Last Updated | August 2022

WooCommerce is the most popular open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress to turn your website into an online store. It is a powerful tool with a robust feature set and many extensions. The WooCommerce plugin turns any WordPress site into an eCommerce site, seamlessly integrating content with eCommerce elements. You can sell anything in unlimited amounts on a WooCommerce-powered site, from physical to digital products, including subscriptions and appointments. It supports more than sixty languages, and as open-source software, it’s constantly updated and improved.

Overview Of WooCommerce

WordPress is a powerful platform where you can build almost any type of website. However, one of the things it can’t easily do is enable you to set up an online store. At least, not without the help of an eCommerce plugin. That’s where WooCommerce comes in. This popular plugin includes most of the essential features you’ll need to set up an eCommerce site. WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce plugin for WordPress, developed by WooThemes that can be intimidating at first if you’re new to eCommerce.  Like WordPress, it is designed to be an extendable, adaptable, open-source platform.

As an open-source platform, it offers many customization options if you have some coding experience, but you’ll need to organize your hosting, security, and domain name separately. If you have some technical experience, you’ll find WooCommerce simple to use, and there are over 2 million WooCommerce website owners worldwide who would agree. It has more than 400 extensions. You can also integrate other WordPress plugins easily. WooCommerce allows people to sell physical products, downloadables, or services. WooCommerce is a fully customizable, open-source plugin for WordPress designed for e-commerce.

Who Should Use WooCommerce?

The WooCommerce platform is one of the top plugins on the Internet, supporting more than five million websites, powering 22% of all online stores, and running 40.6% of WordPress websites. It is versatile, with more than 350 contributors worldwide.

It is excellent if you have a small or medium-sized e-commerce site working with a limited budget. However, its steep learning curve and lack of dedicated tech support might make it too difficult for absolute beginners to use. On the other hand, WooCommerce is an especially advisable option for those with previous WordPress experience because they will be familiar with the interface. It will allow them to quickly get started with the design of their store and, therefore, make their first sales earlier.

To share my first experience with WooCommerce, I must say that I was pretty impressed. My previous experience with WordPress might have made it a little bit easier. One of the best parts about WooCommerce is its flexibility. You can add additional features with the plugins WooCommerce offers, which is why it has grown so much in popularity.

With this WooCommerce brand review, you can conclude if WooCommerce is the most suitable solution for you.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

Rating: Breakdown

We use thorough and continuous eCommerce builder testing to properly rank each brand in its expert review. The testing process allows us to check their functionality, assess their work across devices, and evaluate the risks. We use specific parameters that provide the most accurate results to specify the best builders present. Here are the factors we used for the Wix reviews.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use WooCommerce)?

In the following few paragraphs, we will create an account from scratch to decide whether to create a website using WooCommerce Website builder is easy.

The first step is to set up an account and fill in your information. If you already have a WordPress account, you do not need to create an account from scratch. You need to sign up, and after signing up, you will be prompted to answer a quick survey to gather some insights about the website you will be creating.

You need to provide some basic information about the store for which you will be creating a website.

You can choose what types of products you will sell.

Then choose how the payment will take place.

Depending on if you are a new user or already have a WordPress site, you can choose how to install it.

And the last thing is to choose a provider.

After completing the essential information, you are now ready to create your website.

WooCommerce requires you to install, manage updates, keep backups, and optimize everything yourself because it is an open-source platform. That is why it requires a certain level of knowledge to use or a willingness to spend some time learning.

Although there is no built-in drag-and-drop design-builder, the interface is user-friendly thanks to the WP- Admin dashboard.

You can create, edit, and customize your website layout with little coding via a side control panel. Using WooCommerce is not that different from using a WordPress site, so if you have previous experience with WordPress, it will not be a problem for you.

WooCommerce Value For Money – Pricing & Plans

Even though WooCommerce Website Builder is free, your costs will go up throughout specific functions and features added to the website. Each business has unique requirements, and based on that, you can divide the actual cost of WooCommerce into two aspects:

1. Essential costs: It is considered mandatory because of their vitality when launching a complete WooCommerce store that can get online orders.
2. Optional costs: They are considered optional depending on the requirement of the business for customization options.

Essential costs:

Optional costs:

The first thing to do is get a domain name. Then, since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, you can’t run your online store without configuring WordPress. And to do so, you first need to buy a hosting plan. Then you need to choose a theme. You have thousands of options. Although you can use great free WooCommerce themes to design any online store, a free theme usually does not come with exclusive support and may not be the right fit in its original state. Another essential thing for online stores includes the shipping and payment gateway you integrate into your store. Security is also necessary. It would help if you got Anti-malware tools and SSL certificates.

The WooCommerce plugin is free, but your store can only survive with a basic hosting plan and additional adjustments. It is up to you to use your money on WooCommerce add-ons, and fortunately, there is much flexibility for every budget. The value for money rating is 9.7.

Templates (Design Flexibility)

The world of WooCommerce themes is vast and confusing. The problem with WordPress is that everyone is allowed to create themes and sell them off to customers. On the bright side, this gives you all sorts of options for selection.

Choosing a suitable theme plays a vital role in the WooCommerce setup process. A stunning design and outstanding performance contribute remarkably to the value of your store.

Fortunately, you can easily pick a unique theme for your eCommerce store, thanks to WooCommerce’s theme store. It is a WooCommerce theme marketplace where you can find free and premium designs.

Users can also use 9000+ WordPress themes or go to Themeforest and choose the best one for their online store out of over 48,000 alternatives (both free and paid). The average cost of a WooCommerce premium theme is $29.99.

Indeed, you can switch to another theme if the one you’ve chosen no longer meets your requirements.

One of the most popular themes of all time is Astra. Astra is a clean and free WordPress theme with full WooCommerce support and flexible customization options. It has a modern homepage layout with multiple widget-ready areas to simply drag and drop content widgets.

Shoppe is a customizable WooCommerce WordPress theme for fashion, online stores, eCommerce, and lifestyle websites. It has a powerful, quick product search, shopping cart, wishlist, product image zoom, etc. The rating is 9.6.

Features and Tools

It is impossible to cover all WooCommerce features in one expert review, but I’ll certainly try. To explain briefly, WooCommerce works as a WordPress plugin, where you install the plugin to turn your WordPress website into a fully functional online store. WooCommerce comes with features to help you connect your audience with the right offer and help manage orders and customers.

Domain Names

You can think of domain names like street addresses for an online business. Domain names are assigned to those numeric addresses to make it easier for humans to remember and locate individual websites. It tells people where they can find your store. That’s why it’s also called a web address. But it’s so much more — unlike most street addresses, your domain name can reflect or even perfectly match your store’s name. It’s an extension of your brand or, sometimes, is your brand itself. The decision of a domain name is as important as choosing a location for a physical store.

If you purchase a domain name, you get included for free:

• Privacy protection
• SSL Certificate
• Advanced DNS Features
• Email Forwarding
• Professional Email
• Easy Upgrade

Many hosts offer domain buying services or include a free name as part of their package, but you may find it easiest to visit the domain buying platform on WordPress.com. You can search for available names, select from common endings (.com, .net, etc.), and more than 350 unique options like .blog, .store, etc.

Mobile App

Manage your business on the go with the WooCommerce Mobile App. WooCommerce offers a mobile app for Android and Ios. You can create products, process orders, print labels, and track key stats in real-time. Create, edit, and publish products directly from your favorite mobile device. Capture your creativity at the moment – turn your ideas into products in seconds, or save them as drafts for later. You can manage the entire order process via the app. Scroll the summaries, or search by customer or order specifics. Tap into the details to see itemized billing or change order status. If you run more than one store, you can toggle between your businesses in seconds and keep day-to-day operations under your thumb. To use the WooCommerce mobile app, you need to install Jetpack and connect it to your WooCommerce store. There are a few simple steps for installing Jetpack that we will go over in this WooCommerce review:

1. You need to install the Jetpack plugin from the plugins tab in the left panel.
2. Once the plugin is installed, you need to activate it.
3. The next step is activating Jetpack.
4. Since WordPress powers jetpack, you need to sign in to your WordPress account.
5. Then you have to approve the connection with Jetpack.
6. After connecting, you need to answer some questions and choose a Jetpack plan.
7. You can now use the mobile app.

Social Media Integration

WooCommerce is one of the most accessible options for starting an online store. Once you have a live online store, an essential aspect is to reach out to prospective customers. In the current digital environment, social media is one of the most effective marketing tools. Several solutions will help you automate your social media marketing strategies. We will go over some of the best social media marketing plugins for WooCommerce.

1. WooCommerce Instagram – You will be able to use Instagram posts as ad campaigns. The Instagram plugin will help you create posts and stories on Instagram from which customers can place orders. You will also be able to redirect customers to product pages and define specific hashtags for products. The plugin costs $79.
2. Pinterest for WooCommerce – This plugin will enable your products to have better visibility through the large user base of Pinterest. The images displayed on Pinterest can be controlled right from your WooCommerce dashboard. The price for this plugin is $79.
3. FS Poster –  You can post individual website posts and WooCommerce. It makes it easy to schedule posts with the help of emoji, custom message shortcodes, and hashtag support.

Security

It’s easy to lose sight of security when launching your store, but it’s essential. Keeping your store’s data safe should be a top priority from the very start. Good site security starts with a good host and domain, so you must take care of them. You constantly have a well-known security brand checking in on the overall ecosystem of the WooCommerce platform. In addition, the WooCommerce code is secure, but you also have to find a good web host who’s not going to open up your files to hackers.

All online payments are safe and secure but depend on your payment gateway.

It would be best to rest easy knowing that your site is safe and your customer information is encrypted. The only thing to remember is that you have to get your SSL certificate. If you’re building an eCommerce site with WooCommerce, you are expected to do some security work independently. Even though security measures are delivered in WordPress automatically, you also need to handle some things. WooCommerce recommends starting with a host that offers things like:

• Attack prevention and monitoring
• Proactive reviews and security threat patching
• Up-to-date server software
• The ability to isolate spreading infections

Generally speaking, WooCommerce is relatively safe. This platform lets you create two-step authentication.

Thanks to that, you don’t have to be worried much when your password accidentally falls into the hand of strangers. With WooCommerce, you will also be in charge of PCI compliance, a set of actionable rules to encourage the broad adoption of consistent data security measures worldwide to reduce credit card fraud. You have to strictly follow 12 core requirements to make your website PCI compliant.

Marketing

Ecommerce marketing is driving top-of-funnel traffic to convert into sales and customers. WooCommerce offers powerful extensions that can assist you in several marketing activities. Some of them are:

• Follow Up Emails
• Beeketing for WooCommerce
• Newsletter Subscription
• Automatewoo
• InstantSearch+ for WooCommerce
• and many more.

Another thing worth mentioning is the Discount & Coupons.

WooCommerce allows you to choose one of three discount types: percentage discount, fixed cart discount, and fixed product discount. Furthermore, you can add restrictions and limits for the coupon in the “Coupon data” tab. WooCommerce Reviews for Discount plugin allows you to offer discounts to your customers for their reviews and recommendations. A positive review is a powerful tool to drive repeat purchases, up-sells, and new sales. Once your customer leaves a review, the system will automatically send an email with a discount coupon code. WooCommerce Review for Discounts Plugin allows you to generate multiple coupons for customers who review products in your WooCommerce store. You can easily customize all emails generated by the plugin.

Email Marketing

Good eCommerce email marketing builds excellent relations with your customers by sending emails with helpful information at relevant times.

Email Marketing is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies with one of the highest ROIs. It allows you to connect your marketing channels for a cohesive and fluid buyer’s journey.

WooCommerce allows you to collect addresses from your site visitors and send them specific emails based on their accounts and orders.

At the same time, this platform also provides many add-ons like Newsletter subscriptions, etc., to send automatic and personalized emails to increase customer loyalty and incentivize recurring purchases.

Besides, Abandoned Cart Recovery empowers you to create multiple follow-up emails and schedules to send to customers who have added the items into their carts but left without purchasing. WooCommerce offers more than a few extensions for email Marketing. This WooCommerce review will go over the official email solution: Mailchimp.

By connecting your online store to Mailchimp, you will have access to powerful marketing features to better build relationships with your customers. It is entirely free. With Mailchimp, you can increase your Revenue Potential with the help of the following features:

• Automation – To maintain communication with your customers, you need to use key automation. Once these emails are set up, they will automatically deploy based on your criteria.
• Retargeting Ads – Mailchimp’s Facebook and Instagram retargeting ads help remind site visitors about your products when they check their social media. You can create and publish ads that recapture your potential customer’s attention and increase conversion with customers who were once engaged with your products and brand.
• Purchase Likelihood – This predictive insights tool looks at patterns in return customer behavior and can help you understand their likelihood of purchasing again. With that, you can best optimize your marketing efforts and budgets.

You can increase Traffic to Your Site & Drive Repeat Purchases with the help of:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Marketing CRM tools are essential in helping you build and manage customer relationships.
• Digital Ads – With Mailchimp’s powerful targeting options, drive traffic to your site by reaching the right people on Facebook, Instagram, and across the web with Google’s ad network.
• Social Media – Social Media can be an effective tool to drive traffic. Mailchimp makes it easy to build beautiful, on-brand posts that can get your customers’ attention, from organic posts to targeted ads

Mailchimp also provides the tools you need to test new opportunities and view campaign performance to optimize your marketing strategy in the future. To use Mailchimp, you must comply with the following requirements:

• The WooCommerce plugin should already be installed and activated in WordPress.
• Your hosting environment must meet WooCommerce’s minimum requirements, including PHP 5.6 or greater.
• A staging environment should be used before installation on production servers. The customer’s first name, last name, email address, and orders are needed for Mailchimp for WooCommerce to sync.

To connect your WooCommerce store to Mailchimp, you need to do the following steps:

1. Download the Mailchimp plugin
2. Install the plugin on your WordPress Admin site
3. Connect the plugin with your Mailchimp API Key
4. Configure your list settings to complete the data sync process

Inventory Management

Inventory management forms the basis of a successful supply chain and is also vital for the longevity of your online store. WooCommerce inventory management feature allows you to easily manage your stock and track inventory. You can handle basic tasks like creating inventory reports and making changes to any part of your products. You can also create and manage variable products and add quantities for separated variations.

An advantage of WooCommerce is that there are no limitations on how many products and variations you can create. However, managing inventory with WooCommerce may require the help of 3rd-party support to bring out the best in your store performance.

Business Features

The WooCommerce Website Builder provides excellent features that you need for your business. With the help of the research for writing this WooCommerce review and collecting data, I can say that the features that WooCommerce offers triumph over all other eCommerce platforms because of its versatility.

SEO Tools

WooCommerce SEO is pretty important. Like any WordPress website, optimizing your WooCommerce store for search engines is critical, and if you don’t, it could impact your site’s natural referencing and, ultimately, your sales.

SEO plugins are a great way to optimize your store, so in this WooCommerce review, I will preview the best WooCommerce SEO plugins.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast WordPress SEO Plugins are a set of tools developed by Joost de Valk and team, founder of yoast.com and WordPress enthusiast. These tools are designed to help content rank higher and are subsumed under the Yoast Complete pack, which includes Video SEO for rank climbing with embedded videos in a WordPress site, WooCommerce SEO for the WP eCommerce plugin, News SEO for rank climbing in Google news, Local SEO for climbing in local listings with complete information so can be located, and Premium SEO redirects manager for dealing with common redirect errors and issues.

Yoast provides Meta Box on the posting page, which allows us to change things like Meta Title, Description, and Slug.

Apart from this, Yoast also provides a content analysis feature that gives suggestions on how you can improve the content from an SEO point of view. It makes things a lot easier, and the instructions are so easy that even beginners can follow them. Moreover, it also has Sitemap generation, GSC Integration, and much more.

The plugins may also be bought individually, and yoast.com now offers a Google Analytics (GA) plugin.

2. All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the original WordPress SEO plugin that helps you improve your website SEO. Over 3 million intelligent website owners use AIOSEO to optimize their websites for higher search rankings.

With AIOSEO, you get access to all the powerful tools to boost your website’s SEO rankings. These SEO tools help you create website content that Google and other search engines can easily understand. AIOSEO seamlessly integrates with necessary webmaster tools and social media platforms. Here are some of the features that make AIOSEO the best WordPress SEO plugin:

• Advanced WooCommerce SEO – With AIOSEO, you can easily optimize your product pages, product categories, and more in WooCommerce.
• Instant Sitemap Creation – It’s crucial to have an XML sitemap for your website that search engines can use to quickly find all your content. Good website SEO markup plays a vital role in improving SEO rankings. That’s why intelligent SEO experts use AIOSEO for on-page SEO optimization. Aside from the comprehensive WordPress XML sitemap feature, they also offer a News SEO sitemap and Video SEO sitemap to help you improve your website’s SEO ranking and get more traffic.
• Automatic Search Engine Notification – Whenever you update content or add something new to your site, AIOSEO will instantly notify search engines like Google and Bing.
• Easy Connection to Important Webmaster Tools – AIOSEO connects your website to tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Pinterest Site Verification.
• Image SEO – Many website owners overlook images when it comes to SEO. AIOSEO can automatically generate title text and alt text for your images based on a specified formula (e.g., using the post title) that you can adapt.
• Powerful On-Page SEO Optimization Tools – AIOSEO makes adding things like a meta title and description to your page quickly.
• SEO Redirection Manager and 404 Monitoring – AIOSEO Redirection manager helps you set up proper 301 redirects to improve your SEO rankings. They also support other advanced SEO redirects, including 302 redirects, 307 redirects, 410 redirections, 404 redirects, and REGEX redirects for advanced SEO needs. An automatic 404 error monitor helps you track and redirect 404 errors to prevent losing SEO rankings.

1. WP Smush – Optimizing images on your WordPress site is vital to improving the page loading speed and score on tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. WP Smush is one of the most accessible plugins to perform image compression for WordPress. With more than one million active installs, this image optimizer is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in the official plugin repository.
2. Broken Link Checker – It monitors and tests all internal links & external links on your site, looking for broken links. It helps you fix wrong links to improve SEO and user experience. Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks, and other content and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site, this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more. When parsing is complete, the plugin will check each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress.
3. WP – BackLinks is a freemium WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to monitor new backlinks directly from your dashboard.
4. JetPack by WordPress – Jetpack is an essential plugin for WooCommerce beginners. It is one of the best plugins for commonly required features and functions such as security, backups, CDNs and performance, list building, marketing, and many other essentials. Straightforward to use, it’s backed by the mother company of WordPress.com (Automattic) and a thoroughly professional support team. The free version includes a statistics tool, automatic sharing of publications on social networks, and a “similar articles” feature that directs your readers to articles of your choice.

Performance

Your eCommerce store’s performance will do a lot to determine its success. If its pages take too long to load, your customers could become frustrated and look elsewhere to make their purchases. That’s something you want to avoid at all costs. For this reason, to include the performance in this WooCommerce Review, I put a few websites through GTMetrix to give final scores.

Speed Page

The results from GTmetrix were the following: B score and “85%” on performance which sound excellent. The website takes 3.6 seconds to load fully, which is not much. It takes 1.2 seconds to fully interact and load the most visible elements, which is excellent. I can assure you this is concise as I visited the page a few times to see it in action.

Uptime and Response Time

Website uptime monitoring checks that your website stays permanently online and is available for your visitors. It provides an overview and history of the availability of your website and domain.

WooCommerce performed excellently in regards to uptime. At no point in the whole week, while I used the uptime monitoring system with an alerting system, was the website unavailable. The response time and the average speed were also great. However, the average speed of your website will also depend on your theme.

Based on the tests and the results, the overall ranking for performance is 9.8.

Help and Customer Support

WooCommerce Website Builder does not have a dedicated support team. You’re pretty much on your own if you run into issues, although you can get help from the various WooCommerce communities.

WooCommerce offers some ways so that customers can connect with this platform. Due to its open-source nature, one of the drawbacks of WooCommerce is that it doesn’t allow the customer to keep in touch with this platform through live chat or email. But the site provides help mostly in WooCommerce Documentation that walks you through almost everything non-coders and developers alike will need to set up and maintain a WooCommerce site. The platform also offers an FAQ section to answer the most common questions. Another resource you can seek support from is the community forum.

Additionally, community support is quite significant. If you require more support, contact a WooCommerce Expert for a fee.

You can buy a plugin that allows customer service to be run directly within the WooCommerce store.

It costs $149 per year. This plugin allows:

• Chat for guest users
• Chat for subscribed users
• Chatlog for subscribed users

However, WooCommerce’s support service doesn’t cover its products supplied by third parties who are not its resellers or third-party products and services. In other words, this platform only supports products sold on WooCommerce.com.

WooCommerce Example Sites

Since WooCommerce powers around 30% of all online stores, there are a lot of excellent example sites.

Before diving in and setting up a WooCommerce store of your own, it’s good to look at some existing websites. It will give you an idea of what vital components to include in your eCommerce store.

Here are a few examples of companies with WooCommerce stores at the top of their game.

Porter & York(Meat online store)

Porter & York are sellers of fresh meat, fish, and poultry cuts delivered to your door within 48 hours. The website uses a custom-developed WordPress theme and tracking via Google Analytics.

Porter & York are an example of using product imagery as an effective marketing tool.

Strandberg Guitars (Music store)

Strandberg Guitars is a stylish, sophisticated website from the Swedish guitar company Strandberg Guitars. It is a great example to follow if you’re in the music and sound industry. Their homepage is visually striking, with a rich dark color palette and beautiful product images.

The streamlined product gallery makes it easy to sort their guitars based on the product line and type.

Bittersweet (Fashion store)

Bittersweet is a fashion retailer selling trendy boho clothing. The WooCommerce store was built with the assistance of Robot Ninja.

The Bittersweet website has a non-intrusive live chat feature. Live chat allows website visitors to quickly ask questions and find the answers. It can help eCommerce owners maximize sales and minimize cart abandonment.

WooCommerce Review: Summary

WooCommerce is one of the world’s best eCommerce website builders. It’s a little more challenging to use than some alternatives, and it can only be used in combination with WordPress. The base WooCommerce program is free. However, there are loads of premium extensions that you can purchase to add functionality to your store, and most of these are super affordable. WooCommerce boasts an excellent selection of online selling tools. There’s a tremendous mobile management app for iOS and Android devices, and the entire program is open-source—which means that you can edit your store’s code to your heart’s content. A downside is WooCommerce’s support, which is limited to email and sporadic live chat. But this is minor. Creating a new store is very straightforward, and adding and customizing product listings is easy.

Overall, I would recommend WooCommerce for those with decent tech skills who want something more versatile than most eCommerce builders and users looking for a cost-effective eCommerce platform that’s relatively easy to use and allows you to scale your business. It’s also an excellent option for those on a tight budget. As long as you know how to code, you’ll love the creative freedom you get from WooCommerce.

WooCommerce User Reviews

Being one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce Website Builder has been reviewed by many users. According to many reviews, it is considered the best and most powerful system available for eCommerce businesses.

It is widely integrated into WordPress themes, and it’s connected to Stripe and PayPal. Its automated emails are friendly, as well. Plugins are excellent. The order management panel is great because it allows you to easily view and order, enter into it, and view customers’ information and the order’s status. You can even manually update the status of an order and, most amazingly, add private notes and customers’ notes.

Another important thing is its compatibility. Because it’s so widely used, it can integrate with anything and everything. Every bank has a payment gateway that connects to WooCommerce.