WooCommerce - What You Need To Know
March 10, 2025
WooCommerce - What You Need To Know
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WooCommerce
Our company provides website development and hosting solutions for businesses of any size in our region. Since we are primarily build WordPress websites, we use Woo-Commerce whenever we have a customer who wants to have an online store. The sites range from single-page campaign pages, offering one product or such as an event ticket to complex multi-page site offering hundreds of products in the retail space. We have also successfully used WooCommerce to implement e-commerce solutions for the sale of digital goods, such as books and articles. Some customers want a "request a quote" solution as opposed to a full checkout and delivery system on their website and we have successfully implemented both of these types using WooCommerce. While WooCommerce doesn't natively handle every scenario that we come across in the e-commerce space, we are always able to find reliable add-ons to achieve the customers' goals.
Pros
- WooCommerce has easy integration with WordPress and a wide variety of plug-ins or add-ons to expand the base functionality
- The product management and bulk upload features of WooCommerce make it easy to get customers started quickly with e-commerce on their WordPress sites..
- The included order management functionality with WooCommerce is simple for customers to use, even if they are not tech savvy. This allows us to handover the transaction management to customers after quick training sessions to effectively allow them to manage their online stores on their own.
- WooCommerce has built-in capabilities for integrating with most of the popular payment gateway options for customers who want to handle the full transaction online.
Cons
- While the product management functionality is good, the ability to manage the search functionality on websites that use WooCommerce needs some improvement. Although this is considered basic functionality, you need add-ons to set things like the match type on search queries. Without these add-ons, doing searches on a WooCommerce enabled website can have unexpected results that diminish the user experience.
- Although, having plug-ins created by third-party's is a good thing, it also means that there is a higher risk of plug-ins being unsafe or not compatible with other features on the website or even other WooCommerce add-ons. This can and has compromise the integrity of some websites, causing both display and functionality issues.
- Unless you just need a very basic website or a very basic e-commerce functionality, your development team is going to have to learn to use new plug-ins every time a customer wants some thing different from a standard e-commerce implementation. This is because features such as, discounts, post shopping surveys, and delivery reminders are not available out of the box with WooCommerce, and you will need to explore and likely purchase plug-ins outside of WooCommerce to achieve the desired functionality. This means that your development of e-commerce websites could slow down unless you restrict your customers to options that are included out of the box with WooCommerce only.
- WooCommerce has allowed us to offer e-commerce functionality to our customers at a reasonable price point for our region.
- The add-ons have allowed us to tailor the e-commerce solutions to each of our customers needs.
- Unfortunately, the customization afforded by the many add-ons available for a WooCommerce has also created situations where the development time for a project was exceeded due to unforeseen issues with plug-in compatibility. In some cases this has created a negative customer experience..
WooCommerce is great for customization and for customers whose needs grow with their business. With its add-ons, it works for customers of all sizes with a variety of e-commerce needs. It does need more technical development skills to set up compared to Wix or Shopify, which are built for the non-developer users. While WooCommerce is free (great for entry level), you will spend more money when you need to customize. Ecwid’s free plan is also affordable if the needs of the customer are basic. Since our customers often have a very specific vision about how they want their e-commerce solution to work, and since we have a development team that is well-versed in WordPress and plug-in implementation, we went with WooCommerce for our main e-commerce implementation solution.
Do you think WooCommerce delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with WooCommerce's feature set?
No
Did WooCommerce live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of WooCommerce go as expected?
No
Would you buy WooCommerce again?
Yes
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