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WooCommerce

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce is an ecommerce plug-in for the WordPress content management system (CMS) that has gained immense popularity in just a couple of years. In 3 years, it already has 2.3 million downloads, and to put that in perspective, PrestaShop, which doesn’t require a CMS, has 3.4 million in 7 years.

Why Choose WooCommerce?

It’s Free

There is no shortage of high quality ecommerce CMS currently on offer, all of which endeavour to help merchants sell online easily and innovatively. Most of the time, the only drawback is that they all come at a price. All except WooCommerce that is.

WooCommerce is completely free to download, right now. Yet, despite being free and open-source, WooCommerce offers extensive features out of the box, whilst also being extremely flexible both by nature, and via the additional of extensions, which I will mention later.

Huge Flexibility

Perhaps one of WooCommerce’s biggest benefit to ecommerce newcomers, is that merchants using the platform can exercise a whole lot of flexibility with their products, without having to know too much about the technical side of things.

Products can be categorized, given sale prices, independent attributes, and more. Additionally, WooCommerce stores are capable of selling physical, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate/external products.

More Than Ecommerce

WooCommerce doesn’t force users to go beyond their comfort zone when building their online store, yet at the same time, it readily opens the door for more than just ecommerce.

For example, WooCommerce users can build a fully functioning store within a professional website, alongside an integrated blog. All of these dimensions of a business’ online presence are harnessed in one place, and presented together seamlessly, and it’s all thanks to WooCommerce being a WordPress based platform.

Familiar Friendliness

Speaking of WordPress, the hugely popular CMS supports over 51% of the top million websites currently in existence, and so it would be fair to say that many ecommerce startups will have had the pleasure of using WordPress, for similar, or unrelated online project.

With WooCommerce being a WordPress plugin, past users of the platform will benefit from being able to recognize the user-friendly WordPress interface. That kind of familiarity when building an online store could easily save time and confusion, whilst bolstering creativity.

Analytics Made Easy

A core tool used by any website owner, is their analytics tool. Many ecommerce startups may not know how to apply an analytics system to their website, nor will they know what statistics need focused analysis. Thankfully, WooCommerce has such merchants covered.

The built in analytics system makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. Figures like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all neatly presented via graphs, without the user ever having to leave their admin panel. It’s that easy.