WordPress has been a great benefit to many people looking to start a website. It is free, and comes with community support far surpassing other content management systems. One of the best plugins for WordPress is WooCommerce.
This plugin enables you to run a fully-fledged eCommerce store on your own domain, completely free! You get access to invoices, shipping modules, tax and VAT calculations, and much more. There are even hundreds of themes available on wordpress.org/themes where you can browse and try out new designs from inside your admin panel.
WooCommerce compared to other systems
Who are the main competitors you should consider when choosing between WooCommerce or other systems? Well, there are a few other plugins you could download for WordPress, like WP Easy Cart and others, but when comparing features and developer history, it is clear WooCommerce is in a league of its own when it comes to free plugin choices.
You could also opt for Shopify or similar solutions, but again, looking at pricing versus features, it is extremely hard to beat the performance WooCommerce offers customers, and again, it’s free.
Upgrading your WooCommerce plugins
You can upgrade your eCommerce store with plugins that provide even more functionality, in case you want to use WooCommerce Membership features that aren’t built in. This can be a great way to pick and choose exactly how your store should function, while keeping costs to a minimum.
Sometimes these plugins expand on existing concepts, to help users get the most bang for their buck, and other times these upgrades fix certain issues from the original plugin.
Adding new features
But it’s also possible to add completely new features. There are many different plugins by third party developers that enrich the experience your visitors will get when shopping on your store.
There are also tons of plugins that make your administrative job easier, by letting you edit products in bulk or allows WooCommerce Shipping modules to work in your local country, add automatic sharing for social media whenever you create new products and much more.
WooCommerce is considered mature
Since the first version of the plugin was started back in 2011, WooCommerce has seen millions of users downloading and applying the plugin to their sites. This has led to incredible user feedback, and over the years we have seen the team behind the popular eCommerce plugin grow their business and improve the plugin remarkably well.
This also means that bugs in the code are found fast, sometimes within hours of happening, and that is great news for you as a store owner. Providing a secure and safe experience for your customers has never been easier than with using WooCommerce.
Options for addons
Today you can pay for certain WooCommerce features that doesn’t come for free with the main plugin. Automaticc, the developer behind the eCommerce module, offers expanded features and addons that help you take your business to the next level. This model of making more complex systems available at a cost is actually a good thing, since you don’t need to pay any entry fee to start a new store, but as you grow, you can choose which new features to add.
And while we’d love to get everything in the world for free, by having the developers earn money on WooCommerce, it means that they will continue expanding and developing the plugin for years to come, and not just abandon it for a more lucrative plugin.
