What is WooCommerce? A Brief History

What is WooCommerce? With the help of the free WordPress plugin WooCommerce, you can create an online store and add e-commerce features to your WordPress website. Your WordPress website may be converted into an e-commerce website with only a few clicks.

You probably already have a WordPress website and are prepared to start selling, well, just about anything, if you’re wondering “What is WooCommerce?” In this article, we’ll explain about WooCommerce, including what it is, how it functions, and the benefits of using it.

WooCommerce is a plugin that connects seamlessly with your current WordPress website, transforming it into a fully working WordPress e-commerce website in just a few simple steps.

The plugin quickly established itself as the go-to option for people wishing to start their own online businesses after its 2011 release.

The plugin and its parent business were purchased by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) in 2015; at the time, it was their biggest acquisition to date, and it has continued to develop rapidly ever since.

In the US, Canada, and the UK, it presently runs over 99 percent of WordPress e-commerce websites (Source: BuiltWith.com.)

With millions of active installations and over 27,000,000 downloads, it is undoubtedly the driving force behind many e-commerce sites (Source: WordPress.org.)

What Does WooCommerce Do?

WooCommerce comes with a free plugin that can be installed from the Plugin Repository or from your WordPress dashboard, and it offers the most basic shop capabilities out of the box.

Although it has hundreds of downloadable extensions—we’ll get to that—it also comes with some amazing built-in features.

Easy Installation, Setup, and Integration

With a straightforward installation and Setup Wizard, WooCommerce is intended to make getting started as simple as possible. This will allow you to quickly and easily integrate your WordPress theme with your online store.

• Installation — The WooCommerce plugin can be downloaded and activated with a few clicks, just like any other plugin. To download it, look for it in the Plugin’s menu of your WordPress dashboard.
• Setup – After installing WooCommerce, the Setup Wizard will guide you through customising the essential steps to launch your business. Your possibilities for online shopping are practically limitless, but the Setup Wizard gets right to the point and highlights the most crucial choices, so you never miss a step.
• WordPress Theme Integration – WooCommerce integrates easily with most WordPress themes since it is WordPress compatible. If you want to utilise the original theme, you may choose the Storefront theme; it’s free, just like the plugin!

Data Control

WooCommerce keeps you in charge, so you never have to bother about losing control over the data.

• Your Data, Always – When you utilise a third-party e-commerce platform, your data is gone if they go out of business. You always have control over your data while using WooCommerce. Running a successful e-commerce website requires access to data about consumer behaviour, past purchases, and shop performance.

Feature-packed Shopping Cart

Customize every aspect of the checkout process for site visitors so that you may turn them into paying clients. Create your website the way you want it, even down to the checkout URLs.

• Payment Gateways – WooCommerce allows you to take checks, cash on delivery, bank transfers, as well as PayPal, which allows you to receive major credit cards and also other PayPal payments. Want Stripe? Using the Setup Wizard, you may set up Stripe as a payment gateway.
• Geolocation and Automated Taxes – WooCommerce provides you the option to enable geolocation and automatic taxes, so your store will always show your customers the proper pricing with taxes, regardless of where they are.
• Customizable checkout procedure – Complete control over the whole procedure from beginning to end. You have the option to require secure checkout, enable/disable guest checkout, specify your checkout flow URLs, and decide which countries you want to sell to specifically or globally.
• Default Currency – You may select the usual currency for your business from a large selection of different currencies.
• Redirect Cart: After a consumer adds a product, you may choose to send them back to their cart.

Complete Control of Products

No matter if you’re selling a single product, a single product with several alternatives, or dozens, hundreds, or more of them… You have full control over everything using WooCommerce.

• Unlimited Products – Start with one and keep adding. Your hosting solution is the sole restriction on how many goods you can add using WooCommerce.
• Product Categories – Do you provide e-books? Associated goods? Your own original stock? No issue. Simple Product, Grouped Product, External/Affiliate Product, Variable Product, or Virtual/Downloadable Product are the available options for your product type.
• Product Variations – If you provide alternatives for your items, your consumers may decide those variations while placing an order, saving you both important time. Each option’s sizes, colours, pricing, stock levels, photos, and other parameters may be customised.
• Inventory: Manage your inventory with confidence! You may streamline and simplify product management by using features like stock levels, backorders, concealing out-of-stock inventory, email notifications when an item’s stock level is low or sold out, and more.

Easy Shipping

WooCommerce not only simplifies the process of selling your goods, but also that of delivering them to customers. There are several shipping alternatives available that make it easy to connect your items with clients!

• Shipping Options – With built-in choices to provide Flat rate, International Shipping, Local delivery, or Local pickup, shipping will be less of a problem. Depending on the customer’s address, set your rate to Automatic and provide free delivery or the lowest fee possible.
• Calculation, Display, and Location for Shipping — Provide a Shipping Calculator in your shopping basket, hide the shipping rate until the address is submitted, and enable customers ship to either their Billing Address or a different Shipping Address.

Easier Tax Management

Dealing with taxes is a necessary part of operating a profitable online shop. With a number of solutions made to reduce the burden associated with processing taxes, WooCommerce makes this easier for you.

• Tax management – Because WooCommerce is a website product designed for online goods sales, managing sales taxes is already included in the plugin. Among the choices are custom tax rates, major tax rate computation, and geo-location tax rates. Additionally, you may choose tax rates and manage the tax rate that is applied to your shipping expenses.

A Leader in Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

If nobody knows you’ve constructed a better mousetrap, it won’t bring anyone to your door. WooCommerce makes use of WordPress SEO’s strength to spread the word and let potential buyers know you exist.

• WordPress SEO – Because WooCommerce is based on WordPress, your online store may take use of the built-in SEO features that WordPress offers. WooCommerce stores receive a considerable SEO boost as a result of it and the detailed controls offered for important SEO settings.
• Discounts and coupons – It’s simple to activate discounts and coupon codes without ever reducing tax.
• Reviews – Reviews may be enabled directly from your dashboard and are crucial for boosting online purchases. You can decide to only allow reviews from customers who have been verified, and you can mark such reviews with a label designating them as such.

Keeping You Informed

Selling items is a wonderful place to start, and WooCommerce reports let you keep track of your sales, identify patterns, and examine your data to prepare for future expansion.

• Store Dashboard- From the dashboard’s built-in interface, quickly examine your traffic, orders, and status summary.
• Reports – You can check your gross and net sales in WooCommerce reports and print them.
• Analyzing – Monitor your sales and growth patterns to assist plan the expansion of your store.

Customer Management

The Customer Management capabilities in WooCommerce make it simple for site visitors to take the next step from visitor to customer or from customer to recurring customer.

• Passwords and Accounts – You can keep your clients by encouraging them to establish accounts and making it simple for them to do so. The account creation process may be made to go more smoothly by configuring your WooCommerce installation to optionally autogenerate passwords and generate the customer account username from the client’s email address.
• iOS App: Your store should accompany you everywhere you go! Right from your iOS smartphone, you can easily check your product catalogue, product information, orders, and more.

Easy Mobile E-Commerce

WooCommerce ensures that your consumers have a fantastic experience regardless of the device they are purchasing from. Customers using phones, phablets, and tablets are a rising population.

• Mobile-friendly websites are “mCommerce,” or mobile e-commerce, which controls a sizable amount of online purchases and is expected to increase exponentially. Because WooCommerce is mobile-friendly, you’ll never lose a sale because a customer’s gadget isn’t compatible.

The main plugin includes all of this and much more, providing everything you need to launch your own online store right now.

But there are WooCommerce extensions, just in case.

Fully Extendable

With WooCommerce plugins, the possibilities are absolutely endless. You may customise your business in almost countless ways thanks to the over 450 extensions we currently have available.

Extensions are add-ons that operate with WooCommerce only after installation; they enhance the effectiveness of your e-commerce website rather than adding to the core plugin.

While there are numerous other plugins in the WordPress plugin database that are created for or compatible with WooCommerce, you can also get free and paid extensions from the WooCommerce shop.

Why Should I Use WooCommerce?

After addressing the questions “What is WooCommerce?” and “What can WooCommerce do?” it is clear why you should use WooCommerce. WooCommerce is the obvious choice for your WordPress e-commerce site in terms of usability, SEO, inventory control, and mobile compatibility!