Woocommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress store creation plugin and also one of the most used ways to create an e-commerce site worldwide. With this fantastic plugin, it is possible to create a complete online store and sell your products on the internet through a very intuitive and easy to manage the environment.

Starting a virtual business and being able to sell your products is the dream of many, but numerous challenges can arise and compromise the experience of creating a successful business on the internet. At first glance, it may seem very complicated to set up a virtual store, but it is important not to give up.

What is an E-commerce site?

E-commerce is an abbreviation in English for Electronic Commerce, or as we call it, Electronic Commerce. And it refers to any type of commerce that uses electronic devices and platforms, such as computers and cell phones, to market products or services.

If you have purchased anything over the internet, then you must have heard something about e-commerce. In this context, the internet provides really incredible feats, facilitating people's daily lives and connecting them to the whole world.

Currently, we can do everything on the internet, like talking to a friend who lives on the other side of the world or buying a birthday present for a family member. It is in this aspect that virtual commerce is gaining strength. With each passing day, many people are opting for new opportunities, and creating a virtual store is one of them.

Basically, we can define e-commerce as a virtual environment for the sale of products, where anyone can have a virtual store. This means that e-commerce is nothing more than an online platform, allowing any merchant to advertise and advertise products through a website or online store.

In other words, the user can create a virtual store, make products available, and manage their payments, all without leaving home. For a visitor to your online store, just click on the desired product, buy, and pay, without any headache. That sounds very interesting, doesn't it?

E-commerce is a virtual store similar to a physical store. In this way, e-commerce has products, and address (which is the domain), numerous payment options (such as credit card, debit card, etc.), and a space to track your deliveries. Given this, we can say that e-commerce acts as a facilitator in both parts, allowing you to advertise your products online, and at the same time, giving comfort to the customer of your virtual store.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source platform for e-commerce, developed for WordPress, and can be installed easily in the form of a plugin.

WooCommerce emerged in 2008 from the idea of ​​3 Automattic employees (the company responsible for WordPress) and today it has a multidisciplinary development team that includes developers, designers, and marketing, all to make WooCommerce even better.

To get an idea of ​​the popularity, WooCommerce is an e-commerce platform used by about 21% of online stores worldwide. And being the most popular platform in the world, the responsibility is enormous, it is not for nothing that it is audited by Sucuri, a company specialized in digital security and one of the most important in the industry.

It is worth noting that integration with WordPress is excellent, which makes it possible to create a complete website and a virtual store in the same environment, all in a simple and practical way with the same standard as WordPress. Despite being a plugin, that is, an extension that adds extra functionality to WordPress, WooCommerce is quite complete and leaves nothing to be desired when it comes to e-commerce.

Some features of WooCommerce:

• It is Open Source (the code is free for everyone who wants to know it);

• It allows embedding a complete checkout on your website;

• Support for product reviews and reviews ;

• Allows categorization and creation of filters for product searches;

• It is possible to integrate with the Post Office ;

• Unlimited products and images;

• Accepts national payment methods (national cards, etc.);

• Offers integration with PayPal, and many others;

• You can customize measurements, currency, and other information for your store;

• Allows you to create customized plugins to add new features;

• Very complete SEO resources ;

• Extremely safe and reliable (audited by Sucuri);

• It is completely free.

It is important to note that some of the features and integrations mentioned above depend on the installation of other plugins that add extra features to WooCommerce.

Advantages of WooCommerce

As you could see earlier, WooCommerce has several interesting features and is packed with important features that assist in the creation and administration of a complete and dynamic online store. The reasons for using WordPress with this plugin are many, as we will see below:

Easy management

Most marketers are not experts in programming or related, they want to have their own online business, without needing a third party to manage that part. Given this, people end up thinking that creating a virtual store is really a nightmare. In this regard, WooCommerce can solve this problem, and doing it in an elegant way.

Once installed and fully functional, WooCommerce becomes a tool with innumerable qualities, among them is the easy management of resources. In WooCommerce, everything is done through the administration panel, adding a product is very simple, and managing your sales is even simpler.

So, if you want simple virtual commerce, easy to handle, then WooCommerce is a strong candidate for this. And no, it is not heavy, it is very light by the way, it runs quickly within WordPress.

Efficient total control

For users, the biggest challenge of virtual commerce is to control everything, how to register products or manage sales. In this context, WooCommerce enables intelligent and efficient control of all the features offered, such as adding new plugins, managing products, changing or registering prices, selecting payment methods, and checking orders that have not yet been shipped.

Best of all, all modifications can be made through the WooCommerce administration panel, without complex codes or confusing interfaces.

Various payment options

Providing different payment methods can make your business more flexible, and the best, customers will be more satisfied with it. Therefore, WooCommerce has the option to select several payment methods to integrate your online store. Pretty cool, isn't it?

In WooCommerce, this integration is very simple, without the need for time-consuming bureaucracies, and without having to contact any bank for that. This is one of the main strengths of the platform.

WooCommerce offers payments by credit card, PayPal , among many other options. In addition, any option not available natively can be made through the installation of plugins.

Various features

With WooCommerce, we can integrate several other plugins, allowing a multitude of new features for your online store. In this regard, WooCommerce offers integration with various digital marketing plugins, discount coupons, freight calculations (post offices and others), purchase manager, data security, among many other things. It is a Premium store, but totally free.

Safety

In virtual commerce, we cannot forget about data security, being one of the essential items, especially when it comes to online banking transactions. At this point, WooCommerce is a really smart choice, as it offers different information security supports. Based on this, we list some advantages related to data security offered by it, they are:

• Audited by an external company;

• Integration with security plugins;

• Secure payment gateway integration;

• Integration of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates;

• Frequent updates to correct errors and vulnerabilities.

How to install WooCommerce

It is very easy to install WooCommerce on your WordPress site, just follow the step by step below:

1. Access your WordPress admin panel, navigate to the Plugins menu > Add New.

2. Look for the “WooCommerce” plugin in the search bar and then click the "Install" button

3. Immediately after activating the plugin you will be taken to the WooCommerce configuration page. Fill in all the information requested on the screen and then click "Let's go".

4. In this step, WooCommerce should display the page for configuring payments. Include the requested data from your PayPal account if you wish to receive it through this payment company. Rest assured, if you want to use other companies just do the configuration later. Click "Continue" again to proceed to the next step.

5. Now, a screen related to sending options should appear in your browser. Don't forget to set up delivery methods or add shipping fees (which can be fixed or free). If you want to add a front-end calculation plugin you can do it later.

6. The WooCommerce will offer to install some plugins and also the Storefront theme, which is a great theme for online stores tell by the way. If you want to install any of these plugins or themes, just leave the corresponding option checked.

7. To have access to a series of resources, tools, reports, Spam control, and etc. you can activate Jetpack on your website. And if you don't want to install it, just click "Skip this step" displayed at the bottom of the screen.

8. The installation of WooCommerce has ended. You can now choose between adding a new product, managing settings, and a number of other options.

All options about your online store can be found from the WooCommerce administration panel. It is very easy and practical, I believe you will have no problem with that.

Is WooCommerce really free?

The answer is yes, WooCommerce is really free, you don't have to pay anything to use it! But beware you need to use WordPress hosted on a website hosting company. Do not confuse with the free hosting WordPress.com (yes, you need to pay to use WooCommerce).

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the main advantages of using WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce plugin on the internet. Given this, it is evident the number of benefits that we can extract from WooCommerce. It is certainly one of the easiest and simplest solutions, even for users who are not very experienced in creating and managing virtual stores.

Therefore, if you are thinking of an alternative to put your products online, then WooCommerce can be a smart option, modeled especially for you.

Now it's up to you to set up a successful online store and sell a lot over the internet. With the information above it is possible to create a virtual store from scratch and start sales. All you need is a hosting service and WordPress installed on it to use WooCommerce.