A Quick Guide To The 9 Top Benefits of WooCommerce
Whenever we embark on a new eCommerce design project for a client, our go-to store platform is WooCommerce. After years spent testing all of the products available, we find that they offer a superior finished build, above and beyond all of the other big names in the industry. Curious as to why? Well, here’s a quick overview of the top 9 benefits that WooCommerce has to offer.
1. Endless customisation
Who really wants to have a store exactly the same as everyone else’s? You wouldn’t have a physical store that looked the same as your competitor’s, so why do the same online? Well, the great thing about WooCommerce is, first and foremost, that it allows you to fully customise the look and feel of your store however you want it.
Compared to other store builders that offer rigid themes, WooCommerce puts the designer in control. With an almost endless array of plugins, you can fully customise everything, right through from product landing pages to the final checkout screen. Integrations are available for all major parts of the eCommerce process, including marketing, sales, reporting and even establishing memberships.
2nd December 2018
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 3 seconds.
2. Low upfront design costs
Building a new eCommerce store is typically considered very expensive. Well, the truth is that it all depends on how you go about building the store. We tend to find that WooCommerce stores are very affordable to build, as they integrate so well alongside existing WordPress sites. Even if your WooCommerce store is being built from scratch, it is usually far cheaper than the alternatives.
For example, Shopify stores can be very expensive to build if you wish to construct a store that is in any way different from an existing theme. Yes, they offer a load of apps, in order to customise your store. But the cost of these apps soon stacks app. Whereas with WooCommerce, a good designer can implement the same features much more affordably.
3. Low ongoing monthly costs for clients
Those additional apps discussed above often contain their own ongoing monthly costs. This is because they are each built by 3rd party designers who expect you to pay them for using their features. After you’ve included 5 or more of such features, you soon find that the monthly payments you’re expected to make are incredibly high.
Once again, WooCommerce comes in much cheaper as these add-ons can often be built in once and then remain there for life, with no ongoing monthly fees. You also don’t have to pay for any expensive monthly plans, such as the ones Shopify offers. So you don’t find your profit margins getting squeezed each and every month.
4. It’s SEO friendly
It is of crucial importance that your eCommerce store is built upon a solid foundation of search engine friendly principles. This includes things like being mobile responsive and fast to load. Well, WooCommerce is great at incorporating all such functionality, allowing you to potentially perform very well for targeted search terms.
Not only do they load quickly and effectively across all devices, but you can also completely optimise individual pages for how they appear in search results. Also, as long as you work with a good quality designer, you can ensure that your site includes a solid site hierarchy and URL structure.
5. High levels of security
Security is of the utmost importance when it comes to selling anything online through your own store. You need to ensure that you are using a platform to sell your products that is safe and reliable and which leads to minimal risk for anyone choosing to make a purchase. Especially seeing as customers have to input very sensitive data.
Well, WooCommerce is indeed incredibly secure, as this is one of the key focuses of their business. They regularly perform updates to their platform in order to safeguard users and keep hackers out. They also have this useful guide here which allows store owners to take additional steps to shore up their store’s security protocol.
6. A well-recognised name in the industry
If you are relying on someone to power your online business, then you need to be sure that they will not let you down. As such, using such a well-recognised, global brand such as WooCommerce can bring lots of peace of mind. They have been around now for 9 years and, in that time, have gone on to power many of the most famous online stores. Such as:
– The Official All Blacks Online Store
– Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Book Store
– Weber Barbecues Online Store
In fact, they now power a whopping 30% of all online stores! As such, you can be guaranteed that they know what they are doing and can be relied on to help support your business and enable long-term growth.
7. They are easy to manage on the back-end
A key element of a powerful eCommerce store is having a streamlined back-end that makes processing and fulfilling orders a breeze. Well, this is where WooCommerce really comes into its own. At its heart, it was founded as a straightforward online store builder for the masses. As well as this, it also offers powerful reporting tools, giving you deep insight into your customer base.
You can generate customised reports in order to track where customers are coming from and how to boost future sales. You also have the ability to customise admin roles and responsibilities for anyone with access to the backend of your store. Meaning only key decision makers have access to crucial tasks, like updating or removing existing products.
8. Powered by WordPress!
Even if you have little-to-no experience of designing websites, you should know what WordPress is. It’s the leading website builder globally, and now powers more than two-thirds of all websites online! So, if you are looking to expand an existing WordPress site and include eCommerce functionality, then there really is no other alternative.
WooCommerce was designed and built in order to integrate perfectly and seamlessly with WordPress sites. Another important thing to note is that WooCommerce allows you to use almost all major payment methods available. Further showing how the platform has been designed to build trust and security in your customer base.
9. It is built to grow with you
As mentioned earlier, WooCommerce powers many of the world’s most highly trafficked eCommerce stores. Showing it is more than capable of keeping up with heavy demand and processing hundreds and thousands of orders every single day. Which is nice to know if you have plans to grow your store in the coming years.
Which you should! Well, you can rest easy knowing that WooCommerce is built to grow with you and to handle sudden increases in traffic and orders over time. Rather than having to construct a brand new site in a few years time, WooCommerce can be expanded upon in order to inhibit this expected growth.
If you’re in the process of having a new online store built for your business then WooCommerce is, in our humble opinion, the best choice available. Our past clients who now own stores like Fetish Cartel and Andy Millward Skincare were overjoyed with their finished sites, and it’s hard to see why. If you would like to find out any more about our eCommerce design packages, please feel free to reach out.