Woocommerce Review

Woocommerce is an open-source E-commerce plugin for WordPress. Woocommerce is the most popular opensource eCommerce solution on the Internet. It seems obvious but I think Woocommerce and WordPress work with every PHP version. I do encourage you to take a look at the requirements of other E-commerce solutions. Compared to other E-commerce solutions, woocommerce has the loosest requirements in terms of what is needed to run an online shop website. Creating or modifying a product is like writing a blog post in wordpress.

You can sell digital and tangible products using woocommerce. If you want to sell digital products, you can set the link where the file has been uploaded. This link is only available to buyers.  

A good solution for shop owners

Woocommerce allows you to keep track of your inventory. If you have 3 available items of a shirt, you can enter this so that after 3 sales, “out of stock” automatically appears on the woocommerce product page. Also, a shop owner can add products on its own because the process of creating a product page is like creating a blog post in WordPress. You upload pictures and write your price and descriptions. 

A large & helpful community

The Woocommerce community is the most active among the E-commerce solution. It is very important because when you want to customize your woocommerce installation, you quickly find a solution by googling your problem. This helps you to customize your woocommerce on your own without hiring expensive PHP developers. WordPress users would be happy to know that most of the time things can be fixed by adding codes to functions.php.

Regulation

Woocommerce can automatically determine and manage the VAT tax depending on the location of the buyer. Woocommerce is in compliance with the European Union laws about the choice of the VAT tax depending on the country of the buyer. Woocommerce stores all the data that are required to make an invoice in the EU or USA. It means that the buyer can enter a name, a surname, the name of the company (if any), address, postcode, city, and country. From that, it is possible to generate accurate invoices in PDF format. 

Good Quality plugins

Several times we were surprised that the free and paid plugins of woocommerce work the majority of the times. Also, there are many woocommerce plugins. I think this is the E-commerce solution with the highest number of extension plugins. This includes payment gateways, accounting software gateways, invoicing, emailing, CRM. 

The disadvantages of Woocommerce

The orders are stored in the same table than the WordPress posts in the MySQL database. In other words, there aren’t “order” table in MySQL. That’s why it is better to install Woocommerce on a fresh version of WordPress.

A woocommerce extension plugin can break the WordPress installation. This is a common WordPress issue. 

Woocommerce is really dedicated to selling products online. Then, when you try to use it for something else, you need a bit of customization. Anyways, you always need customization whatever the Ecommerce solution you need. 

Some wordpress themes aren’t compatible with Woocommerce or at least the products / service pages may look bad on some wordpress themes. That’s why it is important to choose a WordPress theme that is REALLY compatible with Woocommerce.

Conclusion

While it is not a perfect solution, Woocommerce is the best open source ecommerce solution.