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WooCommerce and WordPress - a winner's combo
June 03, 2020

WooCommerce and WordPress - a winner's combo

Rick Fitzgerald | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with WooCommerce

As an engineer I am always looking for solutions and and platforms to be used in different applications. As a really long-time ecommerce expert, I started with WooCommerce back in 2011/2012, as I usually reject hosted applications, because you completely lost the control or the freedom on the core, and the ability to set up your resources the best way your current platform handles them. I loved WooCommerce since the beginning, because of the impressive array of built in features, their use of the traditional MySQL/PHP platform, its seamless integration with WordPress, and their ease of use and upgrade, along with the compatibility with a large number of templates, or your own custom one.
I currently have 4 ecommerce websites on the platform and plan to upgrade to even more, as my new ventures, with different partners also use it. As an entrepreneur and admin, I loved the way you can quickly change and perform large updates without hassles, as my prior experience with open source platforms, has been really tedious, because I had to modify core files, and custom files by myself, and even adapt the css to match the site's design, I wonder how a non-tech user handles those situations.
  • Shopping cart.
  • Payment gateways.
  • Email and bulk email.
  • Multiple store inventories.
  • Works with all WP Themes.
  • WordPress seamless integration.
  • Ease of use and maintain.
  • Scalability.
  • Localization.
  • Growing number of plugins.
  • Fast.
  • Different dashboards.
  • Back end analytics.
  • Marketing features.
  • Customization.
  • The GUI can be improved.
  • Better image handling.
  • Additional check out add ons.
  • Ability to customize geolocation.
  • The widgets are sometimes not performing.
  • Positive: I'm very satisfied as it only required some basic knowledge.
  • It needs to be manually updated or you do need someone to work for you as an admin.
  • As it's seamlessly integrated with WordPress you can take advantage of all the platform's plugins right from the start.
  • Very scalable so it saves you money.
  • Constantly being upgraded which gives you a sense of robustness that translates into more revenue.
  • There are free and paid plugins and also freemium ones, but prices are more than reasonable so it's a favorable ROI.
The fact that WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, but it looks like built into WordPress is one of its advantageous points, because it follows the modularity of the platform, updating, upgrading and customizing it, it's a cinch. While OSCommerce is a solid and very secure platform it's a pain when it comes to add plugins, as you have to edit files by yourself, and then integrate them, the same goes for Zen Cart, as it is an ecommerce solution that departed from OSCommerce and improved the original old interface, and has a large community supporting it. As far as Shopping Cart Elite is a hosted solution that's very hard to master, and it's unstable.
I love WooCommerce so much, as I use it on a daily basis along with WordPress, that I recommend it to everyone I know. The advantage of having control means most merchants can find it a bit overwhelming, because they prefer canned solutions like Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, etc. - all of them hosted solutions - but in terms of free and freemium plugins, WooCommerce wins hands down.
As an engineer I am always thinking about new applications and improvements, and WooCommerce gives me all that, whatever I want to do it's fairly easy because there's always an existing plugin, I rarely have to write my own code.
It doesn't have a steep learning curve, and this is a plus. Sometimes there are conflicts between plugins and support is limited, but if you want a free open source solution that can be escalated to something really robust, I think it's the answer.

WooCommerce Feature Ratings

8.9
Product catalog & listings
9
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
8
Branding
9
Mobile storefront
9
Product variations
9
Website integration
9
Visual customization
9
CMS
9
9.0
Abandoned cart recovery
9
Checkout user experience
9
9.0
eCommerce security
9
9.0
Promotions & discounts
9
Personalized recommendations
9
SEO
9
9.0
Multi-site management
9
Order processing
9
Inventory management
9
Shipping
9
Custom functionality
9

Using WooCommerce

50 - Authors - Writing Product descriptions and uploading content
SEO- Marketing
Admins
Myself - Super Admin
Sales and Marketing - CRM tools and Stats

Each website is governed by their own admins, but I am the super admin, so I control everything, as I owned the company, I'm not just the CEO. Therefore each department in the organization has different access levels.
20 - I usually support the people that work for me as supporters, each decision has to be approved by me, and I am the one that checks what has been done. Nothing escapes this policy because this is my business operation, therefore, it's critical to me that I am satisfied with any fixes and or changes, even though they are following my own guidelines and policies.
  • Online Store (hosted by ourselves).
  • Payment gateway.
  • Inventory control (fully automated).
  • Catalog - Shopping cart.
  • Cross selling and up selling.
  • Customer reviews.
  • We develop a proprietary platform that seamlessly connects with our WooCommerce stores and updates inventories on daily basis and even twice a day. Which is fully automated.
  • We use it to integrate data into our marketing campaigns.
  • We use it to ship internationally based on destination.
  • Depending on the evolution of the platform if new features and new ways of marketing and advertising our products become available.
  • Using any innovations first.
  • To serve even more of our growing number of websites.
Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories.
We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.