WooCommerce Anyone using WooCommerce?

[TheChiro]

My wife and I are starting up a new business. Been quite the experience getting everything ready before launch. I wanted to know if anyone here is having success with Woo and what suggestions they may have for operations, plugins, etc.

We will be selling clothing (more specific, leggings with designs).

Currently looking at adding these features to the site (no links to the products, just going off the top of my head):
TaxJar - take care of all the sales tax complications for us
Social Logins
Facebook commenter (still deciding on this one)
Bulk sale (which is basically like, if we get this many people to buy within x days, everyone will get x discount)
Facebook shop integration
Mailchimp (would really love to dive more into the email marketing part of this if anyone has any suggestions, links to articles, or anything that has helped them)
Capture email popup (maybe to even offer discounts with to keep them on the site and hopefully create an order with us)
EasyPost (bulk shipping label printing, shipping company api, etc)

I think those are the main ones in terms of promoting and sales. Hoping there are some experience e-commerce people here that wouldn't mind sharing some tips for a noobie.

 

[Alex - A2Hosting]

I don't have any direct experience of running WooCommerce in production though I can say I've seen several of our clients using WooCommerce with great success. I won't go much more in detail as I haven't had that much experience with WooCommerce specifically to state.

This thread has some great WooCommerce recommendations: https://theadminzone.com/threads/good-shopping-carts-for-wordpress.133724/

Though a couple options you can consider alongside are PrestaShop and OpenCart.

 

[TheChiro]

I don't have any direct experience of running WooCommerce in production though I can say I've seen several of our clients using WooCommerce with great success. I won't go much more in detail as I haven't had that much experience with WooCommerce specifically to state.

This thread has some great WooCommerce recommendations: https://theadminzone.com/threads/good-shopping-carts-for-wordpress.133724/

Though a couple options you can consider alongside are PrestaShop and OpenCart.

I'm not looking for other options, more so what addons have done well for people and what people think are must haves.

 

[fixer]

i have it running on a clients website they only have 2 items tho and i imported all categories from an old zencart store

www.mightydiesel.com

 

[Kyrie]

If you install "booster" it'll have most of those options. Including bulk.

 

[TheChiro]

Including bulk.

I don't see this anywhere. Maybe you quickly glanced and saw this:

• Bulk Price Converter – Multiply all WooCommerce products prices by set value.

But I've already bought multiple addons that do what I've listed above. Since this topic is pretty much dead and not many in this community do or care enough to discuss e-commerce, I won't take this discussion any further.

Thanks for your reply! That addon does look great and I may have to revisit it later on but since I have a bunch of addons doing most of that now...it's kind of one of those things "hey, I know how to use these and am familiar with them (and already paid for them), I don't want to screw anything up by changing".

 

[Kyrie]

I don't see this anywhere. Maybe you quickly glanced and saw this:

• Bulk Price Converter – Multiply all WooCommerce products prices by set value.

But I've already bought multiple addons that do what I've listed above. Since this topic is pretty much dead and not many in this community do or care enough to discuss e-commerce, I won't take this discussion any further.

Thanks for your reply! That addon does look great and I may have to revisit it later on but since I have a bunch of addons doing most of that now...it's kind of one of those things "hey, I know how to use these and am familiar with them (and already paid for them), I don't want to screw anything up by changing".

Booster is fantastic but it does install a bunch of stuff you may not need, which (for me) is probably the worst thing an addon can do

 

[SarbjitGrewal]

My wife and I are starting up a new business. Been quite the experience getting everything ready before launch. I wanted to know if anyone here is having success with Woo and what suggestions they may have for operations, plugins, etc.

We will be selling clothing (more specific, leggings with designs).

Currently looking at adding these features to the site (no links to the products, just going off the top of my head):
TaxJar - take care of all the sales tax complications for us
Social Logins
Facebook commenter (still deciding on this one)
Bulk sale (which is basically like, if we get this many people to buy within x days, everyone will get x discount)
Facebook shop integration
Mailchimp (would really love to dive more into the email marketing part of this if anyone has any suggestions, links to articles, or anything that has helped them)
Capture email popup (maybe to even offer discounts with to keep them on the site and hopefully create an order with us)
EasyPost (bulk shipping label printing, shipping company api, etc)

I think those are the main ones in terms of promoting and sales. Hoping there are some experience e-commerce people here that wouldn't mind sharing some tips for a noobie.

You also need Yoast SEO plugin for internet marketing.

 

[Denis Chandler]

Yoast SEO plugin (I put myself on the site All In One SEO Pack) for internet marketing. Talk about the plugin WooCommerce. I, too, with him in question - I made myself a site on Wodpresse, and WooCommerce is not configurable((

 

[Tecca]

About a year later — curious if you got this off the ground. And if so, what plugins did you end up with? I've been toying with the idea of using Woocommerce and have set up an installation, I'm just not sure if I'm moving forward with it yet.

 

[Denis Chandler]

I left this venture, I'll do it when time will be

 

[R0binHood]

I've been using it quite a lot recently to learn the software and build a small shop to create a more active online presence for an small local offline business.

It is very good, but depending on what you're trying to do and how much customisation you want it will start to add up.

All of the official add ons are very expensive, and renewal every 12 months is 100% of the add on cost. This can be anywhere from $30 to $130 for a single add on.

Take social sign in for example so your customers can login using facebook etc., the official plugin for that is $130, and once you buy into it, then you're on the line for it every year for the same amount after that. No discount like with many other software plugins I've bought.

Sure there's some free ones you can get, and actually some very good free ones when it comes to social login in particular that work just for WordPress, but you usually have to pay for the ones that have it integrated into WooCommerce, so being able to link your account on the order thank you page, or being able to easily social login to leave reviews.

There are alternative marketplaces to look for all these plugins, and often there will be better plugins, with more features, for less money in these market places. I ended up spending a lot of money on a bundle direct from WooCommerce, then only after spending a huge amount of time setting it up did I come accross a limitation and ended up finding a much better version of the plugin by a 3rd party on CodeCanyon for half the price.

Plugins can be freemium ones in the Worpdress Directory. So you search the built in WordPress plugin directory, then you have the option to upgrade to the premium version by purchasing it direct fro the dev. Or you've got codes rpos like CodeCanyon on Envato. Then you have 3rd party devs relying on SEO and selling them direct from their websites, found through google searches or top 10 lists. But it means a lot of time and research to find the exact functionality you need sometime, especially if you don't want to pay for every single tweak. I'm sure this is similar for many eccommerce solutions though.

I also built a small Shopify store about 6 months ago that I never launched, but it did feel a bit more streamlined and easy to launch as a complete noobie to ecommerce.

For Woo, even the official Storefront theme has costly add ons to make it look as good as some of the demos.

It really depends on how big your inventory is, how much time and money you want to spend trying to optimise it, what you're selling etc.

In the long run WooCommerce I've read is a lot more customisable than Shopify, and I've done a lot of customisations simply using code snippits I've found that I can paste into the functions.php file. I'm sure anyone with some PHP knowledge could get pretty far in customising it much more pretty easily.

The one thing I've fallen in love with is the Stripe integration on Woo. It gives you true one click guest checkout and through chrome browser payment requests and also Apple pay. Which is free out of the box and makes the shop feel very professional.


Like I mentioned at the start, this shop is really to be complimentary to a small offline business, and it's allowing me to add a lot more content to the site, which is helping SEO. One massive advantage I've found though is by having products that represent the services that this business offers, I now have a way for customers to post some user generated content to the site in terms of reviews, instead of just sending them to google and facbeook. Even a week after getting a few up there it means that quotes from these customers are showing up as quote snippets in the local Map Pack, which is great. Also, the normal SERP listings are now marked up with 5 star metadata from the reviews, which is awesome and really helps them stand out.

I really want to flesh that out so I'm looking at reviews extentions. It's fine out of the box for basic text reviews - but you can extend the system so that it's more like Amazon and users can upload photos, answer questions etc. So that's another $130 official add on I have to add to the list...

 

[PoetJC]

There are actually quite a lot of premium WP themes that are especially tailored for online shopping, with complete integration for WordPress/Woocommerce installs. Lots extensions available to enhance the shopping experience as well. I swear by WP/WC whenever tasked with creating eCommerce type sites.

J.

 

[Tecca]

I've been designing my theme (based off Storefront), and yeah, I've noticed pretty much everything you've mentioned about the plugins, freemium, etc, R0binHood. I don't mind having to do some customization, but I do go for plugins fairly preemptively. I tend to want to add the features I know I'll eventually get anyway. Not really going to do that this time around, and one upside is that I decided to use Printful so a lot of the plugins I wanted, I don't really need due to that.

I had Shopify in mind before because a friend runs a shop on the platform. It's definitely gorgeous and streamlined, so I can see why it's popular. But with this project, I'm trying to go in with very little upfront investment. Which means saving at least the $30 monthly fee since I have my own VPS I can host the Woocommerce store on, on top of the fact that Shopify requires plugins/addons much like Woocommerce. My friend said he's paying $20 per month for a mega menu plugin. I downloaded a free one that works with Storefront and I customized it. Granted, he might not be able to do that, but 20 bucks a month for a mega menu is pretty crazy.

I'm excited about the new project, as much as it was a spur of the moment thing.

 

[R0binHood]

Yeah, I came across that mega menu issue too on Shopify.

On my WooC store I'm using Avada at the moment which I bought years ago (I may change to an eccommerce focussed theme eventually if the shop gets any action), but that entire theme is about the same price as the single mega menu Storefront extension, $40 or so.

 

[BrandonSheley]

WooCommerance is deffiantly one of the top plugins for e-sales and well supported.
I saw a few mentioned AIO and Yoast for SEO. Yoast premium is well worth the money in my opinion.

 

[Jericho]

Yes, it's a great piece of software if you're opening an online e-commerce store, really user friendly.

 

[JaimeDickson]

Woocommerce is a good choice - it's user friendly for most, but compared to shopify it takes a little bit more to set-up. However, you will save your self a lot of money in the long run by choosing woocommerce. Most plugins for Shopify also are for woocommerce or have an analogue for it. I wouldn't get tax-jar as they reinterpret the nexus laws in a way that gives them a business model. Only collect and pay sales tax in states where you have a nexus.

 

[mausin12991]

Yes, obviously WooCommerce is one of the best platform for developing eCommerce website. You can use many Woocommerce plugins for easily development of eCommerce website.

 

[Alpha1]

you can try Shopify...

Please explain yourself..