It's FREE and compatible with WordPRess! WooCommerce for WordPress is easy to use and along with an enormous libraries/plugins, and themes you can use. You don't have to be a programmer to use WordPress nor WooCommerce! Love WooCommerce's ability of pricing items, providing discounts, creating coupons and charging shipping fee is very easy with WooCommerce. We love the "Product Type - Variable Product" features! We can set different picture on each variable as well as prices. We also like the WooCommerce Status on our WP Dashboard. It shows our net sales, how many orders, low in stock and out of stock, etc. Another great thing about WooCommerce is its user-friendly interface. After I finished creating customers' websites, customers have the option to maintain/add their own products to their websites without any programming skills.
As a beginner user, it's OK to use what WooCommerce has to offer. But when advance features are needed, additional plugins will need to be purchase. Also some of the videos tutorials, I have to watch a couple of times. It would be wonderful to have a blank option in the "Product Type" for a text field to be use for 'other'.
Helping and showing a small startup company that having an online business doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg! The many great combination of features and free plugins of WooCommerce and WordPress helped save a lot of money. The WYSIWYG interface of both platform is excellent for the customer who wants to learn to maintain their own website is a plus!
Being able to edit values for items as I need over 100s of items to share value and pricing such as size, weight and pricing.
Value tends to not work correctly not giving all items the same value which hurts during sales to get in and edit to correct. Needs a mass fast edit.
Getting products highlighted by price and sale for sales and upsell other items.
As far as pricing goes, it's hard to beat FREE - just like WordPress, WooCommerce is free to download, install and run with no subscription fees of any kind. This makes it a great option for testing out a new concept. Also, the integration with WordPress is flawless, which means your store has access to the entire WordPress ecosystem of themes and plugins. To get from bare-metal to having a working online store can happen in as little as 30 minutes if you're rolling your own, and 10 minutes if you use a Managed WordPress host like Kinsta or Lightspeed.
Whilst you can integrate other payment methods, the default (and by far easiest) payment method is PayPal - which gets expensive - budget roughly 4.5% of each transaction for payment fees. This is fine if you're selling high margin items (which you should regardless) but terrible if you're in the computer business where margins get razor-thin - as low 1 to 2 %. From a security standpoint, WooCommerce also suffers from a gazillion security holes if you're trying to process the payment locally - there's just no cost-effective way to roll your own PCI compliant LAMP or LEMP stack and stick WooCommerce on it. There's all sorts of exploits like MageCart (originally targeted at Magento, I think) that also now hit WooCommerce.
Got working store preview. Quick prototype/proof-of-concept.
I know there are other e-commerce solutions available for WordPress, and I'm sure they work just fine, but WooCommerce is the only plugin I look to when needing e-commerce on a website. In my opinion, the fact that they are owned by Automattic (the company behind WordPress) is a huge plus, because you know the product will ALWAYS work with WordPress and won't be dropped by a developer who "just got tired of doing it." In addition, they have a vast array of premium extension to further expand on the base functionality (from different payment gateways to subscription management, online bookings, and tons more). The free plugin makes online selling accessible for everyone, and it's easy to collect payments immediately via PayPal. Every extension I've ever purchased has worked nearly flawlessly, and when it doesn't, support is always immediately available via chat. Product support and reliability are two of my biggest deciding factors when looking at solutions for my clients.
Some of the really great extensions are on the pricey side (at least, that's how some of my clients feel). Shelling out $250/year for online bookings or subscription services can be a hard pill to swallow for some small/micro businesses who are creating their first website. However, I would argue that their extensions are extremely affordable when compared to custom code development, and ideally the small business would be quickly and easily recouping that annual cost through the service the extension is providing.
Being able to setup e-commerce solutions quickly is key in my business model. If I have a client who wants to "sell a few things online," I shouldn't need to tack on $5,000 to their project cost just to do so. The fact that I can install and setup WooCommerce, with PayPal, and a handful of products in less than an hour means I can offer basic e-commerce solutions to my clients at an extremely affordable price. And when my clients are happy, they know they can trust me for future needs AND they tell others about me (in turn building my client base).
For the price of $0, you get one of the most capable and simple to set up e-commerce solutions. For a Wordpress site, it comes in the form of a free plugin. Woocommerce even provides a free compatible theme. With basic Woocommerce, you get to sell physical or digital products, calculate flat rate shipping, calculate taxes, accept Paypal, Stripe, or Amazon as payment gateways, and a customer accounts area. Extra functionality is available for yearly payments at the Woocommerce extensions store. I recommend spending the money you're saving on a fast business hosting service that includes an SSL certificate. The lowest tier shared hosting plan will cost you sales since site speed will most definitely be affected and customers will leave out of sheer frustration. SEO is also negatively impacted by slow websites.
It's hard to dislike something that is free and works really well out of the box. If I had to point out something, some of the extensions are a bit on the pricey side if you are on a budget and trying to open a store that deviates from the simple look for an item and buy it e-commerce model. The subscription extension is $199/year. Memberships extension is $149/year. To take online bookings, that is $249 a year. On top of hosting, domain, theme, and SSL certificate costs, you could easily be spending more than you thought it would costs to start a web-store.
Coming from Shopify, I was looking for a self-hosted solution because I was uncomfortable with having a third-party e-commerce provider having the "keys" to my store. Basically, I was afraid of having them shut down my store or shut down functionality at any moments notice. I already had problems with payments with Shopify so I decided to move to another solution. Getting set-up with Woocommerce on a self-hosted Wordpress site felt very natural. UI is very intuitive and the knowledge base and support are robust for even beginners to start their own e-commerce store. I'm glad to say I like the look of my new store compared to Shopify. The best part of Woocommerce is that they even provide a free compatible theme so you can get up and running in no time. It is a lot more customizable than Shopify if you are looking for that. More popular extensions that manage email marketing, shipping, and fulfillment are all available on Woocommerce extensions. Those extensions in combination with Wordpress plugins will make your store run like a professional business.
The vast array of plugins and themes that are available to extend the functionality of basic WordPress/WooCommerce is absolutely astounding. It's almost like whatever functionality you can think of, somebody will say "there's a plugin for that". And most of the time the free versions of the plugins are powerful enough to do the whole job intended for the website, or it gives you the opportunity to test and explore the functionality until you are ready to upgrade to paid versions. And of course, it's free! No monthly fees like some of its competitors in the e-commerce space.
The price you pay for it being free is the constant need to upgrade plugins and themes. And the very real possibility that any of the upgrades may crash your site at any given time. It is also very resource-intensive, both in terms of execution resources and storage resources. As a consequence, it eats away rapidly into your processor load and especially inode (#files) quota with your web host provider.
With more and more offline retailers moving into online retail (and online B2B), having an online presence for your e-commerce offering is crucial. WooCommerce fills that need to get smaller businesses with smaller budgets up to speed with next to no investment cost (if you do it in-house) and monthly fees. The availability of so many plugins of different kinds, assure that almost any business in any niche will be able to get started online using only currently available plugins and themes. So in short, WooCommerce can get your business online in a relatively short time frame with relatively small investment costs.
So plugins satisfy the requirement of sites WooCommerce is a platform. What I enjoy most is WooCommerce helps me save operating costs compared to some other platforms. In comparison to Shopify, I don't have to pay charges in addition to transaction fees. Something else I enjoy is that WooCommerce enables me to personalize plenty of things. I'm a developer, and I do not satisfy; therefore, I updated the code and optimized it. Also, WooCommerce enables me to perform it without limits or any issues.
Additionally, WooCommerce's aid is constrained. You can't talk using a supporter. You have to speak to the plugin's writer rather than WooCommerce if your issue is in the plugin. At times the quality of those plugins isn't excellent. Even though there are lots of suppliers of plugins such as WooCommerce. Numerous plugins are free, but the plugins are pricey. Woo-commerce's capacity is high, but a few plugins are complicated to set up and use. Users will need to possess comprehension and some abilities of Wordpress.
I utilize WooCommerce to market products online. I have changed to WooCommerce for a couple of decades, although Shopify was used by me earlier. WooCommerce helps me a great deal and meets my requirements. After some time, you will get accustomed to it, although the interface is much more complicated compared to Shopify.
I like that it's super easy to setup, comes with a couple free themes that are nice looking, and they don't charge anything to use the basic, necessary features.
I dislike that they don't have more free themes because the paid ones are extremely pricey. Also, the calculated shipping feature they have built in doesn't always pull accurate shipping costs and won't let you customize it on other shipping methods.
I'm able to list my items and display them in beautiful fashion. The site runs smoothly and the best part of all, I'm not paying monthly fees like you would with other eCommerce solutions. If you have a domain and a host, just sign up for WordPress and install woo-commerce today.