WooCommerce Overview
Best single platform to run both an ecommerce and an affiliate site under one roof. But the true ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify sell better, but not by much. However, choosing it is all about your needs because no platform is fool-proof for every business. Hopefully, after you read my WooCommerce review, you can decide easily.
Pros
- WordPress is the best platform for SEO
- 1-Click Selling App Available
- Lots of WordPress experts available
Cons
- Good hosting can be pricey
- Have to deal with blame game for troubleshooting
- Virtually zero support
- You need extensions for simple stuff
WooCommerce Features
Woocommerce allows unlimited products and product variants. Digital products are included out of the box as well. You can set when and how you want customers to receive them. However, you’ll need to check in with your web host to see if the plan you chose can carry what you want to sell.
SEO Tools
WooCommerce’s code is optimized for SEO. It is integrated with WordPress.
WordPress has so many SEO features and plugins. Some of them are a flexible URL structure, generate sitemap.xml, canonical URL tags, meta descriptions, and blogs.
The only thing I don’t like is that you need plugins for simple things like meta descriptions. And the more plugins you have on your site, the more security and load time issues you might face.
What I love is the blog. WordPress is a CMS after all. It’s impressive. You can create a new user/author, categorize posts, put tags, optimize images, and the design is intuitive.
In terms of content design and longform page layout, WordPress is ahead of the competition by a mile. You can make pages look really sexy with a page builder like Elementor. Good looking pages are easier to promote and generate links, which is crucial for SEO.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
Shopping cart abandonment is a big problem in ecommerce; visitors often place products in carts, leave the website and never come back it to again. People have other things to worry about.
Abandoned cart recovery is not one of the features of WooCommerce, but you can set it up with Conversio. Aside from its abandoned cart feature, I like that Conversio has a lot of segmentation out of the box. This allows you personalize emails based on location, your relationship with the buyer, those who have invested in your store, and inactive ones. That can increase your conversion by more than 100%.
There are other free and paid apps as well that you can use for more options.
Site Search
If you have a lot of products, your customers will be faced with a slow search or many search results that sometimes aren’t what they are searching for. Sometimes relevant results are mixed with irrelevant ones. Other times, it’s either of those. Fortunately, there are a few extensions that add more relevancy and faster search results.
Real-Time Shipping Rates And Tracking
Providing real-time shipping rates is important. If you have a flat fee instead and the actual rate is lower or higher, you’ll lose.
This is one of the places where you pay. I don’t like that you have to pay for this.
WooCommerce allows you to show real-time rates with only paid extensions. Most start out at $79 per shipping carrier. That means if you are using more than one, you’d be paying that times the number you’re using. Or you use a multi-purpose shipping rates plugin. Those are around $200.
It’s not so nice that you have to pay for these things that most true platforms give for free.
Pricing
WooCommerce is an open-source WordPress plugin that’s free to download. It does not charge transaction fees, and it doesn’t regulate bandwidth or storage (your site’s hosting will do that).
That doesn’t mean, however, that WooCommerce is free of all expenses. First, to maintain a WooCommerce site, you must purchase hosting for your WordPress.com site.
And to get the best use out of the platform, you’ll have to spring for various add-ons and extensions, which range in price from free to hundreds of dollars. However, because many of these extensions are one-time purchases, you’ll probably come out paying slightly less than you would with some other popular options, such as Shopify.
