Now more than ever, shoppers are going to the web for their purchases. These days, we can order pretty much anything online, from clothes and electronics to software and even groceries.
Customers appreciate the convenience of making purchases from the comfort of their homes 24 hours a day. There are several other reasons why more and more people prefer shopping online including better prices, wider variety, easier to compare prices and so on. It’s for these reasons, every major retailer is now offering their wares online instead of just in the shops.
Online shops also offer many advantages to their owners, mostly that they are cheaper to maintain. In contrast to brick-and-mortar businesses, there’s no need to rent space, take out insurance, or any of the other things involved in running an in-store business.
These days, you can open up shop online for the price of a hosting package. In addition, if you are selling digital products or choose dropshipping, you don’t even need storage room and can run your business from anywhere in the world.
Plus, technology has essentially leveled the playing field. An increasing number of high-quality and affordable eCommerce solutions have enabled almost anyone to get started selling stuff online. No wonder more and more business owners opt to do so.
To help you decide which solution is best for your online WordPress shop, we will have a look at four of the biggest players in the eCommerce game: WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
Together, they power about half of all online shops and in the following, we will examine their strengths, weaknesses, and what purposes they are most suited for. All of these eCommerce solutions offer easy integration with your WordPress site. In the end, we want you to be able to make an informed decision about which solution to use for your own online shop.
Ready to rock ‘n’ roll? Let’s dive in.
WooCommerce
The first one on the list is by far the largest of the bunch. The WordPress plugin WooCommerce powers almost 41 percent of all online shops. That doesn’t just make it the most popular eCommerce solution for the WordPress platform but the most popular eCommerce solution, period.
In 2015 alone, WooCommerce was downloaded more than 7 million times. In the same year, its parent company WooThemes was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.
Pretty impressive, right? Now, let’s talk about what makes WooCommerce so popular.
Strengths
The eCommerce plugin has a lot going for itself:
Cost effective – WooCommerce’s first advantage is its price tag: it’s free. You can download it completely free in the WordPress directory. Since WordPress is also free, you can build a full-fledged online shop for the cost of a hosting package. While some advanced features might be paid (more on that below) most extensions are quite affordable and, most importantly, only need to be purchased once and not subscribed to.
Easy to setup and use – Since we are talking about a WordPress plugin, setup is really easy. Download, install, and activate. After that, a setup wizard will guide you through the beginner-friendly setup. Once you are done, creating and managing products is as easy as other WordPress content. Detailed settings also give you full control over your shop. (For more information, read our WooCommerce tutorial for beginners.)
Feature rich – Users of WooCommerce can sell both physical and digital goods as well as affiliate goods. You can set up product variations, multiple shipping options, and payment gateways as well as coupons, take advantage of full inventory and order management and get detailed reporting.
Highly extendable – Besides the standard features, the eCommerce solution offers a plethora of free and paid extensions. For example, you can add PDF invoices, multi-language capabilities, membership functionality, additional payment options and much more. The price range for paid extensions is from free to $249 for a single-site license.
Customizable – WooCommerce integrates well with most themes so you are free to choose your own design from thousands of possibilities. There are also special WooCommerce-ready themes as well as child themes. Since everything is based on WordPress, with some technically chops you can basically customize everything and the plugin itself is also very developer friendly.
Well supported – The support structure behind WooCommerce is great. Users profit from regular updates and multiple support channels (WordPress forums, documentation, email support from WooThemes). It is also very well established, which makes it easier to find affordable hired help.
SEO and marketing – With WordPress in the background, users get to enjoy the search engine optimization of the platform and can take advantage of powerful SEO plugins like Yoast SEO. Most importantly though, the platform is a blogging powerhouse which shops can use for content marketing.
Full ownership – Finally, one of the main benefits of WooCommerce is that with a self-hosted WordPress website your online shop is fully yours and nobody else’s. With everything located on your own server, you have complete control over what happens with your shops and can always take it with you when you change providers.
Read More >> https://torquemag.io/2017/04/the-decision-makers-guide-to-wordpress-ecommerce/
Hello NICK SCHÄFERHOFF, Paid Yoast features are not worth the cost! I get a lot of the same for free from INK for All
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