Ecommerce is now a reality and inevitable to make your business a roaring success. But you need a feature-rich ecommerce platform for various tasks for running a successful business online. The selection of the best ecommerce platform has a direct impact on the scalability and long-term growth of your digital businesses.
There are multiple options available such as Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, and more. This abundance of available options sometimes makes it harder for an online retailer to make an informed decision regarding what ecommerce platform is the most suitable. The most probable answer is WooCommerce. When hiring an IT firm offering WooCommerce development services, you are certainly going to have a big ROI.
In this blog, we will be discussing some important benefits that you get from a WooCommerce solution. But before we move ahead to dwell on this, first we look at what WooCommerce is.
What is WooCommerce and How Popular Is It?
WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress that helps businesses create and manage online stores. It is specially designed for small and medium-sized online enterprises which are using WordPress. Launched in 2011, it became rapidly popular due to many advantages such as easy to use and install and more.
How popular WooCommerce is? Let’s look at some facts and figures because they neither lie nor exaggerate.
- WooCommerce is used by 7.4% of all websites globally and over 28.19% of all online stores are powered by it.
- With 23.43% of the market share, WooCommerce is a leading ecommerce platform, followed by Shopify with 18.19% and Magento with 8.7%.
- It has over 30,000 downloads per day and collectively it has 123 million downloads with downloading trends accelerating quickly with every passing way.
- WooCommerce has 980 plugins and 1,000 themes at its disposal which is partly the reason for its wild popularity.
These statistics show that WooCommerce is a prominent platform in the ecommerce world and is helping businesses perform various business tasks with ease and confidence.
Now, we will dig further to show you 10 reasons why you should prefer investing in hiring a WooCommerce Development firm to ensure sustained profit and scalability.
Top 10 Reasons That Convince Businesses Invest in WooCommerce Development Services
Here are the 10 most important reasons why you should invest in WooCommerce development.
Reason #1: Open-Source and Free:
Resources matter. The fact WooCommerce is open and free is one of the most obvious reasons for its popularity. Other platforms have expensive subscription fee that makes it harder for some startups to bear.
WooCommerce enables you to download stores free of charge and add themes and plugins as per your requirements. You can enhance the functionalities of your online store with these plugins and free WooCommerce themes.
Reason#2: Easy Customizability Through Endless Theme Options:
WooCommerce offers easy customization to personalize your online store as per your brand personality and business requirements. Other website builders don’t provide such flexibility. This is the second reason for the popularity of WooCommerce development.
You can tailor the design, layout, and functionality of the online store with both free and paid premium WooCommerce themes. For instance, there are more than three dozen ready-to-use themes to select from to adjust your online as per your requirements. They offer a large variety of options such as some supporting responsive design and others allowing you to build the fastest WordPress themes or WooCommerce Checkout pages and more.
WooCommerce is a plug-in of WordPress, therefore, you will have all the functionalities and customization options of WordPress along with its additional features. The paid version of themes comes with specialized support from the theme’s developer which makes it easy for you to offer a personalized user experience. You can also modify CSS, colors, and code, which makes your online store more appealing and attractive, thereby enhancing website traffic.
Reason#3: A Wide-Range of Features:
The extensive set of features that WooCommerce offers is one of the most important reasons for the widespread acceptance of this ecommerce platform. It offers all you need to run a successful online business.
Here is a list of some features offered by WooCommerce:
- Product Management
- Shopping Cart
- Payment Gateway
- Shopping Options
- Tax Calculation
- Order Management
- Coupons and Discounts
- Product Reviews
- Customer Accounts
- Extensions and Integrations
Reason #4: Convenient Scalability:
Every business aims at future growth and expansion. So, when you are boiling down to a particular ecommerce platform, the scalability of that platform should occupy your mind to ensure uninterrupted and cost-effective expansion in online business operations.
WooCommerce comes at the top when it comes to offering easily available scalability. With its plugins, you can expand your business from selling a few products to thousands of them and serving a few customers per week to hundreds of them per day.
WooCommerce offers this scalability based on multiple features such as store sizes, performance optimization, server scalability, third-party integration, scalable payment gateways, multisite functionality, load balancing, and more. WooCommerce can help you meet your increasing demand without extra effort and compromising its performance. That is one of the major factors responsible for its increasing deployment.
Reason#5: Robust, Comprehensive, and Adaptative Cybersecurity:
The security of online stores is the topmost priority of every store owner. When there is payment and transaction, there should be a system for robust and adaptive security mechanisms for protecting user information from unauthorized access and malicious use.
WooCommerce provides its customers with a level of security that can easily be termed as reliable and robust. Through regular updates, SSL support, PCI compliance, secure payment gateways, user account security, data backup and recovery, firewall protection, security audits, vulnerability scans, and more features, WooCommerce has become a secure and dependable platform to run ecommerce businesses.
Apart from these regular built-in WordPress and WooCommerce features, you can deploy new security plugins with the help of WooCommerce Development company to add more layers of security to your online store.
Reason#6: Search Engine Optimization
SEO is key to remaining competitive and visible in the overcrowded ecommerce market. If your website is not optimized, it would not appear on the top of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). And if you are not visible, your online store will remain deprived of visitors. The SEO-friendly store is the first precondition to running a successful online business.
Fortunately, WordPress and WooCommerce have been developed in complete compliance with Google SEO’s rules which makes it easy to optimize your store. It runs on a code that is optimized for SEO and it offers impressive options for customized URLs. Hence, you can make your online store optimized for relevant keywords and phrases.
You can also customize pages, product URLs, meta descriptions, and more to enhance the visibility and ranking of your online store. Other features that help in SEO are as followings:
- Meta Tag Optimization,
- XML sitemaps
- Breadcrumb Navigation
- Rick Snippets
- Mobile responsiveness
- Page speed optimization
- Image optimization,
- SEO plugin integrations
- Canonical URLs
The utilization of these WooCommerce features enables you to improve the ranking and visibility of your online store, thereby attracting new visitors and enhancing the revenue and sale of your ecommerce business.
Reason#7: Huge Library of Plugins or Extensions:
WooCommerce offers a vast set of plug-ins and extensions that adds more layers of functionalities to your store. It has more than 400 official extensions or plugins for shopping, analytics, shipping, inventory management, accounting, marketing, reporting, and more. To make your life easier, you can search WooCommerce Library through filters or categories.
These extensions can easily be integrated into your online store. Keep in mind that if you develop these extensions from a web development agency, it would cost you hundreds of dollars but WooCommerce can help you integrate these plugins at a cost of hardly $20 to $30. That is certainly a cost-effective way to enhance functionalities.
Reason #8: Mobile Responsive Design:
Mobile responsiveness has become a key to running a successful ecommerce because more than 86% of the world population uses mobile phones to access the internet. WooCommerce provides various features and options to make your online store mobile responsive. You can ensure many advantages when it comes to mobile optimization of your online store such as
- Responsive design
- Mobile-optimized user interface
- Improved use experience
- Faster page load time
- Touch-friendly interaction
- Mobile checkout optimization
- Mobile Search Engine Optimization
- Cross Platform Consistency
- Mobile notification
- Mobile analytics
By deploying the WooCommerce plugin, you can ensure that your online store is accessible across devices in particular smartphones and tablets. Ensuing improved user experience would help you engage more customers and provide them enjoying a shopping experience across various devices and platforms.
Reason #9: Community and Support:
Out of the many advantages of using WooCommerce development to develop an ecommerce store is the active, vast, and vibrant WooCommerce and WordPress community. There are 6.7 million WooCommerce users worldwide who have invaluable resources, tutorials, plug-ins, and themes. This vibrant WooCommerce can help you in many ways such as
- Availability of documentation and resources
- Access to plugins and theme ecosystems
- Support of WooCommerce,
- Regular updates and security patches
- User feedback and improvement
- Training and courses
- Collaboration and partnership opportunities
Hence, by participating in different activities of the WooCommerce community, you can tap into the collective experience of WooCommerce developers and designers. It offers an extensive network of resources and knowledge sharing which help you make your online store responsive to emerging trends and technologies.
Reason#10: Built-in Reporting and Analytics:
You can enjoy many built analytics and reporting tools through WooCommerce that help you make an informed decision. Through these tools and resources, you can gain invaluable insights regarding customer behaviors, performance of the store, and sales trends which comes in handy in designing and implementing personalized user experience.
You can gain various reports as well such as sales reports, order reports, product reports, customer reports, coupons and discount reports, export and customizations, and more. You can use information gained from these tools to make data-driven decisions that help you can a long way in ensuring growth and expansion in your digital business.
Wrapping Up:
WooCommerce has become the choice of online businesses for multiple reasons. It is a leading ecommerce WordPress-based plugin that helps businesses establish and maintain an online store to accommodate their varying business needs and requirements.
Multiple reasons make a convincing case that you should invest in WooCommerce development. It is open-source and free and it offers an extensive set of functionalities and features. The analytics tools and reporting help you make informed decisions. The robust cybersecurity, vibrant community, its support, mobile responsive design, Search Engine Optimization, and the like benefits are factors responsible for the growing investment of IT firms in WooCommerce development.