From the course: WordPress Ecommerce: WooCommerce
Why WooCommerce?
- [Instructor] If you're a store owner or if you're a developer going to build a site for a client, you will either get asked to use WooCommerce or you will have to think about why you want to use WooCommerce. WooCommerce has a couple of amazing things going for it. First of all, it is built on WordPress. That means that you can leverage all of the tools and services built on top of WordPress. There are thousands of free plugins and themes available to you. WordPress was created in 2003. Normally, software doesn't make it into the teenage years because it unravels as people lose interest. But this hasn't happened with WordPress. It's only getting bigger and bigger, and the space is maturing. No matter what you need, someone else has also had that need and developed a theme, plugin, or custom code to solve that issue. The second selling point is that WooCommerce, like WordPress, is open source and GPL-licensed. Open source means that you can look at every single line of code to see what it's doing. You can rip out or edit any line of code that you want. You could completely rewrite WooCommerce for your own purpose. Because it's open source, you can literally do anything with it. Most e-commerce platforms are hosted, and the source code is hidden, so there are things you won't be able to do. The GPL license is a bit harder to explain. The easiest way to understand it is that it's one of the most liberal licenses. It lets you use the software however you want, for as long as you want, without having to pay. What's great about the GPL from a business perspective is that even if the unthinkable happened and Automattic, the company behind WooCommerce, went out of business, the community could continue to develop WooCommerce and distribute it. The third selling point is that WordPress is very strongly tied to content. WordPress started out as a blogging platform, so there are thousands of plugins just about blogging, content, and SEO. Many e-commerce platforms throw a blog on as an afterthought. It isn't a primary feature, and it's pretty basic. If you plan on doing content marketing for your store, then having a fully featured blog is essential, and you should choose a platform that's tied strongly to content, like WordPress. The fourth selling point is the huge number of developers that you have access to. If you ever need something totally custom, there are hundreds of thousands of WordPress developers that you can reach out to. On Freelancer.com, they list 100,000 WordPress developers, and that's just one site. Chances are there's a WordPress meetup in your town where you could meet a developer face to face. So far, we've really only talked about WooCommerce and WordPress as platforms. We haven't even gone into any of the features, and WooCommerce has a ton of features. WooCommerce lets you sell physical products, downloadable goods, subscriptions, memberships, preorders, name-your-own-price products, and more. It's incredibly customizable. You can sell any type of product in any way you want. It also integrates with some of the biggest payment gateways out there, so you can get paid however you want to get paid, whether that be through Stripe, PayPal, or any of the 100-plus official payment gateways on WooCommerce.com. It also integrates with all of the major shipping providers. You can get live quotes from UPS, USPS, and FedEx. You can export these orders into fulfillment software, like ShipStation and Ordoro. And of course, you can print labels at home. WooCommerce is a solid platform for store owners because it has a lot of integrations. And it's solid for developers because of the open-source nature of the platform and how customizable it is. Whether you're starting a new e-commerce store or replatforming from an older system, you can't go wrong with WooCommerce.
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