getting the WooCommerce plugin is a simple way to transform your website into an eCommerce store.

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WooCommerce hosting for your store.

Picking a reliable host for your WooCommerce store is of paramount importance. A web host provides the infrastructure to make your eCommerce store accessible on the internet. The right web host provides a solid foundation for your WooCommerce store, making sure that it is fast, secure, and high performing. Compromising on the quality of your web host could prove costly for your business as you may not get the functionality or services to keep your store running smoothly.

There are several web hosting providers for WooCommerce. For instance, at GraVoc, we use the industry-leading WP Engine to host our clients’ eCommerce websites as part of our WordPress Maintenance Plan. WP Engine keeps our clients’ websites are up-to-date and optimized for selling.

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So, why build your website on WooCommerce?

The bottom line? Backed by WordPress, WooCommerce is a powerful platform for online retailers, especially small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for more flexibility on price. The platform is extremely user-friendly and really a seller’s playground with its broad network of themes and extensions. And, WooCommerce is scalable, which means it can grow with your business.

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looking for WooCommerce development services?

Our WooCommerce website developers have designed and launched multiple eCommerce stores for businesses. In fact, our eCommerce store for new company, Method Embroidery, even made it to the top 5 of WP Engine’s Agency Partner Awards. Our team has the capabilities to design a fast, visually engaging, and functional WooCommerce website for your business.

Click below to check out our WooCommerce website design services or contact us today to get started!

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