What is WooCommerce?

Are you wanting to start an eCommerce business? Or are you converting your ordinary business into an online business? Then you can simply create a site by adding the WooCommerce plugin to WordPress. WooCommerce allows you to sell products, services, and memberships from your WordPress sites. It is a plugin offered by WordPress with many features available. It is launched by Automattic which is the corporate arm of WordPress, so if you are willing to use it, feel free as you are in good hands.

In this article, all your questions related to WooCommerce are being answered and you will be able to know everything related to it in just a short period.

What is WooCommerce?

The basic objective of WooCommerce is for selling products and services. In particular, it makes it easy for a non-technical or beginner to do these tasks easily within the budget. You can sell any kind of product from physical to digital, from managing inventory to shipping, and from transactions to sorting taxes easily. You are completely in charge of your data, having the support for mobile devices and limitless potential to expand your sites.

By far, WooCommerce is the most popular and the best-designed eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It is now in fact, the most popular eCommerce solution across all websites, powering less than half and counting, online stores.

Why should I use WooCommerce?

As you know all the basics about WooCommerce, the question now comes is how should I use it. WooCommerce has been launched in 2011 and has a strong development team behind it. It keeps getting better and better having its ever-growing popularity.

WooCommerce, just like WordPress is an open-source free-of-cost plugin. It is completely free to download, use and modify, despite its premium feel.

It is handy for the beginner, although it’s incredibly powerful and extensible. Anyone can set up and run a professional store from their WordPress site, without the need to know any coding.

Easy install and set up:

WooCommerce installation is as easy as adding other plugins to your WordPress site. It is available in the plugin directory free of cost to download and is accessible from your website admin. Once it is installed, it is extraordinarily easy to set up. It has an innate setup wizard and takes minutes to get crucial aspects of your store sorted, including payment and shipping.

Powerful eCommerce features:

This amazing plugin comes with an outstanding set of features. You can easily sell any kind of product you like and can add multiple images and animations. You can add categories, tags, and attributes of that product for easier search. You can choose shipping options and restrict options based on customer location. Also, you can manage orders and customers with one-click refunds, customer accounts, and guest checkout

Highly extensible:

It happens when a plugin is easy to use, it has limited flexibility. But in WooCommerce, this statement is false as there are a wide range of ways to expand the functionality of WooCommerce through themes, plugins, extensions, or even by editing the plugin code itself, if you are very keen to do it.

How does it work?

WooCommerce makes it very easy for the beginner to start an online store. For that, you need these four things:

• Hosting and a domain name
• A WordPress-powered website
• The WooCommerce plugin
• A WooCommerce-compatible WordPress theme

1. Get hosting and a domain name

You will need hosting and a domain name to get your WordPress website online. Hosting is a storage space for your website. It is a place to keep all the data that makes up your online store. A domain name is the address of the website which is used to find your particular website such as forexample.com. There are dozens of hosting companies that offer affordable hosting, choose WordPress-quality sites. As WordPress hosting specialists take care of the technical side, letting you get your site online quickly.

2. Install WordPress

Even for a beginner, WordPress installation is a breeze as it offers its famous five minutes installation. Once this is done, you can visit your WordPress site by typing the domain name you chose earlier into your browser.

3. Install the WooCommerce WordPress plugin

Adding WooCommerce is very easy once you’ve installed your WordPress site. You can install WooCommerce straight from your WordPress directory, the same as any other WordPress plugin. You can simply head back to the WP dashboard after the installation of the setup. You’ll see the plugin has added a bunch of options and extra menus to your site. Now, you just need a new theme for your site.

4. Get a WooCommerce-compatible WordPress theme

Now comes the most decision-making and fun-filled step which is choosing and installing the WooCommerce-ready theme. It represents how your site will look which will gradually tell a lot about your business. So, this part is to be done to impress your customers as they are the ones making purchases and they would choose it by their first impression of the site.

For that, you will need a WooCommerce WP theme that can easily support unique features like product display pages, storefronts showing off all your products, and the checkout process.

Be sure to check all the WooCommerce pages and not just the shop page, when you’re considering a theme. As it has several sections including ‘My Account’, the cart, and the checkout page. You have to be very careful when choosing one as the wrong one can make your site look unprofessional. As some themes will say they’re “WooCommerce compatible” or “WooCommerce integrated”, but will not be integrating the design of these much-needed page layouts.

Although WooCommerce is mobile-friendly it is the theme that decides the layout as your customers will view your store on a variety of devices, including desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. It is vital to choose a responsive theme that will be attractive and functional on every device. After this basic information, you are now good to go ahead with the WooCommerce usage!