Benefits of Using WordPress for Your eCommerce Site

Nowadays, eCommerce is the fastest growing business niche. New online stores are opening every day, and they are featuring an increased traffic, even in the least developed countries. Just a few years ago, building online stores required thorough web and UX design knowledge. Today, eCommerce entrepreneurs can use either independent eCommerce platforms or easy-to-use CMS.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS on the market. Its popularity is mainly driven by its ease of use. It allows you to create a complex online store with the help of free plugins. Plugins are the WordPress’s biggest competitive advantage over other more complicated content management systems. Each one adds a new functionality to the website structure, and there are several options you can choose from for equipping your web presentation with online store features.

In order to present the advantages of WordPress, we’ll also analyze WooCommerce, which is the most famous eCommerce plugin for the WordPress environment. Still, we’ll start this article by determining some of the benefits of the basic WordPress structure.

wp-woocommerce

So, WordPress comes with …

  1. Easy interface – It’s a PHP-based platform, so it comes with an easy interface, which allows you to create direct changes in website’s appearance and functionality, without coding. WordPress has specially designed themes and there are thousands of both free and paid ones to choose from. This content management system also offers a user-friendly dashboard.

There’s also a media library, which enables users to import and place media files. For example, on Drupal, this kind of functionality and even the most basic WYSIWYG require users to track, download and activate several different modules.

  1. An unlimited number of plugins – Each plugin adds a new functionality to the website. The same as themes, there are both free and paid ones. Apart from WooCommerce, there are also other plugins that deal with specific tasks within the online store environment.
  2. Easy database integration – Every online store needs to have a database of product pages that can be searched with the use of filters. Data integration on WordPress websites is easy and straightforward. Admins can easily create databases and attributes, and they can also import custom SQL files.  
  3. Global access – Building your website on the hosting server allows you to manage it from any computer. This is a much better option than creating a presentation on your computer and uploading it to the server.

WooCommerce

woocommerce-tutorial

Most online stores that use WordPress as their preferred CMS opt for the WooCommerce plugin. This is an open source plugin that’s designed to equip regular WordPress websites with the online store functionality. It helps you create checkout and product pages, navigation, pricing, etc.

WooCommerce is popular with both big and small retail businesses. It can be used for building a flexible eCommerce platform. WooCommerce also closely tracks the visitors’ data and provides insights that include performance and conversion monitoring and visitors’ analysis.

Apart from the WordPress benefits we’ve shared above, WooCommerce itself also has plenty of advantages for both big and small retailers. These include:

  • Hassle-free upselling and cross-selling features.
  • It can be easily integrated with a wide variety of plugins and payment gateways. This allows website admins to provide multiple payment options to their customers.
  • Multiple analysis tools included in the plugin show customer data and product performance. These data can be used for creating innovative sales strategies.
  • WooCommerce can be easily integrated with customer retention programs. Admins can give away coupon codes or run a friend referral programs. This way they can improve their customer loyalty and promote the products they are selling.
  • The plugin comes with the top notch customer support.
  • It comes with the flexible shipping option, which allows admins to mark the areas where they deliver the goods.
  • Integrated SEO helps admins to optimize content pages with keywords and to increase their conversion by simplifying navigation through an online store.

By looking at these benefits, it’s easy to see why WooCommerce is one of the best eCommerce options on the market. Of course, since this field is highly competitive, the plugin has some of the toughest business rivals you can imagine. This includes Shopify, which is an independent online store platform. There’s also Magneto, which is an open source eCommerce platform, written in PHP. At the moment, WooCommerce has more than a million users, and there are indications that this number will exponentially grow, in the years to come.

Marcus Jensen

Marcus is an Australian IT support professional. He’s running his own business, working with companies that outsource their IT maintenance. He often writes about technology, business and marketing and is a regular contributor on several sites.

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