Should I Use WooCommerce for my eCommerce Website? | EP 687

Should I Use WooCommerce for my eCommerce Website?

1. It depends… 00:32
2. Do you have lots of products or the goal of having lots of products? 04:36
3. Do you need a shopping cart, account system, discount code system, etc? 06:20

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:29 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:32  David Blackmon: And today we have an amazing episode for you. We’re going to cover one of the most important topics that you could possibly cover, if you’re selling stuff online. So should i use Woocommerce for my e-commerce website. First of all let me say Woocommerce is the number one e-commerce platform in the world. Which makes sense, it’s owned by Automatic. Automatic has the number one platform i think 43 of the internet now is built on WordPress, and Automatic owns WordPress. Automatic owns Woocommerce, they integrate and tie together very nicely, they have for a long time so it makes sense that they make it really easy to use that platform for an e-commerce that they would be the largest. Now do you need it that’s the question? Before i dive off into a couple of things, Tim do you want to say anything before i keep talking no keep on talking all right i’ll keep talking uh the bottom line with whether or not you’re gonna need this is depending on what it is that you’re selling how many of these products are you selling and those are the two main questions that you need to ask yourself, are you selling physical products are you selling digital products Obviously Woocommerce can handle both but does it make sense to have it if you’re not selling physical products and we can dive off down that rabbit hole we won’t cover that today because that’s a whole different animal and we can talk about it but you know if you’re not going to have a lot of products that you’re selling if you’re only going to have one or two products that you’re selling you’re not going to need digital uh Woocommerce it’s going to be way too much to manage and it’s going to bloat your site entirely too much when you can utilize something like a forum plug-in like, Gravity Forms Ninja forms any of the top form plug-ins they’re going to be able to tie in. Payment gateways put things behind paywalls to where you don’t have to worry about people stealing your products and stuff you can do it with with just a forum plug-in and we highly recommend, not because security on an e-commerce website that in and of itself can be a full-time job. So you just want to make sure that do you need it and the one question is how many products do you have? If you have less than five i’m probably going to say you don’t need it Tim’s probably going to say if you got less than two, i’m going with less than five. Um unless you’re planning on expanding and growing that product list down the line then it might make sense to to have a full e Woocommerce um platform on your site.  So Tim won’t you go into the other reasons?

03:24 Tim Strifler: Absolutely so David covered that well you have the number of products that will greatly help you decide whether or not you should have Woocommerce. But in addition to that there’s a lot of other features that a really robust ecommerce platform, like Woocommerce includes such as a shopping cart right an actual ability to add stuff to a cart multiple products to a cart shop around and go go to checkout so again if if back to. David’s question do you have a lot of products. Well if you only have one product then you definitely don’t need a shopping cart um and then you know if you have two to five you know maybe maybe not so that’s one thing and then also an account system right. So if you like do you need a way for customers to log in and uh see what they purchased and track their order and stuff like that or like do you want just people to buy the product get a receipt and be done with it you don’t need to over complicate it um another big part of an e-commerce system is, like discount codes being able to create coupon codes discount codes and send them to customers and run campaigns and stuff like that. And so if you don’t need that then you don’t need to use Woocommerce. So those are just a few features obviously i’m not naming everything that Woocommerce can do, but those are some of the big things that if you need then your chances are you’re going to need to use something like Woocommerce. So if if you answered no to those questions no you don’t have a lot of products no you don’t need a shopping cart no you don’t need a discount code system no you don’t need an account system all of those things well then you definitely do not need to use Woocommerce. We love Woocommerce as David mentioned. It’s the most popular in the world and that’s for a good reason it’s very powerful but with all that power comes a decent amount of code which can blow your site and so uh if you can get away with not using it then we highly recommend doing so do a David recommend use a form plug-in to easily sell a product simply without the complications of a big bloated e-commerce platform.

04:36 David Blackmon:

Yeah now i will say this as well, so if if that wasn’t enough for you to make a decision you know and you decide. You know what? Woocommerce is free. I can download that and add it to my website uh well it’s very complicated and you better be you better have developer status to manage and design, and handle all of those pages, and tying everything together. And if you go and hire someone a e-commerce website costs a ton to design and develop whether you have one product or whether you have a thousand so keep that in mind the cost of an e-commerce website is much much greater yeah you know than not.

06:25 Tim Strifler: Yeah and Woocommerce itself is free, but all the extensions cost money. So um and actually if if you’re looking for something free um to sell you know one or two products or whatever then you can actually use the forminator plug-in right for wordpress it’s by wpmu dev and it will allow you to sell products free the form plug-in is a premium level plug-in that they give away for free to promote their other products and very powerful very well designed and you can integrate you can sell products and integrate with stripe and paypal and that’s all free it’s included it’s built into it so you actually get more for free than you would using woocommerce because woocommerce have to pay for those different integrations

07:10 David Blackmon: Absolutely. All right well, we hope you we’ve answered your question about whether or not you should use Woocommerce for your ecommerce website. Tomorrow we’ve got another great topic do i need to use the WordPress menu system. Tune in tomorrow and we’ll let you know, Tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then.

07:22  Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye.