What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a powerful E-Commerce extension to your WordPress installation which will allow you to sell all kinds of products online. While it is not applicable to every business need, WooCommerce can be used to in lieu of simple PayPal purchase buttons to sell products with more advanced checkout and account management features.
- Catalog Management
- Optional real-time payment integration
- Multiple images of products
- Search engine (SEO) friendly
- Custom URLs
- Email notifications
- Shipping discounts, shipping by price or weight, optional real-time ship rating integration with USPS, FedEx, UPS
- Analytics integrations
Why WooCommerce?
WooCommerce combines the power of most mainstream E-Commerce products along with the elegance and simplicity of your WordPress installation. You have the power to:
- Manage Products
- Optional Product Ratings
- Optional Product User Comments
- Manage Orders
- Manage Coupons and Sales
- Manage Users
- Manages Taxes
- Manage Shipping Options
- Multiple Checkout Options
- View Shopping Statistics
There’s so much that you can achieve with this powerful tool, all within your current WordPress Installation.
Product Management
When adding products you can either add a physical product, virtual product, or downloadable product. On all products you have the ability to add description, price, sales price (and optional sale start and end dates), product dimensions, weight and shipping class. You can also set options for grouping similar individual products together or adding variations to your product (such as color or size). You can also link to external products, which means you can list the product and product information on your website, but when the user goes to buy the product they will be redirected to an affiliate or sellers website.
Shipping Methods
WooCommerce has a few built in features for shipping and taxes. The built in shipping options are:
- Flat Rate – This option will let you set a single price to charge for shipping on each product.
- Free Shipping – You can set this option as a choice or only appear if the price is above a certain threshold.
- International Shipping – Here you can set a flat shipping cost, flat handling cost and if this cost will be added on a per item basis or entire cart basis.
- Local Pickup and Local Delivery – With local delivery you can set a flat cost and local pick up is entirely free.
- UPS, FedEx, Other – We can implement other shipping methods that are not built in, if you would like to use an alternative shipping method let us know!
Taxing Products
You can set taxes at different levels. For example, you can tax the entire state of Missouri a tax of 5%, but a local tax on the city of St. Louis only 2% tax. To achieve optimal or complex taxing structures you can layer these to fit your needs. There are three tax classes that you can use by default:
- Standard Rate
- Reduced Rate
- Zero Rate
If you don’t want to tax purchases (in the case of wholesalers for instance), you can set WooCommerce to use prices without taxes.
View Orders and Statistics
Anytime a user goes through the checkout process, it gets added to the Orders section where you can review, modify, add notes, and signify that the order has been completed, is currently pending, or has been canceled. Any time an order is processed, it gets added to the statistics. Very much like Google Analytics, you will be greeted with a chart for the month(s) which will show sales, product stock, customers, and more. Combine that with Google Analytics and you have a powerful statistic tool.
This summary only scratches the surface of WooCommerce and what it can do. If you have questions or if you’re not sure if WooCommerce is right for your project, Contact IQComputing to learn more.