While eCommerce plugins for WordPress are nothing new, WooCommerce is a plugin that was released in 2011 and has since taken the WordPress eCommerce world by storm. WooCommerce is known for its excellent stability, support, themes, extensions and usability. And not only that, WooCommerce is developed and maintained by WooThemes — one of the best known and most established premium WordPress theme companies. This means that you can be sure that the developer won’t just randomly abandon the project. And if you’ve used WordPress plugins before, you’ve probably come across a lot of abandoned plugins. By minimizing that sort of risk upfront, you’re saving yourself from the potential of needing to totally redo your store at some point down the line when you need an important feature that the abandoned plugin doesn’t have due to lack of developer commitment and attention.
So how does WooCommerce actually work? It’s a WordPress plugin that works specifically with certain designated themes from WooThemes. As of the writing of this review, there are 16 themes that work on a plug-and-play basis with the WooCommerce plugin. Of course, due to the non-compiled nature (meaning that you can easily edit the source code) of all WordPress and PHP scripts, you can actually implement any commerce theme with WooCommerce. But to use a theme not included in the official 16 themes would involve a fair amount of custom php and html/css work — something that you don’t want to try unless you have access to someone with that sort of expertise. All that being said, the 16 official WooCommerce themes are great looking themes with all of the necessary templates to run a successful web store.
In addition to themes, WooCommerce has almost 50 extensions. Extensions for WooCommerce are similar to the concept for plugins for WordPress. In other words, the WooCommerce extensions simply add to the capabilities of the WooCommerce system. For instance, if you want to add things like more advanced PayPal processing (basic PayPal processing is included), various shipping cost calculations, processors like 2co and so on, you can do so easily with the WooCommerce extensions. This sort of extensibility really sets WooCommerce apart from the competition.
If you’re looking for a great alternative to a paid service like Shopify, definitely take WooCommerce into consideration. It’s a low cost, highly efficient and easy-to-use way to run a WordPress web store.
