We’ve put a lot of effort into understanding content management systems, especially WordPress. For many businesses, the key functionality to automate is e-commerce. The best WordPress solution, at present, for e-commerce is WooCommerce. WooCommerce has 27% of the e-commerce market share. It serves small and large businesses alike. Built on an open-source foundation, there are hundreds of free and premium plugins (aka extensions) to expand the functionality. Through a mix and match of plugins for payments, shipping, marketing and accounting, a site can be built to match the business processes.
In 2011, WooThemes hired developers Mike Jolley and James Koster to create what became Woocommerce. Woocommece rose quickly in popularity. By 2014, it ran 17.7% of all e-commece sites. In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were acquired by Automattic, operator of WordPress.com and core contributor to the WordPress software. The estimate that Woocommerce systems now transact over $10 billion in online sales.
WooCommerce plugins allow for:
- Customer accounts and guest checkout
- Email templates
- Search engine optimization
- Related products
- Reporting
Best of all: if there’s functionality that hasn’t been created yet, we can build it for you with a custom WordPress / Woocommerce plugin.
Businesses have long felt that ecommerce was a nice to have. In 2020, that all changed. We understand the position that businesses are in. We have rolled out flexible solutions. For example, we can digitize and entire inventory and offer all of the products for sale. With one client, we digitized only products with good profit margins or uncomplicated shipping needed. We cherry picked the best parts of a business’ offerings to allow the online system make the best return on its investment. We have worked to arrive at the best payment gateway. We also work with merchants to iterate their site: many start small and build; maybe opt for high per-transaction fees until the volume allows for a solution with lower per-transaction fees.
We find that WordPress is turnkey and Woocommerce is both powerful and flexible. When it comes to the operating costs, Woocommerce scores well on that front:
- Site Hosting – $10 – 30 / month (we work with a shortlist of vetted web hosts).
- Domain Name – $10 – $30 / year (we like Namecheap — link in the site footer)
- Theming – We offer our clients themes build on a Divi foundation. We can also deploy a premium theme. They cost $80 – 100 per year.
- Additional Plugins – these vary from client to client, but they usually run in the $300 / year range for licensing.
- Payment gateway – this varies widely. We like low barrier solutions like Paypal as well as their related product Braintree. Over 20 years of ecommerce deployments, we worked with most of the providers.
Don’t take our word for it about Woocommece. Ecommerce Companies has compiled a list, Best eCommerce Solutions, and Woocommerce is profiled there next to the competitor options.
