eCommerce Website Design - WooCommerce Overview

Wellington WooCommerce Experts

Is WooCommerce The Best e-Commerce System For Your Business?

Anyware are Wellington's adaptable WooCommerce specialists. WooCommerce is our favourite eCommerce system and is fast becoming our clients' favourite too. It is the most flexible and full featured shopping cart we have ever used and we've yet to find a requirement it cannot meet.

We help you evaluate your marketing, choose the right shopping cart and features for your business and we offer all levels of support for your online store from planning to design, build and ongoing search engine optimisation and product/website maintenance.
Here is how we rate WooCommerce compared to the rest.

	Shopify	BigCommerce	WooCommerce
Simplicity for Users & Admin	90%	70%	80%
Features & Extendability	70%	80%	95%
Support	90%	80%	70%
Blogging	50%	60%	100%
Set-up Cost
Ongoing Cost

WooCommerce Strengths

Our clients choose WooCommerce for it's flexibility, lower running costs or if they plan to publish a blog.

WooCommerce is built on WordPress, which is the most powerful blogging platorm. So if you plan to publish a blog or articles then WooCommerce is a great choice.
Because we host your WodPress/WooCommerce website for you, your ongoing fees are based on your monthly hosting fee plus the annual cost of any paid plugins you choose. This often adds up to between $60 to $150 per month depending on the number of paid plugins you use. This tends to give you a similar level of features and transactions as a US$250-$300 per month BigCommerce or Shopify plan.
WooCommerce has a massive community of both users and developers. This makes it easy to find solutions and resolve problems and it results in a vast array of plugins for any purpose you can imagine. Plugins include integration with 3rd party systems such as accounting, inventory and shipping management, designed for New Zealand businesses and all many of tweaks and tunes for the shopping cart itself.
WooCommerce is open source software, which means that unlike BigCommerce and Shopify, we can change the code and literally make it do anything.

WooCommerce Weaknesses

Out of the box, WooCommerce comes with less features than BigCommerce or Shopify (depending on which plan you choose). Plugins are added to get the equivalent features. Most plugins have a free version with limited features and you pay an annual fee for the full version. This can also be  looked at as a strength because you pay for features you need, not features the average user on the same plan as you wants.

WooCommerce generally takes around 50% to 100% longer to set up than BigCommerce or Shopify, which translates directly to cost.That's the Yan for the Yin of supreme flexibility and lower running costs.

WordPress is a little bit famous for it's slow performance. Usually that's a bloat problem due to people installing huge graphical based themes, stuffing it full of redundant plugins and running it on shared servers that can't handle the load. Our experience is that when running on (our own) well optimised server with the latest security patches always installed and keeping plugins to a minimum, WooCommerce runs about the same speed as Shopify and BigCommerce and we don't have any reliability problems.

Base Features

Plugin Features

Plugins optons are vast and include...

Plugins usually have a basic, free version with a paid upgrade.

New Zealand Credit Card Processing

WooCommerce has the nicest credit card processing options we have seen for NZ businesses. Stripe can be set up in under one hour and is a great option if you don't already accept credit card payments. There is no fixed monthly fee and you don't pay an exta fee for a payment gatewaye. Credit card transaction fees from the bank do still apply.

Paystation and Payment Express are both good options if you have an existing credit card facility or if you need to accept payments in a physical store.

See our two monthly fee comparisons for more details:

• All-in-one credit card payment processing costs and option
• Credit card payment Gateway & merchant account costs

More info about payment gateways.

Amazing, Local Support

WooCommerce has limited support because it is a free open source product. You can submit a web based tickt and expect a reply within 48 hours.

Most of your support for WooCommerce will be provided by your web design company. You are likely to need lots of support in the early stages and Anyware is designed exacly for that.
Anyware can provide a range of services. We can set up the whole system and manage your inventory for you.

Blogging

WooCommerce is based on WordPress and WordPress was originally designed for blogging. So if you can imagine a blogging requirement then you can do it with WordPress. To quote WordPress, "30% of the web uses WordPress, from hobby blogs to the biggest news sites online."

WooCommerce Examples

Easily Add Products

Your website will become expense very quickly if you have to pay your web company to load every product.

WooCommerce is simple and easy to use for all your regular maintenance tasks, like adding products or updating pages. It's great for business owners as well as web designers.

Search Engine Friendly

When combined with the right plugin, knowledge and processes, WooCommerce has exceptional SEO features that allow your product listings in particular to earn you top rankings in search engines. This includes custom URLs, page title and meta details for products, web pages, categories, brands and news items, as well as search engine friendly links, tableless templates, proper use of header tags, HTML/XML sitemaps and image alt tags.

Social Media Friendly

WooCommerce has a vast array of options for leveraging your social media marketing. You can include a store directly on many social media platforms, social media users can share pages and products, write reviews and engage with your website in numerous ways.

Lower Ongoing Costs

Because there is no service fee based on your sales volume, WooCommerce tends to become more popular with merchants as sales volumes grow.
You can add features with free or paid plugins. Paid plugins usuall attract an annual fee.
Your hosting fee starts from around $40 per month and can increase if your website is really busy and needs more server resources.

Flexible Products, Inventory & Shipping

WooCommerce has a plugin for everything. See the available extensions to get an idea of what's available.

Coupons, Upselling & Marketing

WooCommerce has the widest range of options for coupons. vouchers and other marketing like upsells.
It's easy to send a coupon to your mailing list or offer an exclusive discount to customers of a joint venture or promotion partner.

BigCommerce vs Shopify - Monthly Cost Comparison

See our comparison of monthly shopping cart costs between BigCommerce and Shopify. Keep an eye out for the addition of WooCommerce to this guide soon.

 

Contact Anyware for a free evaluation of your e-commerce requirements.