How complex can WooCommerce be?

While there are many great options for ecommerce website owners, WooCommerce is undoubtedly the most popular choice. It currently powers 28% of all online stores. Woo makes it relatively easy to get up a store and it’s, of course, a great solution for small shops. But at the same time, WooCommerce is exceptionally extensible and has plenty of powerful functionalities that are behind many highly successful e-businesses and their incredible solutions.

A standard e-store has some common elements: product pages, store pages with lists of products, a user account, a checkout flow, and a shopping cart. WooCommerce makes it very easy to set these up using templates that allows to run any store in a short time. All you need to do is to set up the products and payment processing details.

WooCommerce is super extensible and flexible in this matter. It provides a whole range of filters and actions, as well as the ability to override the templates in a WordPress theme. But, of course, all of this can be done by – at the very least – intermediate-level developers. In fact, WooCommerce is created with devs in mind. It provides a robust framework that experienced developers can use to create any online store. And extend it as needed.

So the real question is: How powerful, complex, and flexible can WooCommerce be?

Powerful and flexible like WooCommerce

Woo allows ecommerce website owners to make money selling digital downloads, tangible goods, and services with a variety of options, plugins, filters, and actions.

You can find many of the customization options in the general settings menu of the WooCommerce plugin. You can personalize the consumer experience both in a detailed and broad sense. Everything can be changed here, from the checkout process to how prices are displayed.

Payment options. And even more

Core WooCommerce plugin supports majority of popular credit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, and even COD. It provides over 100 payment interfaces, including Stripe, Amazon Payments, and others.

For example, the Stripe plugin allows you to accept payments directly in the store, instead of redirecting clients to the payment gateway page. This is a great option, because, according to WooCommerce, keeping customers on the store’s page during the payment process increases conversion rates.

Shipping Options

WooCommerce offers a few shipping options including free, flat rate, and real-time cost calculation. They can also be restricted geographically.

Taxes

Proper collection of taxes is a major source of stress for any ecommerce website owner around the world. WooCommerce offers them a variety of tax options, that can be calculated based on shipping address, billing address, or store location. Product prices can be displayed inclusive of taxes, which means all prices can include the applicable tax rate in a given country.

Inventory tracking

Woo allows online management of store inventory including tracking stock levels, setting up alerts, and automatically stopping sales when inventory runs low.

Discounts and coupons

WooCommerce is very flexible when it comes to coupons and discounts. It allows you to add restrictions on products and product types, as well as restrictions on coupons with a minimum purchase amount. You can also exclude discounted products and block certain email addresses from being used.

Customer emails follow-up

WooCommerce allows you to automate and customize emails that customers receive during the checkout process. The emails can be easily and freely tailored to the needs and preferences of the ecommerce website.

Analytics. Quick access to actionable data

Data is fuel for any ecommerce business. WooCommerce gives you the ability to create, view, and export data on sales, shipping costs, orders, and more in charts or graphs. It also allows you to export data in CSV format, which is necessary for importing into spreadsheets and other applications, as well as to customize reports by product type and category.

Security

WooCommerce is audited by Sucuri. It is a recognized authority and industry leader in all matters related to website security, specializing in reviewing and certifying the security of WordPress and WordPress plugins.

WooCommerce is an extendable, adaptable, and open-source platform, that allows you to scale any store from one product to an unlimited number of goods and to create custom solutions that can make any ecommerce website unique and powerful.

Extensions and Plugins that expand ecommerce website functionalities

The above-mentioned options are functionalities of the core WooCommerce. But, the additional, free and paid, plugins from WooCommerce’s extensions shop can make any ecommerce website truly powerful and successful by enhancing its logistical and technical features.

You can choose from more than 400, free and premium, plugins for just about every function from improving the appearance of the ecommerce website, to bookings appointments, analyzing customer behavior (and thus increasing conversion rates) and managing email campaigns and special offers.

WooCommerce offers hundreds of free and paid plugins that add additional functionalities to the ecommerce website allowing, for example, to:

• Book appointments, which is necessary in many small businesses such as fitness training, hair and beauty salons, barber shops, plumbing and home services, business consulting, and many others
• Create and manage members-only areas on ecommerce websites necessary, for example, to provide certain paid information.
• Manage subscriptions to digital or physical goods, such as home maintenance services or software subscriptions.
• Track shipments.
• Manage volume discounts.
• Create multi-vendor marketplaces.
• Configure group-buy discounts.
• Generate gift certificates for retail stores.
• Manage gift subscriptions.
• Manage ticket sales.
• Track EU VAT rules.

The most popular and recommended WooCommerce plugins

Here are some useful WooCommerce plugins with a brief overview:

Beeketing:

is an all-in-one marketing tool with coupon popup and automated functionalities for cross-selling related products and encouraging customers to buy a certain amount to unlock a premium discount.

Conversio:

is another marketing tool that allows you to manage marketing activities from a single dashboard, including email marketing, viewing product recommendations, reviews, and customer feedback.

MailChimp:

an easy-to-use and one of the most popular plugins for personalized email marketing based on customer behavior on the ecommerce website.

One Page Checkout:

simplifies the checkout process by displaying the product selection and checkout form on the same page. This allows customers to add or remove products from their order, and pay for their goods on a single page.

According to WooCommerce, a complicated checkout process is one of the top reasons of a cart abandonment, so a simple and quick checkout process helps to increase conversion rates.

Product Add-Ons:

allows customers to customize their purchases with, for example, products’ engravings or adding gift messages.

Smart Coupons:

is another marketing tool that allows you to offer discounts on product purchases, for example,  by generating coupons and offering them to your customers via email.

WooCommerce Dropshipping:

allows you to manage the dropshipping process by sending automated emails to the dropshipping suppliers.

WooCommerce Follow-ups:

allows you to reach out to customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, for example, with automated emails.

WooCommerce Multi-Lingual:

allows translating the ecommerce website into customers’ languages and sending them emails in their preferred language

WooCommerce Points and Rewards:

allows tolimit the amount a store customer has to spend to earn points and get discounts.

WooCommerce Product Table:

is an essential tool for majority online stores to showcase their products in a simplified way. It is a great solution for restaurant orders or wholesale stores for example.

WooCommerce Product Search:

atool that simplifies the navigation of a store. It includes statistics about the most popular products, which can serve as a basis for a marketing strategy.

WooCommerce Social Login:

tool to simplify the checkout process with one of the social network accounts.

Summary

The above describes only a fraction of the extensive features of WooCommerce.

Not only does it help to sell everything from digital downloads and physical products to services and even subscriptions anywhere in the world, but it also provides great ways to expand any online store.

It is a great solution for any ecommerce business. Especially if you have sound and profound knowledge of website development techniques to create an ecommerce website best fit for a dreamy and successful business.