WooCommerce can work for most shops and offers more features without the price tag
November 01, 2018
WooCommerce can work for most shops and offers more features without the price tag
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WooCommerce
I have used it in the past to try and sell digital products. I am coming back to it as the best option for compatibility with themes, builders, and plugins. I want to sell bundled graphics, themes, and templates, and WooCommerce offers the best solution for this. It allows for digital products and to denote whether it is completely virtual or not. I can customize how my products look, use galleries to give more product photos, and track my sales in real-time. When I first started using it years ago, the customization was lacking, but now it integrates with Elementor, giving me full control on how my pages look.
- Offers integration with multiple payment gateways - This is especially nice if you don't want to be tied into Paypal. I use Square and was able to get a free add-on to connect my shop to Square.
- Integrates with a number of themes and page builders - You don't need to get a specific theme to set up a shop. Most fully integrate with WooCommerce, which means keeping your existing website as it is.
- The settings easily allow for different types of products out of the box. Want to sell books or T-shirts? You can set up shipping profiles, gather shipping information, and stay on top of order fulfillment. Selling digital goods? You can set the download link so that customers get their downloads immediately after purchase.
- The emails that are auto-generated are customizable. Whether you just want to add branding colors or change the text, you can do it.
- WooCommerce's interface looks very similar to what it did years ago. While features may have improved, sometimes finding where those features live to make changes can be a challenge.
- While I can make larger changes to how my shop page looks, some of the actual product pages are set in stone. It takes knowledge of PHP and coding to make changes to the template or the purchase of WooCommerce's shortcode plugin to get more flexibility. Having some layout options for how the product page looks would be great from non-coders.
- WooCommerce is still very much geared towards physical products. While it has a few options for digital products, expanding these features would make WooCommerce more competitive against other plugins such as Easy Digital Downloads.
- I currently have not had a lot of ROI from using WooCommerce
- While it is easy to set up, it doesn't handle things like marketing, emails, or promotion to build up sales
- It can easily integrate with most email marketing, making follow-up emails easy to set up.
I have used Easy Digital Downloads. While this platform is specifically geared towards digital only shops, it only integrates with Paypal on their free version. I personally don't like Paypal as a payment gateway, and opted for an option that would be more flexible. The product page layout was more to my liking with EDD but WooCommerce simply has more features available for free.