E-Commerce Development
Whidbey Island Web Design Proudly uses the wordpress plugin “WooCommerce”
WooCommerce offers many benefits! It provides a fully-functional e-commerce store and a seamless opportunity to order product and even handle donations on the store section of the site.
Released for the first time in 2011, WooCommerce is a WordPress extension that enables WordPress to be converted to an online E-Commerce application. It gained wide recognition and popularity in a very short span of time. Its popularity is not only due to the fact that it is installed and runs over WordPress in a highly search engine optimization friendly manner but that it is the most developer friendly cart on the WP market right now. This makes customization’s of the WooCommerce system itself an infinite list of possibilities.
The stats are impressive: the WooCommerce plugin has over 7.5 million downloads and a million+ active installs; Built With’s survey of ecommerce platforms shows Woo passing up Magento in the top million, with about triple the number of total sites.
Even a conservative estimate that WooCommerce powers 650,000 storefronts means they’re enabling a huge number of independent sellers.
WooCommerce now joins the Automattic team to make it easier for people to sell online. Along with Woo’s announcement, here’s a short video explaining more:
If a companies tagline tells you anything, the WooCommerce tagline is: “woo commerce excelling eCommerce”
The best thing about woo commerce is that the core setup is absolutely free to use for any person who wants to turn their WordPress website into an eCommerce store. To top that it has a lot of free extensions available that enhance its capabilities and features manifolds.
Below are some of the advantages and benefits that woocommerce offers to its users:
- Basic WooCommerce setup is absolutely free, we do all like free right?
- WooCommerce is managed by wordpress itself
- Free theme and system extensions are available, and the list of professional paid extensions is growing daily
- IgniteWoo – Owned and Operated by our own developer associate, Mark Edwards and out of Colorado, IgniteWoo creates truly innovative plugins that push the limits of what WooCommerce is capable of!!!
- The Official WooCommerce Plugin Directory
- Code Canyon (Woocommerce plugins growing daily)
- Theme Forest (WooCommerce Themes Growing Daily)
- Supports PayPal payment gateway by default, but also has extensions for just about any gateway services available. Heartland Payments systems, FirstData, Authorize.net, Amazon, Stripe, Future pay, Level up and Pay stand to name a few.
- Supports a TON of shipping methods, UPS, FedEx, United States Postal Service, ship wire, Canada Post and Aramex to name a prominent few.
- Has a robust inventory management service that makes inventory management a lot easier.
- Woo commerce has reporting tools that provide the administrator with a bird’s eye view of the incoming sales & reviews, stock levels & general store performance, all from WordPress backend. Though with advanced extensions highly intuitive and extensive reports can be generated and reviewed.
- As of July 2015 more than 140,000 websites are successfully running woo commerce.
- Woo commerce being run over WordPress blends very well with its core features and is thus also very easy to market and popularize online.
- Another advantage that comes with woo commerce is that it is comparatively light weight and runs as an extension atop the WordPress so with a few tricks and considerations the E-commerce store can be made to be a very fast loading one.
- With such a large, loyal customer base for WordPress and the huge number of websites running, woo commerce the developer community support for woo commerce is incredibly great. In fact third party developers can be easily found that develop woo commerce add-ons for special requirements at very reasonable prices. In fact the developers of woo commerce themselves have provided an extensive knowledge base for the users and developers to reference to.
- Woo commerce has extensions available that allow administrators to transfer data easily from one WooCommerce setup to another, enabling to easily setup multiple stores with a similar product range and options.
Consumers spent a record $117 billion online last year buying products and services over the internet. Do you want your share?
Overall, online consumer retail spending grew by 26 percent over the $93.2 billion * spent in 2003. During the holiday shopping season alone, which includes November and December, consumers spent $23.6 billion, a 28 percent increase over the $18.3 billion spent the previous year.
* 1/10/2005 InformationWeek Online Spending Sets Record In 2004
When considering an Ecommerce website:
Search for your competition on the Internet.
- How does their website look? A catchy design is good, but design alone doesn’t sell product on the web.
- How easy is their site to use? This is an important factor in the success of your Web site even if it’s not an Ecommerce site.
- Does it seem like the competition is successful? One way to tell is to place a test order every couple of weeks and keep an eye on their order numbers.
- Market Identity: Who is going to buy your products? How are they going to find out about you?
- Costs: Can you buy stock, will you have time for packaging, shipping and tracking it? What will your return policy be? How will you track inventory? How and where will you store your products? Do you have an advertising budget?
- Talk to a business advisor. Learn about the potential pitfalls you hadn’t thought of.
Cost effective!
Whidbey Island Web Design can help develop cost-effective, Ecommerce shopping cart Web sites that work and provide a Secure On-line Shopping experience for your customers! Our developers understand today’s state-of-the-art website development techniques that will help your Ecommerce website succeed on the Internet.
Our shopping cart is highly customizable, flexible, easy to use, scalable, search engine friendly and packed with features! Call Whidbey Island Web Design today and we’ll be glad to help figure out how we can assist your E-commerce needs.