Is selling online easy? With WordPress it can be for sure. There’s now a popular plugin called Woocommerce that does exactly that, and does it pretty well. Developed by Woothemes in 2011, Woocommerce is now one of the main ecommerce player in the world. The best part is, it integrates smoothly with WordPress, WordPress themes and plugins…and has its own set of themes and plugins to allow you to create a complete ecommerce site. Unlike Magento or even Prestashop, implementing Woocommerce is fairly easy and happens in just a couple of clicks. But you can go even deeper if you need and build a very custom ecommerce site to sell pretty much anything, including digital goods.
Ecommerce biggest hurdles
Don’t fool ourselves, building an ecommerce site is far from being easy. It’s not just about publishing content, but selling products and/or services. Your visitors need to find what they are looking for easily, the purchase funnel needs to be smooth, etc.
One of the biggest hurdle is probably building trust. Your website needs to look professional of course but not only. Testimonials, offering the ability to contact you easily, using HTTPS in the payment process…are all important aspects of an ecommerce website. Security is obviously very important. Not everybody is willing to put their credit card number on a website that doesn’t offer a minimum of security. Having an SSL certificate and using HTTPS is a must have.
What ecommerce solution choose
When it comes to building an ecommerce website, you have a lot of solutions out there. The main ones would be Magento, Woocommerce and Prestashop. Magento can be daunting so there’s only Prestashop and Woocommerce left. Prestashop is very good platform but it doesn’t have the power offered by WordPress.Besides Prestashop is specifically an ecommerce content manegement system so if you only offer products that might be a solution for you but if you do have content and even a blog you understand why WordPress makes more sense. It might be more complicated with a solution like Prestashop to build a full website and blog natively. If your store needs to be in multiple languages, Prestashop again might be the best solution here. But in any other cases I would highly recommend Woocommerce.
Woocommerce
Installing Woocommerce is fairly easy. You just have to search it in the available plugins and install for free. Now once installed and activated you might be surprised by the number of settings you have to go through to set it up. No worries, it’s not as hard as it seems. Luckily, there’s a guide that helps you go through all the steps and you pretty much just have to fill in the blanks deciding the currency, taxes, shipping, etc.
Once that is done you just need a add your products and you are pretty much set. The best part about Woocommerce is that, of course, it’s free but you also have a large amount of plugins that can help you with anything you might need. For example if you want to import a full list of products from Excel or sell memberships or subscriptions or even bookings,etc. You will find plugings to enhance your product pages as well if you need to add options that are not natively in Woocommerce. Like WordPress you can also find themes specifically for Woocommerce. You get it, Woocommerce is a powerful solution that will transform your WordPress site into a full on ecommerce site in no time.
If you want the full details on how to install Woocommerce and start building your ecommerce website, check out this article: https://www.shivarweb.com/wordpress-ecommerce-setup/
If you have any question about ecommerce in general or Woocommerce in particular or if need help setting up your own Woocommerce, feel free to contact us.
