In this lucrative market, a seller looks for effective sales of their products. Previously, there were very few channels where the sellers were able to promote their sales by giving away brochures within a particular area, announcing the product launch on the radio or the Television based on their pocket’s strength, but now the times have changed. It is the era of digitalization, and every little economic activity takes place on the online platform.

The Internet has connected millions of miles in the distance of minutes. The purchase of a product is just a few clicks away. Punch those clicks, and you have your product delivering to you in a couple of days. Such speed and ease of process are a consequence of the e-commerce industry taking the front stage. Out of the various tools available to create an e-commerce website, WooCommerce holds the baton for being the widely used e-commerce plugin. It is an initiative by WordPress to make e-commerce website-building easier than ever. WooCommerce is one of the many e-commerce tools, but it’s the most prominent of them all because of the advantages it has over them. Let’s find out the reasons to choose WooCommerce.

Popularity & FOSS

Popularity does not always depend on the duration of the product in the market. Sometimes, a technology may receive fame based on its pros’. Woocommerce is popular because of its functionalities and flexibilities. According to BuiltWith, a total of 3,876,748 websites are using WooCommerce.

If you look at the progressing WooCommerce versions, then you might be able to understand the speed of their progress. You can check about their releases via this link, where they’ve briefed about every release. 

https://woocommerce.wordpress.com/tag/releases/

All these versions are not the intellectual property of the parent company or woocommerce. They belong to various developers, connected with the company, for years together.  

In addition to diverse versions, the technology also appeals to the rational side of developers. Every cognitive being would want to limit their spending. Woocommerce provides you the gratification of working with technology, free of cost. In this free version, you can power your shop till the good edges. Once your business reaches certain edges, you may hire the WordPress development company to extend the functionality. Numerous plugins and themes can help your store and take it to the next level.

WooCommerce Customization

A child’s behavior is a result of the influence it receives from its parents and others around it. Using this analogy, we can conclude that Woocommerce is just as flexible as its parent technology, WordPress. 

WooCommerce provides you various actions and filters that are more than enough to customize any type of e-commerce flow. To create the product from frontend and take the charges based on the selection is also less time taking and expensive compared to other well-known platforms such as Magento, Shopify, OpenCart.

WooCommerce Features & Extensibility

WooCommerce sells physical, virtual, or downloadable products. It is easy for the admin of WooCommerce to manage different types of products. You can add unlimited products not only to the products but the variation of products, users, and orders as well. WooCommerce has various free themes that can make your store attractive.  

WooCommerce provides the default import and export facility, which will help those people who are good on the excel sheet but not much friendly with admin panels.

Once the products are in the system, we need the shipping features to ship the products. WooCommerce provides the option of pickup from the store, local delivery, and shipping with customer location.

In addition to that, shipping rates are very easy to apply to the store. It allows you to define the specific rates on every product and their variant. You can calculate the rates and show the summary on the checkout page.

WooCommerce Scalability

Scalability is a combination of three things, i.e., traffic, code, and server hardware. On any given day, the traffic on your online store could be manageable, but on the day of a sale, it could cross an estimated limit. It is one of the major factors that influence the scalability of your e-commerce website and can then affect your revenue generation. On average, your WooCommerce based e-commerce website can handle up to thousands of transactions per minute-which is possible with the help of scheduled hosting support and maintenance. Another thing you must keep in mind-as a store owner-is that as your store grows larger, you will need a team to support the daily functions. The efficiency of the in-house or hired team can have a huge impact on your e-commerce website. The structure of the code can impact your revenue generation via the e-commerce store.

WooCommerce Security

Payment gateways are a part of the online shopping experience, and if they aren’t secure, then your customer will leave the cart half-way and navigate to a more secure website. To avoid such diversion, you must make sure that your WooCommerce website is up-to-date and secure. Here are a few points that you must follow to ensure a secure WooCommerce website.

  • Regular Updates And Database Prefix: Updating is a way of staying ahead of any maintenance related issues. As an e-commerce website developer, you must be in sync with the latest versions of the software you’re working with and the plugins you’ve induced. You must note that before starting the process of updating, you must take a backup of the database and the source code. Also, it is advisable to use a table prefix containing strings and numbers instead of the default wp_. 
  • Strong Username and Password: More often than not, developers use admin as their username, and the password is also on the same lines. Such a lack of judgment could result in trouble later in the future. Easy username and password are the reason for websites being hacked and going haywire. To avoid external interference, it is advisable to use a username and password with a ‘strong’ rating. 

  • SSL Certification: An SSL certificate enables an encrypted connection and provides authentication for a website. Since an e-commerce website needs a payment gateway at their checkout page, such certification is essential. You can force the user to go through the SSL checkout via this setting method; WooCommerce -> Settings and enable Force Secure Checkout.

  • Disable the Edit rights: WordPress provides the feature of changing the source code from the backend, and it is quite useful on a certain level. You can edit the code any time and from anywhere. You don’t require any server details to access the source code. This feature can also make the security little less because if the admin is hacked by someone, then they will have the source code access. Hackers can have access to the database, so to remove that, you just need to add one single line in the code. 

define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, true );

  • Do not allow Pingbacks and Trackbacks: Pingbacks and Trackbacks slow down the server and send automated spam notifications to your website in terms of the e-mail or comments. To avoid this you just need to add a couple of lines in the .htacess. 

<Files xmlrpc.php> 
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
</Files>

WooCommerce & SEO Compatibility

For a website to reach its niche, it is essential for search engines to rank it. WordPress websites are search engine friendly and have a higher ranking, which enables the website to reach a larger population than estimated. Tools of marketing, such as SEO and PPC, come in handy when trying to pitch the sales of your website. As a shiny new website, your goal must be to focus on SEO and later on PPC. WordPress allows an SEO friendly URL and features of the custom SEO URL.

Wrapping Up

In a nutshell, if you are planning to sell your products on the live store, then WooCommerce should be your first choice because you can start your store with a reasonable budget, and it is available 24*7 days. WooCommerce provides you with wonderful features, such as:

  • Inexpensive – It is free to a certain level which is enough for starting up stores. 

  • Easy to use and customize – It is very user-friendly among GUI, and Customization is really easy and possible for every type of product or e-commerce flow.

  • Scalable – It is highly scalable as we have discussed over this article.

  • Security – There are simple precautions that your Development team needs to take care of, and your system will be fair enough in terms of security.

  • SEO – The system will take the boost by using a couple of free plugins.