Should we use Shopify? Magento? What about using the store Wix provides? Which ecommerce store provides the most features at the best price and is able to scale as our business grows? We asked these same questions and we are sure you have too!

Why WooCommerce?

Let’s cut straight to the chase. The reality is that the ecommerce store you choose will depend on your business needs. This blog post is obviously geared towards WooCommerce and why we think, based off experience, it is a great solution.

WooCommerce is 40% of Online Stores and Still Growing

WooCommerce is literally 40% of the online stores on the internet (“builtwith” doesn’t allow free members to view that statistic anymore apparently but you can see that 36% of the US marketing share is devoted to WooCommerce)…Think about that for a second. 40% of all ecommerce stores you buy from online are built with WooCommerce! One of the huge benefits of this fact is that it means WooCommerce, as a company, is “established”. They know what they are doing AND they know what their audience needs and wants. They’ve built and are continuing to build their store with almost every feature you need or a way to get the feature you need.

Developers can rejoice because WooCommerce has done a great job with documentation. Need an example? Take a look at their documentation for their memberships or subscription product).

One last thing! With the popularity of WooCommerce also comes the benefit of integration with 3rd party applications (Facebook, marketing automation tools like Infusionsoft, MailChimp, etc.). We discuss this more in regards to WordPress in general in our article “5 Reasons to Choose WordPress For Your Business Website”.

Great Extensions and General Public License (GPL)

WooCommerce products are under the GPL. In short, this means you don’t have to pay for the extensions they offer. Other third party vendors offer these same extensions for a much discounted price and oftentimes for free! The reason WooCommerce sells their extensions on their website is because they provide technical support (email support) and services such as automatic updates. However, you can go to sites and download these extensions/plugins for very cheap and/or free. A couple examples are Theme Canal (very cheap with some services) or GPLDL (free with limited services).

You may still be better off paying the $100 or so a year if you prefer to have that cushion of support and automatic updates. But If you are willing to commit to updating extensions on your own (and you’re able to go without their support team), we suggest using the plugin “Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades”. This plugin allows you to simply upload the updated extensions on top of the old extension through the WordPress admin panel.

Some of Our Favorites

Here are some extensions we have loved using.

WooCommerce Memberships

This extension is great if you want to charge your users to view content on specific pages. It is also a great way to build your email list with its ability to automatically assign a membership to all new users.

WooCommerce Subscriptions

This is a very popular extension. It is great for all those recurring charges you need to apply to your clients. It can also be a great way of setting up users with the option for monthly donations to nonprofit organizations.

Built Into the Bridge Theme

Okay so this one isn’t a WooCommerce extension, but we couldn’t end this post without mentioning how great this online store works with the Bridge Theme. Bridge isn’t just one theme. It is a theme with over 200 options to choose from and with all of those options you can include a store. Most of those stores come prebuilt and ready to work with WooCommerce.

Good luck with your ecommerce journey! Let us know about your experience or feel free to leave suggestions about our recommendation in the comments below.