How WooCommerce Integration Will
Help Businesses Expand in 2020

As the vaccines continue to push through the trials, reopenings will resurrect businesses across the globe. Covid-19 has made it evident that having an online store is as essential as having a website. Due to the disruptions in the supply chain and the volatile consumer behavior, many brick and mortar stores are moving online, and their WordPress websites can play a crucial role in making the transition smooth and affordable.

WordPress powers almost 37.8% of the websites on the internet. While big names like Forbes, Mashable, BuzzMachine, Sony, and eBay use WordPress, it remains an all-time favorite for small businesses. It is also the market leader in CMS solutions, with 63.5% of the websites using it owing to its versatility and ease of customization. The good thing for SMBs is that they can easily convert their WP website into an eCommerce store using a plugin like all the other things. WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that turns your website into a full-fledged online store.

This article will see how WooCommerce can help businesses expand their digital footprint and business horizons. Dive in deeper to explore its features, advantages, and benefits in detail:

Why You Should Prefer WooCommerce If You Already Have A WordPress Website (Or Not)

When building an eCommerce store, businesses have many options right from building it on completely customized platforms using Java frameworks, PHP, Python, MEAN Stack, and Ruby on Rails. However, using specialized eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or WooCommerce lowers the development time and cost. As most SMBs look for a budget-friendly option, WooCommerce emerges as the clear winner as it is free to install and extends excellent customization capabilities. Also, it is the most-friendly option for SMBs.

If you are a small business, who’s already running your website on WordPress, the transition to WooCommerce is pretty simple. You need to install a plugin! It provides you with complete control over the applications and functionalities. No matter if you are selling subscription-based digital products, charge for in-person services through appointments and reservations, or physical merchandise, WooCommerce is a perfect choice.

The Top Features and Advantages Of WooCommerce Stores

In this section, we will look at the features most relevant to all business sizes. This includes both technical and marketing aspects of running an online store. It is an open-source technology, and it will continue to evolve with the inputs from its global development community.

Search Engine Optimization

Since WordPress is SEO friendly, WooCommerce gives you an upper edge in online visibility compared to building a store from scratch using other technologies. Search engines find it easy to crawl and index WooCommerce websites, and it also enables assigning meta tags to optimize your web store for target keywords. This includes:

• Meta descriptions for the website and web pages
• URLs
• Alt tags for images/videos, and
• Elements like tables

On the other hand, WordPress CMS allows you to attract traffic with blogging. It also integrates well with the landing pages. All in all, it takes care of both on-page and off-page SEO in a seamless manner.

Analytics

It allows you to access a variety of business intelligence (BI) insights like product purchase trends, the total number of orders received in a given period, individual customer behavior, and order fulfillment statistics without installing any other plugins for apps separately. Most of the other platforms will require you to pay an additional subscription charge for analytics, but WooCommerce offers a wide range of tools pre-built. While its analytics tools are quite powerful and intuitive, you can also integrate WooCommerce with external tools like Google Analytics.

Security

Despite being open-source, WooCommerce comes with cutting-edge security provisions.Automattic, the three billion dollar company, powers this plugin, and it’s pretty reliable. Establishing security is essential for both the customers and the store to run the operations smoothly. It undergoes time to time updation of security protocols automatically. On the other hand, using any other platform would require you to pay a recurring fee for security applications. Thus, it lowers the cost of ownership without compromising your business interests.

Flexibility

This is another reason for choosing WooCommerce. You can make changes in the product listing and descriptions on the go. Depending on the selling season, you can make quick changes in the pricing. It is also excellent for creating mobile-friendly online stores. It allows you to set up multiple shipping zones as well as shipping classes to suit your business requirements. WooCommerce also offers multilingual support for over 50 languages.

Customizability

You can use both free and paid extensions to complement the existing functionalities of your website. This includes payment gateways, BI, accounting, Martech, and other additional services. You can integrate 100+ payment gateways. You can combine with the thousands of themes and plugins available for WordPress and many extensions explicitly built for eCommerce are also available. Its modularity helps businesses in rapidly expanding their digital footprint and maintain system stability at the same time.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the top priorities of all online stores. WooCommerce allows you to fetch your visitors’ email ID with Opt-in forms. It also tracks their activity to generate insights for running email marketing campaigns based on user behavior. Cart abandonment email series is an evergreen tactic for online stores, and it provides you with extensive data for running email campaigns. Its backend also supports email management and setting up RSS feeds.

Scalability

WooCommerce is a very versatile platform as it evolves with your business. It allows listing one million products, which makes it a perfect fit for everybody. Among the top one million websites using eCommerce tech, 29% use WooCommerce.

WordPress.org alone offers around 980 plugins for WooCommerce. On the other hand, over 426 official WooCommerce plugin extensions are listed on WooCommerce(.)com that can help you scale up your web store on the go.

We advise you to hire professional WooCommerce integration services despite the plugin being free. The reasons behind this are very simple: It requires you to install paid plugins for inventory management, shipping, order processing, marketing, accounting, and reporting. Choosing the right ones for your business is essential, while maintenance is entirely in your ballpark. The auto-updates for WordPress will require you to keep up with them as lagging may stop certain functionalities from working properly. Instead of working on all these portions on your own and reinventing the wheel, seeking expert advice will reduce the turnaround time and prove to be more profitable in the longer run.

Over to You

In this article, we gave you insights into how launching your online store with WooCommerce will help expand your business during and post the covid-19 pandemic. Here are some statistics on its usage across the industry:
An estimated17.5% of websites powered by WordPress use WooCommerce.
Around 3,876,748 websites are currently using WooCommerce.
WooCommerce enjoys a 29.24% market share of the online stores.

It is evident that WooCommerce is an excellent value for money platform, but what makes it even more attractive for businesses is the fact that it’s both open source and backed by a credible organization. We hope that you find this article on utilizing WooCommerce to expand your business helpful for 2020 and beyond.

To know more, contact integration experts now!