WooCommerce is a free WordPress Plugin that allows you to run an e-commerce store on your WordPress site. Thanks to WordPress extensibility and flexibility you can have your own online shop up and running with just a few clicks.
WooCommerce’s history
Mark, Magnus and Adii exchanged messages and helped each other with their WordPress installations in 2007. Shortly after they have met they launched WooThemes 2008 to sell handcrafted WordPress designs professionally. For there on they developed a lot of good and widely used themes, some of which are still used today by 100s of WordPress websites. After their 100th theme in August 2011, they launched WooCommerce in September 2011.
Throughout the years, WooCommerce has been free and that will never change. In June 2012 they did launched their first paid extension WooCommerce Subscriptions, this is where they have also discovered their current day business model: Selling extensions for WooCommerce and themes. So WooThemes isn’t anymore, but WooCommerce gets even more love nowadays.
In 2015 Automattic, the company owning WordPress.com, bought WooCommerce parents company and enabled the platform to experience almost explosive growth.
According to builtwith.com WooCommerce powers 2.64% of all eCommerce websites worldwide, making it the biggest shop platform there is and certainly the most used e-commerce plugin for WordPress shops.
With over 60.000.000 downloads and more than 4 million active installations, WooCommerce will continue to grow and is likely the safest bet, when launching your new store with WordPress.
What does WooCommerce offer
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin based on WordPress, therefore making it completely customizable down to the last byte to fit your needs.
Sell anything
It really doesn’t matter what you want to sell, WooCommerce can help you sell it. You can sell physical products in a single country, digital products in another country, sell your own courses or even have people book appointments with you. If someone wants to buy it, WooCommerce enables you to sell it. No restrictions.
Hundreds of themes, extensions and payment gateways
Thanks to its huge market share, the eCommerce platform has attracted a lot of talented developers and designers! Hence there is an endless supply of designs for WooCommerce, different plugins, supported payment gateways and last but most important a lot of helpful people.
Easy setup, installation and integration
The installation is just as simple as any other plugin on WordPress, search for it in your admin panel, click install and then activate. The setup is easily done through their setup wizard, which will walk you through step by step configuring the most important features of your new store. As mentioned before, WooCommerce is the dominant shop solution for WordPress therefor a lot of themes already support it and integration in your website works flawlessly.
Support for all kind of products
It really does not matter what you want to sell. Physical, digital products or even both? You can. Affiliate products? Yep. Variations? Sure. You can even import and export your products if you, for example, use Excel to manage your products. You can restrict shipping options or selling locations for individual products and a lot more. So basically, endless options.
Manage orders and customers
WooCommerce supports customer accounts that your users can create during checkout, allowing them to save their information. Inventory management makes sure you will never oversell a product or even allows you to oversell them if you want to. Orders can be refunded with just one click. Fulfillment can be done directly through your WordPress admin panel, where customers can also be send emails throughout the process. Restricted admin accounts can be created for your staff, in case you don’t handle all the orders on your own and want to restrict staff access.
More, more, more features of WooCommerce
Search Engine Optimization: Built on WordPress’s reliable and SEO friendly platform, your products are just a good discoverable through search as your blog posts or pages. Coupons: Sell more with marketing activities like coupons. These discounts allow you to set a variety of rules. Reports: Stay on top of your business and generate reports that fit your needs.
