Easy E-Commerce, as long as you're a little savvy with WooCommerce
October 11, 2017
Easy E-Commerce, as long as you're a little savvy with WooCommerce
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WooCommerce
We offer WooCommerce set up and integration for a number of our website marketing clients. These clients vary from industrial clients, selling monitoring equipment and sensors, to non-profits that sell event tickets, to a couple of clients providing online training packages. Certainly having an online store helps a business, and the organizations that provide their own online ticketing in house can save on paying out service fees to a third provider.
- WooCommerce is great because it is easy to set up, and easy for us to help our clients manage their products. Set up is usually less than a day, and we can get a handful of products up and configured in the first week. Plus, we are able to duplicate existing products, saving us time.
- WooCommerce has a very detailed, robust support manual to help us get started and add products to the site.
- There are numerous plugins available to enhance WooCommerce. In particular, a couple of plugins allow for further customization of the product page layout, colors and titles. Other plugins enhance the shopping cart experience.
- WooCommerce follows the Wordpress structure of tags and categories, ensuring we will have an easy time organizing products.
- Our clients find WooCommerce frustrating and not that easy to integrate with in store inventory systems. One client in particular, finds it too tedious to set up their products. (They are trying to do it themselves, rather than have us do it, and we are trying to change that.)
- While the WooCommerce support manual is quite thorough, finding specific tweaks we'd like to make can prove difficult.
- WooCommerce doesn't do everything right out of the box. As I mentioned, there are numerous add on plugins to configure WooCommerce to do what you want, but there is the down time of R&D to find a suitable, recently updated and supported add on.
- For us, WooCommerce is just one of the options we can offer our clients wanting a complete, low cost e-commerce solution. This has helped to elevate us from just a quick website developer, to one that provides robust, long term solutions.
- Occasionally, a client will find that WooCommerce is just too complicated for them, and steer toward a Shopify type solution. We have lost a long term client in the last year in this way.
- However, most of our clients appreciate the fact that they can host and sell their own tickets and products on their website, and this has resulted in a net gain.
For our clients using WooCommerce for ticketing events, we have looked at Eventbrite and Constant Contact Events. Both of these work well, but there is something great about having the entire process in house. Specifically, being able to receive reports of orders very quickly, as well as notifications via email anytime that a new order is placed. Constant Contact Events worked in much the same way as Eventbrite, but required a monthly fee - a fee we found was better utilized on other softwares and integrations.