WooCommerce is one of the most popular free WordPress CMS modules that helps you sell anything through online products: physical products, virtual products, downloadable products and many other types of services and options. It was built by WooThemes in 2011 and has quickly grown to over 60,000,000 downloads and powered over 28% of all global online stores.

As mentioned earlier, WooCommerce is 100% free. You won’t have to pay a single cent to use it and it can earn you a very considerable income. Indeed, if you want some advanced functionality, you may need to buy or develop additional plugins, but WooCommerce as a single plugin is free and most likely always will be. This is one of the main advantages of using WooCommerce for your online store.

In addition to the free look, it has amazing functionality that other platforms, such as Magento, integrate into their expensive Enterprise package. With WooCommerce you can sell everything you can think of and exactly how you imagine. You can create multiple product variations such as product color or size, unlimited discounts that have a fixed value or percentage value as well as product restrictions or exclusions, multi-language stores, product descriptions and reviews, price variations by date, location, shipping classes so you can select from multiple shipping providers in different parts of the world, and intuitive reports that will make you understand what your customers want. Honestly, I haven’t even mentioned 30% of what WooCommerce is capable of, but its greatest capability is its flexibility, its ability to integrate seamlessly with other plugins and allow you to build literally anything you can think of.

Flexibility

The biggest advantage of using WooCommerce for your store is that it can be used with thousands of other plugins that will completely transform your online store. From package tracking options to custom product attributes and entire marketing strategies, you can build an amazing shopping experience for any customer around the world.

Attention: Be careful which plugin integrates with WooCommerce. We strongly recommend that you only use purchased/licensed plugins to avoid any abuse or backdoor left in the source files of third-party plugins. Remember that you are selling goods and storing customer information in the database.

It has a great mobile app for iOS and Android

Are you always on the go and need to know what’s happening with your online business? WooCommerce now lets you connect to your online store through a powerful and intuitive mobile app that allows you to:

• Browse the store – see the products that work best. Check overall revenue and view order and visitor data by day, week, month and year.
• Manage orders – scroll, filter or search for specific orders. Tap to view order information – including products, value, customer details, shipping details and notes. You can also place a basic order.
• Real-time order alerts – get notifications about store activity, including new orders and product reviews. There’s an optional cha-ching sound! You can download the WooCommerce app from their website, available for iOS and Android.

Simple file modifications

WooCommerce and WordPress are built using one of the most common programming languages available, PHP. In its core files it has some elements of JavaScript and Jquery, but PHP is somewhere around 80%. Of course, you’ll find a lot of HTML and CSS code, but we’re talking about the programming language here.

PHP is a medium complexity programming language, which means that changes can be made relatively easily and you will always find a PHP developer who will help you with your project and who will fit your budget. Remember that PHP is a much cheaper programming language than say…Microsoft.NET. Also, the structure and architecture of WooCommerce files are solid and straightforward and if you use an FTP client such as WinSCP, you can easily look up the ID or class that generates dynamic content and modify the code to suit your needs.

Disadvantages of WooCommerce for online shop:

It’s a WordPress module and integrates with the same slow PHP data call architecture as WordPress does. This means that if you’re going to have your store set up with more than 10,000 products, you’ll most likely have slow performance that doesn’t help customers get what they need as quickly as possible. Recent studies show that most customers who wait more than 2.4 seconds for a page curl are 76% more likely to leave your site.

Many people wonder if it’s safe to use WooCommerce and WordPress for an e-commerce website. Indeed, if you think about it, there are over 60 million WordPress sites running on the internet. It has a significant share when it comes to the total number of sites using a content management system. However, despite this enormous popularity, WordPress is free. It is open-source, meaning all of its code is accessible and customizable by anyone who wants to do so.

With popularity, comes risk because as a lot of sites run WordPress and WooCommerce, the priority of hackers is often to launch an attack against them. Because they know that if they can infiltrate the WordPress backend, they can attack on a massive scale.

Therefore, if you’ve chosen to use WooCommerce for your online store, you’ll need to think about investing resources in your store’s security, which means security audits, security plugins, security updates.

Another security issue regarding WooCommerce is that while its security is decent, the main problem is that most of the time, website owners use this plugin along with other plugins that integrate with WooCommerce / WordPress. This leads to more vulnerability due to code errors/bugs, lack of third party security updates and more.

Conclusion

WooCommerce is an amazing module to use with your WordPress website. If you plan to sell something soon and have a limited budget but a creative mind, I would definitely recommend this plugin. Of course, if you plan to run a store with tens of thousands of products, I would recommend an alternative solution such as OpenCart or Magento, but WooCommerce is definitely something you should look at.

What to remember if you decide to use WooCommerce for your online store?

Advantages

• It’s free and it will stay that way.
• Lots of features that will help you create literally anything you can think of
• Flexibility to integrate with other modules.
• Mobile app to manage your store from wherever you are.
• Easy file changes and lower development costs because it uses the PHP language.

Disadvantages

• Site architecture doesn’t allow for high loading speed.
• Should not be used for more than 10,000 products.
• Larger stores with many products will cost more if they use WooCommerce and WordPress.
• Low level of security will automatically increase costs due to calling another external security service.