WooCommerce: Turn your WordPress site into an e-commerce site!

WooCommerce is the most popular tool for the creation of online shops. It turns out to be a complete tool with free general features but also many paid extensions that largely enrich and complete this WordPress service. WooCommerce is especially well suited for SMEs that are wishing to develop their own e-shop and that can stay them tuned with WordPress!

WooCommerce, what is it?

Basically, WordPress is not designed to do e-Commerce. Not that WordPress is unreliable, robust or secure, but because it’s basically not responding to this function. To overcome this reality there is a great extension to add commercial and transactional features: WooCommerce e-commerce extension for WordPress which everyone is talking about.

It must be said that the tool has something to attract since it represents a safeguard solution very open to all those who want to launch their e-commerce store with WordPress. The most interesting is its ease of installation, use, and customization, which makes it accessible to even the most novices.

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In practical terms, what is WooCommerce? 

It is a plugin that allows you to add e-commerce features to your WordPress site, which allows you to enjoy a real online sales performance. The main features are:

• Sales and management of products (catalog, stocks, etc.)
• payment management (Paypal or CB type payment system)
• Management of sales statistics (tax costs, product evaluations, etc.)
• The implementation of marketing actions (promotions, best sales, etc.)

How to do the installation?

Installing the WooCommerce extension does not take longer than other plugins. In 10 seconds, we click on “install” and the files are copied. A second click on “activate” and that’s it! It works! It’s a standard plugin installation via the Extensions / Add menu where you are looking for the latest version “WooCommerce”. Once installed, you will have 2 options “WooCommerce” and “Products”, which will allow you to set the extension and add products to sell respectively. A large number of additional plugins are available to improve your e-shops such as flash sales, product galleries, a countdown, and many more!

Why choose WooCommerce rather than a specialized CMS?

There are many e-Commerce CMS available in the market like and WooCommerce is the most widely used worldwide for the creation and management of online shops. It has a large number of active sites than Magento, Prestashop and Shopify combined!

WooCommerce Features:

• It is a convenient and complete open-source platform: Easy to learn and edit with a large number of features.
• With all the great features of WordPress, you can put them to the benefit of your e-store site.  Such as all WordPress themes you can apply to your e-commerce site. Moreover, WordPress is an efficient content management system; additionally, it is extremely valuable to your e-store website for its SEO!

• It is an evolutionary platform. It will adapt to a definite extent for your growth. 
• WooCommerce plugin is free to use.
• It’s the ideal platform for start-up companies or small budget SMEs. Although the power of this one (with its extensions) will also allow you to realize more ambitious and more developed sites.

How to optimize your e-commerce site?

As I told you earlier, the WooCommerce is a free plugin. You can wholly create your e-commerce store site from the basic features of the module and get pro and clean results. From there, what differentiates your e-commerce site from a competing site, apart from design? Well, everything you put in place to enhance, optimize and make unique!

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin where you enjoy all the features of it and especially those related to SEO, the spearhead for the visibility of your e-commerce site! And yes, it’s not enough to create an attractive online store, it is also required that there should be visitors. Among the countless WordPress plugins, here are them that are essential: SEO WordPress extensions by Yoast and YARPP.

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most complete natural SEO plugin yet. It optimizes each element of the website:

• Meta tags control (title, description, and keywords)
• Management of duplicate content (canonical tag for homepages, category pages, keywords)
• Optimization of the internal mesh of the site
• Management of linked files.

The other interesting plugin is the YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin), a module that will allow you to suggest blog articles that are close to or related to the one the user is reading. But in e-commerce, this one can help to put forward a selection of products to the visitor, according to the user’s behavior on the site; this list will be automatically personalized according to the products which he has already looked at. It can also be useful to monetize your site by displaying display ads on your site (sidebar, the bottom of the pages). Tool playing the game of relevance to wonder, it will be very useful to your SEO.

In addition to the features specific to WordPress, there are e-commerce plugins for improving the WooCommerce plugin.

To only mention a few are:

Touch Carousel: a plugin for the visual enhancement of your products. It allows you to design sliders of several different forms while respecting the responsive design criteria.

Social Login: This plugin allows creating an account via social networks (for example Facebook login).

Viral Coupon: It allows you to enjoy the benefits of social networks to take off your e-commerce site. This plugin offers to automatically offer a coupon to all those who would share, like or tweet on Twitter, Facebook or Google +.

Subscribe to Newsletter: plugin to track and synchronize your subscribers instantly via routing platforms such as Mailchimp for example.

Conclusion:

To conclude, WooCommerce is an e-commerce module that can be very powerful and very interesting for SMEs that have budget constraints. Indeed, to pass on Prestashop, it is not the same price. Nevertheless, even if it is free to download and very acceptable for basic use, you will eventually need to add features and therefore buy extensions. Although the interface is complete and well structured, the growth of your e-commerce store will ultimately depend on the administration and optimization of it!

I hope you like reading this blog. If you have any doubts or confusion regarding the e-commerce site, please don’t hesitate to write us in comments.