If you are thinking of opening an online store and looking for the best eCommerce platform, you must have come across many of them, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, etc. Now we know that the type of eCommerce platform you choose is highly dependent on the features you want, business type, and level of expertise. Some businesses opt for hosted platforms like Shopify or self-hosted platforms like WooCommerce and Magento. But when it comes to flexibility and unlimited options, there is no eCommerce platform like WooCommerce.
26% of all online stores use WooCommerce. It is an open-source, beginner-friendly eCommerce platform that is built on WordPress and enables you to build a store exactly the way you want it.
Still not convinced? Read on ahead to know how WooCommerce is the best among them and why you should choose it for your online store.
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Why Choose WooCommerce?
Because it’s free! Do I need to say more? Yes, I do! And I can back it up as well. WooCommerce was launched in 2011 as another plugin for WordPress, but its flexibility and unlimited options quickly made us realize how valuable it is.
Despite being an open-source platform, WooCommerce turned out to be extremely user-friendly and is recommended for new businesses to choose WooCommerce to start their journey with. Although it’s free, WooCommerce provides unlimited options, such as inventory management, multiple payment options, shipping solutions, and much more.
As WooCommerce is built on WordPress, it has strong support and an SEO-friendly interface. Besides having multiple out-of-the-box features, WooCommerce is completely customizable. It enables you to create any type of store and add advanced features with the help of plugins, extensions, and themes.
Checkout out ultimate checklist for Choosing the best Theme for your store
What Makes WooCommerce the Most Flexible ECommerce Platform?
In this era of competitive eCommerce business, it’s hard to stand out and run a business smoothly. Thus, you only need the best resources to make the process as hassle-free as possible. Let’s take a look at how WooCommerce helps you achieve that.
- Sell Any Product
- Plugins Available for Any Functionality
- Extensive Developer Community
- Unique Design Options
- Availability of Amazing Payment Gateways
- Multiple Shipping Options
- Social Media Friendly Nature
- Useful Analytics Option
- Easy Support Availability
- SEO Optimized Platform
1. Sell Any Product
If we are talking about WooCommerce flexibility, we need to mention how it is suitable for selling any product. You can create any type of store and add product variations, bundles, or sell them individually. It has multiple options and accessibility for selling physical, digital, downloadable, and members-only products. You can also create a subscription-based store when it comes to WooCommerce, and all this without any need for plugins.
Besides this, WooCommerce provides you multiple options to make selling easy and beginner-friendly. For example, you get unlimited payment gateways, themes, plugins for free. Paid plugins are also available for advanced functionality.
Its flexibility in terms of products makes it an ideal choice for all types of businesses.
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2. Plugins Available for Any Functionality
The major benefit of WooCommerce is that it is an open-source platform and thus flexible. As your business grows, you might need new advanced functionality to cater to a wider market. Although most features are provided by WooCommerce out-of-the-box, there is still room for customization, depending on your business needs.
Thus, WooCommerce provides unlimited plugins and extensions in different categories. Such as payments, shipping, marketing, enhancements, subscription, and store management. Some plugins are available for free while some are premium, but they are still budget-friendly as compared to other eCommerce platforms.
WooCommerce has plugins developed by themselves and they also support and are compatible with third-party sources, making your choices unlimited. Such flexibility means a large community is available facing the same issues as you and appropriate solutions are available for growth.
3. Extensive Developer Community
As stated above, WooCommerce is an open-source platform, thus it enjoys benefits from not only the WooCommerce community but also from WordPress developers, as it is built on WordPress. Thus, you can easily hire a developer to create custom themes, plugins, and extensions for your business. You can also alter and add new core features and truly create a one-of-a-kind website.
Unlike other eCommerce platforms, you can utilize WooCommerce’s flexibility by choosing from a vast pool of developers available all over the world.
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4. Unique Design Options
Your storefront needs to be captivating to catch the visitors’ eye and encourage them to explore more. Thus, designing is crucial for success and WooCommerce provides multiple options and flexibility in this regard as well.
WooCommerce has a vast collection of themes available, both free and paid. The WooCommerce official Storefront theme is available for free and consists of 14 child themes, suitable for different types of businesses. All themes are compatible with WooCommerce and its plugins. Moreover, they are responsive, which is a huge bonus point. You can also filter out themes based on your business industry and find multiple options.
WooCommerce also enables you to customize each theme according to your preference. Such as changing the layout of the landing page, highlighting CTAs, enabling one-page checkout, and much more to optimize your store design and make it unique.
5. Availability of Amazing Payment Gateways
One of the most important decisions you have to make before opening an online store is to choose a reliable payment gateway. A payment gateway streamlines the flow of cash and provides a safe and secure transaction platform for your customers. Out-of-the-box, WooCommerce enables you to use Stripe and PayPal. It also has its own official payment gateway, called WooCommerce Payments.
Besides these, WooCommerce provides 100+ options for payment gateways. It also accepts multiple payments such as credit and debit cards, online payments, bank transfers, Google Pay, subscriptions, and deposits.
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6. Multiple Shipping Options
WooCommerce also provides multiple options when it comes to shipping. There are 3 shipping methods available:
- Local pickup: Customers can pick their orders from nearby checkpoints set by the business.
- Flat rate shipping: Fixed delivery charges are set despite the order weight and destination.
- Free shipping
If not these options, WooCommerce enables you to create advanced shipping rules and estimate shipping charges based on product weight, category, and customer location. Moreover, WooCommerce also supports Geo-location and automatically detects your customer’s location with their IP address. You can also create multiple shipping zones and also restrict shipping to certain regions if your business is not operational there.
Moreover, WooCommerce simplifies the tax calculation by automating the entire process. You can choose to add tax charges in shipping costs or not.
7. Social Media Friendly Nature
Social media is crucial for your business to scale. People are way less likely to find your business through your website rather than social media platforms. Thus, you need to be active on social media platforms and incorporate them into your website. This is called social proof. It helps in gaining visibility, increased attention, and sales.
WooCommerce offers flexibility in this regard as well, enabling you to use themes to display social media buttons and giving customers the option to share their purchases on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. WooCommere also supports a “Social Login” option, enabling customers to log in from their social media accounts.
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8. Useful Analytics Reports
The only way you can properly manage your business is by keeping track of different metrics and recognizing how customers interact with your business and what are your best-selling products, etc.
These metrics help you recognize your strong and weak points and provides you with suggestions to improve your store and marketing tactics. WooCommerce’s built-in analytics system covers individual customer profiles and insights, total sales, average order totals, etc.
It also integrates with analytical tools easily such as Google Analytics. Check out this detailed guide on how to set up Google Analytics for WooCommerce.
9. Easy Support Availability
Although WooCommerce does not provide call and chat support, it does have an extensive customer support base available to help its users out. As it is built on WordPress, it benefits from a large pool of WordPress and WooCommerce experts available worldwide.
It also provides detailed documentation on all of its plugins and extensions, making the whole setup and query process hassle-free. You can also find dedicated forums outside WooCommerce, such as Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, etc for WooCommerce discussions.
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10. SEO Optimized Platform
Search engine optimization is necessary for your online store if you want to rank higher on search engines. As WooCommerce is built on WordPress, it has a strong SEO base and its websites are preferred by search engines.
In terms of flexibility, WooCommerce also has multiple SEO tools available that can help you optimize content, pages, posts, and much more.
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Wrap-Up
And the list goes on. But you get our point, despite being a self-hosted eCommerce platform, WooCommerce provides flexibility and multiple options to kickstart your website and scale it as your business grows. WooCommerce’s strong core features enable it to handle large data, multiple plugins, and heavy traffic without any performance issues. Thus, we consider it the best eCommerce platform for all business types and sizes. Check out our article on why you should choose WooCommerce to learn more about what makes it the best.
