WooCommerce: Advantages and Key Benefits
At Urban Moon, we often recommend our clients should go for WooCommerce as the platform for their e-Commerce website. Obviously, their most common question is, what are the advantages if they go for WooCommerce?
The most important advantage of WooCommerce is that it is a free and open-source plugin built on WordPress and is known for its flexibility, customizability, and ease of use. Further, it can utilize all the powerful SEO, marketing, design, and integration capabilities that WordPress offers.
It may be a tough choice for most business owners to decide which platform should they use for their e-Commerce store. It is important to understand all the nuances in order to make an informed call about whether WooCommerce is the right platform for your business or not. Â
The Key Benefits of Using WooCommerce
During my initial days of designing websites for clients, I often compared WooCommerce with other eCommerce platforms like Shopify or Magento. I found that WooCommerce was a clear winner in most use cases because it is built on WordPress and you can build a very powerful website utilizing the numerous features that WordPress offers.
Being built on WordPress, you have complete control over your website since you own the domain and the database. Unlike WooCommerce, when you are dependent on another platform to host your store, you run a risk of losing your data in case these platforms close down or have a glitch.
Another advantage of being built on WordPress is its marketing and SEO capabilities. WordPress is considered one of the most SEO-friendly platforms thanks to its popularity among website builders, which means it is well adapted by Search Engine bots. Secondly, WordPress has a huge network of developers and innovative plugins which make SEO easier compared to other platforms.
Further, WooCommerce being a WordPress plugin can utilize its powerful blogging features. WordPress is most popular among bloggers and is used by most of the successful bloggers around the world, after all, WordPress started as a blogging platform. This means, if your eCommerce store is built on WooCommerce, you can put your content marketing machine to its maximum use, thus building your brand over time.
WooCommerce is also compatible with a huge majority of WordPress themes. This means you can easily create very good-looking and professional designs and customize your design to suit your branding.
WooCommerce offers you easy product management features, where you can create products with a lot of ease, be they physical products, virtual products, services, or subscription-based products. You can add different variations of products like colors, sizes, etc, and manage each variation through easy-to-use APIs or plugins.
You can also manage your orders and inventory on WooCommerce in a fairly automated fashion. You just need to update the stock quantities of each product every time you get your supplies, and WooCommerce will take it from there. You need to the status of every order, like in progress, Payment Pending, Completed, or Cancelled, and your inventory will be updated automatically with every status update.
Being one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, WooCommerce has a strong community of experts that can help you along the way, in case you get stuck on your journey.
WooCommerce benefits for non-technical users
You do not need to be a programmer in order to build, operate, or manage your e-Commerce store on WooCommerce. You do not need to code CSS or HTML in order to build your website, since WordPress is an amazing no-code platform that uses plugins and drag and drop to build both the front end and back end of your site.
Most of the customizations on a WooCommerce website can also be done without any coding since you can easily add most of the features and functionalities by using some third-party plugin.
WordPress has a very easy-to-use admin panel, which you can learn to use quickly. Many business owners without any technical background use WooCommerce with a lot of ease. You can even learn to develop your own website using WordPress and WooCommerce if you are willing to invest time and effort into it.
In case you get stuck, you can easily find some resource or video online that will show you the workaround for most of the common issues. Not to forget the huge community of WordPress experts that are eager to help.
Benefits derived from customizing WooCommerce My Account Page
The My Account page in WooCommerce is the home page of any of your customers’ accounts. By default, the WooCommerce My Account page is rather plain, with options like Dashboard, Orders, Downloads, Address, and Account Details.
However, if you want to add additional features like a welcome message, an affiliate program, or a referral system for your existing customers. You can easily add these additional options on the My Accounts page by using a third-party plugin like Booster for WooCommerce, or the YITH plugin.
Using these plugins, you can also change the design of the My Account page and change how the existing menu looks to make them look more appealing for your customers. For example, using the YITH plugin you can change the menu position, menu layout, colors, shadows, etc on your page.
You can also make it easier for your customers to access the details like their orders, downloads payment methods, etc by placing them on a card in the middle of the screen, rather than going to the menu bar.
The advantages of WooCommerce security features
Security can be a major concern while doing any online business since it can involve sensitive information of your customers like Name, Address, and Credit Card info. WooCommerce has built-in security features and it is considered reasonably safe. WooCommerce developers also update it regularly in order to keep its security features up to date.
WooCommerce offers secure payment gateways that accept payments through Credit Cards, Bank Transfers, or other third-party gateways like Stripe and Paypal.
Having said that, it never hurts to add certain basic security steps in order to be extra sure. WooCommerce gives you an extra secure environment if you use a reputed hosting provider, update the plugins regularly and also install some security plugins.
Your hosting provider should provide you with a built-in firewall, security scans, and backups. Your website must have an SSL certificate installed that encrypts any information that your site sends to the server. You should also regularly update all other plugins that you are using on your site along with WooCommerce.
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