What does WooCommerce include: Features and Benefits

When I started using WooCommerce, it took me a while to explore everything it offers and start using all its features to derive the maximum benefit.

WooCommerce includes a wide range of functionalities like Product Management, Order Management, Inventory Management, Payment Gateway, and Sales Reports making it a complete eCommerce builder. It also includes WooCommerce shortcodes and blocks allowing you to add additional functionalities to your pages.

Most WooCommerce users are not very well acquainted with many of its functionalities unless they have spent enough time diving deep into them. With my experience and expertise, I put together this article that will take you through how to use WooCommerce for its maximum benefit.

What are the Most Powerful features WooCommerce includes?

WooCommerce allows you to conveniently set up and customize your store. Being a WordPress plugin, it allows you to set up a powerful website with numerous design and marketing extensions that WordPress offers.

WooCommerce allows you to add a high volume of products. Its variable product feature allows you to include various nuances into your products like size, color, and other variations. It also gives you various pricing features including discount codes and different pricing for different product variations.

Depending on the type of your business, you can sell physical products, virtual products, services, or subscriptions on your WooCommerce store. For physical products, like shoes or T-shirts, you can add product images, dimensions, sizes, and colors to every variation of your product. Virtual products on the other hand include digital products that are downloadable, e.g., eBooks, courses, podcasts, etc.

Services can include anything from haircuts, facials, and housekeeping, to consulting services. You can also sell subscription-based digital products, courses, or membership communities.

WooCommerce provides you with a variety of payment options. You can choose to accept payments through credit cards, debit cards, bank transfers, checks, or even cash on delivery. Further, there are numerous other payment gateways that can be integrated with WooCommerce including Stripe, PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, and Google Pay.

Once again, being a WordPress plugin, your website can use all the powerful features that WordPress has, including tens of thousands of third-party plugins and extensions. WordPress also offers powerful blogging features that can help you build a strong brand for your business.

WooCommerce is also compatible with a number of WordPress themes like Astra, Divi, OceanWP, Zakra, etc which allows you to create a very attractive design customized to your brand.

WooCommerce also offers very convenient inventory management features. You just need to input the stock quantity manually every time you receive the supplies. From there, WooCommerce will take over and keep a track of your stock quantities of each of the SKUs. It automatically deducts the quantities every time an order is processed. You can also select the safety stock and the system will warn you every time your stock goes below a fixed quantity, and you can place an order with your supplier.

WooCommerce order management system allows you to track the status of each of the orders you have received and manage them closely. The order status in WooCommerce includes Pending Payment, Processing, On Hold, Completed, Cancelled, Refunded, etc.

WooCommerce includes some hidden functionalities!

There are so many features offered by WooCommerce that are little known. I learned about these functionalities as and when a requirement came from a client that forced me to sit and do some research. Over the years, I have learned some secret tricks and things that you can do on your WooCommerce website that will set you apart from your competitors.

You can add your favorite products or the products that you want to promote under ‘Featured Products’. On the Products page, you can find the option to mark any product with a ‘star’ in the product list, which adds the product to your featured products and give it more visibility.

You can add labels to certain products to attract attention from your customers, for example in case you are offering a product ‘On Sale’ or a product has ‘last few items in stock’. This can be a powerful feature to boost sales and this can be done using an extension called WooCommerce Advanced Product Labels.

You can also replicate a product from your site to another site, for example, in case there are multiple websites in your network. This will copy all the product features like price, stocks, SKU, pictures, and product description. Under the ‘Multistore’ option on your ‘Products’ page, you can select the other store on which you want your product to feature. You can also enable the options that replicate any change in the parent product to the child product.

Very few people know that you can create an attractive design for your WooCommerce store by using Elementor. Normally, when you try to edit your store page with Elementor, you get an error since Elementor only edits static pages and not dynamic pages. However, you can use an additional free plugin called Woolentor. You can create a custom page using Elementor and Woolentor gives you some additional widgets like Universal Products layout, which you can then use to create your custom store page.

What are the most important benefits of using WooCommerce?

The major benefit of WooCommerce comes from the fact that it is built on WordPress. So it derives all the benefits of WordPress like customizability, integration capabilities, ease for non-technical users, and marketing and blogging power. Overall you can build a powerful website and grow your brand with unlimited capabilities.

WooCommerce, being free and open source, is quick to get started for any entrepreneur (with some learning curve). It works with most WordPress themes which makes it easy to design a beautiful and professional-looking website without spending a fortune on it.

Again since WordPress has numerous third-party plugins and a huge community of developers coming up with some new plugin every day, it is easy to customize and add virtually any functionality to your website at any stage of your business.

Security can be a major concern while doing an online business. WooCommerce includes secure payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal. WooCommerce is regularly updated by developers to keep its security features up to speed.

Another advantage of WooCommerce is its huge, active, and supportive community. In case you face any problem while developing or operating your website, you can get a quick support from others who have been in your position in the past.

What are the shortcodes included with WooCommerce?

Shortcodes are pieces of code that are used to add functionalities to WooCommerce websites. For example, you can display a list of top products, showcase related products, or highlight featured products on your page using shortcodes.

You can place shortcodes in either shortcode blocks, or paste them directly into the page. Shortcodes are broadly classified as WooCommerce product shortcodes and WooCommerce page shortcodes.

What are the Blocks that come with WooCommerce?

WooCommerce blocks are now used to add functionalities to WooCommerce pages without the need to add any codes. Using blocks, you can display your products under different categories, tags, and ratings. You can also use blocks to create custom store pages, design pages for a product group or highlight specific products.

Conclusion

WooCommerce is a complete end-to-end eCommerce platform for those looking to build and grow their brand online. Its major benefits come from the fact that it is built on WordPress, so you can utilize the customization, integration powers, and marketing, SEO, and blogging capabilities of WordPress to your advantage.