Why We Use WooCommerce for WordPress Online Shops

Setting up your WordPress website to give visitors a seamless online shopping experience can be easy with the powerful WooCommerce plugin. WooCommerce is packed with features and is capable of a huge range of functions. Let’s explore a few of these and see what custom functionality can be applied to make it even better.

Powerful‘out-of-the-box’option
At Apex we love WooCommerce for what it’s capable of straight ‘out-of-the-box’… what it can do by default without us adding extensions or plugins. This is thanks to its nature as a 100% open-source plugin that receives ongoing input from hundreds of developers around the globe. WooCommerce is an obvious choice for WordPress users as it’s designed to integrate seamlessly with the ever-expanding WordPress ecosystem, whether you’re building a website from scratch or migrating from another e-Commerce platform. Attractive to businesses at any stage of growth, WooCommerce is suitable for selling all manner of product and is fully scalable whether you are only selling a single product or thousands of products.

The substantial list of core features and functionality that come included with WooCommerce out-of-the-box make it easy for us to provide you with an effective e-Commerce site right off the bat. Here’s a brief rundown of what is possible with WooCommerce core features:

DESIGN

• Modern and clean interface
• Improved mobile friendly experience for site owners
• Seamless integration with WordPress 

SHOPPING CART

• Preinstalled payment gateways – including PayPal. Plus we can add popular gateways including DPS Payment Express, eWay and SagePay
• Full control of the checkout process
• Set default currency 

PRODUCTS

• Range of capacity from one product to thousands – supports physical, virtual or downloadable
• Quickly add and manage products and their images
• Products can be linked for upsell and cross sell
• Options for both simple and variable (i.e. size/colour/other combinations) products
• Detailed inventory management 

SHIPPING

• Enable a shipping calculator on your cart page
• Offer multiple shipping methods
• Flexible shipping destinations ie. select shipping or billing address, or only ship to billing addresses
• Restrict shipping locations by country 

TAXES

• Custom tax calculations based on customer or store address
• Control display of taxes in your store
• Define and control the display of tax rates
• Control tax class applied to shipping 

MARKETING AND SEO

• Built on WordPress – an industry leader in SEO best practice
• Enable or disable product reviews and star ratings
• Option to only allow reviews from verified customers
• Enable or disable discount coupons and codes 

ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

• Generate sales reports with net and gross earnings
• Dashboard shows sales orders, customers, stock, tax in an at-a-glance status summary window
• Product and order insights to track sales and growth trends 

CRM FOR STORE MANAGEMENT

• Control customer account registration
• Customers can generate username from email address
• Option to automatically generate customer passwords
• One-click refunds when using supported payment gateway 
  
  

Is specific functionality possible?

WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box abilities are impressive, but it’s important to know if and when you’ll need more. Here at Apex we speak with our clients about the wish list of specific functions they’d like their e-Commerce site to perform. This helps us identify anything that WooCommerce can’t address out of the box, so we can show the client their options

Specific functionality, such as advanced pricing algorithms or a complex pre-purchase form, will require the addition of a WooCommerce extension or plugin. WooCommerce has an Extension Store where we can generally find an extension to give your site the custom functionality you need.

Providing a custom function with flexibility and ongoing support

It’s important to note though, that WooCommerce extensions and third-party plugins don’t always integrate perfectly with your bespoke needs. It could be the case that they fail to compute one or two particular combinations of the variables you offer in a pre-purchase form, which can frustrate and drive your customers away. 

Where an existing plugin or extension doesn’t meet your exact needs, we can build custom functionality that will be tailored to your specific parameters. This guarantees full functionality as well as ongoing support and updates to ensure the custom function continues to do its job now and into the future.

If you’re going to use the WordPress platform for your e-Commerce website, we highly recommend WooCommerce. Head here to learn more about its high level of default functionality, and drop us a line to hear about how we can get it to do even more for your online shop.