What is WooCommerce?

Summary

In short, WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin created by the team that brought you WordPress. It’s a great way to start selling your products online as it offers an easy to use interface and supports the vast majority of major payment gateways. The great features that WooCommerce offers are backed up by a huge library of third-party plugins and a large community of users.

The Basics

Want to get started selling your products online? Then WooCommerce is going to be one of the best platforms available for you to set up an online store and start selling! This post is going to cover the basics of what WooCommerce offers and why it should be your e-commerce platform of choice.

WooCommerce was created by Automattic in 2011. Automattic is the team that created WordPress and many of its official plugins, so you know you are in good hands. It is available as a free WordPress plugin, which makes it even easier to get started with if you are adding e-commerce functionality to your existing WordPress website.

What Does It Do?

The WooCommerce plugin comes with a wide range of features as standard and has a huge library of third-party plugins in order to enhance its functionality.

Once you have installed and set up WooCommerce on your WordPress site you will be able to sell both physical and digital products, manage your stock, shipping, take payments and automatically sort tax. We’ve included a brief rundown of the features and functionality that WooCommerce offers below:

• Sell any type of product – physical or digital.
• Add limitless products and images.
• Add unlimited categories and tags to your products – this makes your products easier to find.
• All major payment gateways are supported.
• Geared towards ease of use – making it an ideal solution for beginners.
• Regular security updates and bug fixes – keeping both your customer’s and your data safe.
• Large community – to help with any issues you may come across.
• Integrates easily with WordPress sites – Ideal solution for any business which already has a WordPress site or is looking to start a new website from scratch.
• Expansive library of third-party plugins available – further making the scalability and potential of your website and business massive.

Why Should You Use It?

As WooCommerce is built with WordPress it provides a straight forward user interface. Because of the open source nature of WooCommerce, web designers are able to work with its code to create truly bespoke experiences for your customers. Bolstering this with the large community and strong development team built around WooCommerce you can rest assured that if you run into any issues, someone will have an answer!

WooCommerce’s out of the box features allow it to be used as an all-in-one solution for your e-commerce needs with the potential to be expanded on and grow with your business.