Back to 6 months earlier, as part of a new expansion of its e-commerce business, Google rolled out another new integration plan with WooCommerce.

The new approach was aimed at making WooCommer’s 4.4 million sellers easier to integrate their listings on Google’s search page — like uploading products to Google, creating free listings and ad campaigns, and reviewing performance metrics. All of these can be done through their WooCommerce dashboards.

As one of the most popular website-building plugins on WordPress among eCommerce sellers, WooCommerce took up 23.43 % of the eCommerce platform marketing sharing worldwide in 2021, ranking second place according to the data from Statista.

But when it comes to the question of whether WooCommerce is the best choice for online merchants to build up their stores, the feedback is kind of polarized.

When you search on the Internet, it’s not hard to find various articles that review WooCommerce with other famous eCommerce platforms. What is the truth that sellers, especially beginners can refer to in 2021?

Let’s understand what WooCommerce is first.

WooCommerce is one of the software plugins of WordPress with eCommerce functionality, or to say it is an open-source eCommerce platform built for WordPress.

There’s no doubt that WooCommerce is such a powerful platform, with it, sellers can set up their eCommerce websites.

Users can get access to its features for online business after logging in, such as the content management system, API, product filtering & sorting, emails and tax options, shipping settings, etc. The payment processing is also ready for users, bundled with Paypal, BACS, and COD.

What’s more, WooCommerce can be integrated with different kinds of eCommerce solutions, such as ShipStation, Square, Stripe, MailChimp, CJdropshipping, and Fulfilment by Amazon, etc.

Nevertheless, WooCommerce itself might not cover all the specific functions you need to improve a unique online store page. Since WooCommerce is born to be integrated with the open-source WordPress CMS, users may also need to install other plugins to develop advanced features additionally.

So here comes different voices — It seems that using WooCommerce needs sellers to have more knowledge about hosting, domain names, and website design. So does it the best choice for everyone?

Other strong competitors e.g. Shopify, and Squarespace, just wrap all the things up as a services plan, to save users more trouble of coding.

Does WooCommerce worth a try anyway?

To save precious time, here are 5 facts about the platform you may need to know about before starting with WooCommerce.

1. WooCommerce itself is free to download & use

Indeed, WooCommerce is free to install and use. Comparing the price with other fully hosted competitors who bundled domain, hosting, software, and other eCommerce-related settings into a monthly paid plan, WooCommerce will cost you less on this and it does not charge transaction fees either.

However, one thing for sure is that nothing comes all for free. Users will pay for advanced plugins and add-ons. Besides, the main annual cost will be the hosting plan. How to exactly maximize the functions and cost is one thing sellers can take into consideration and make a decision by themselves.

All in all, to put all the costs together, WooCommerce tends to be less than some other platforms.

2. WooCommerce is highly customizable

Good news for sellers who want to have more control over their websites. WooCommerce will not only allow users to customize their designs with a visual builder or by coding but also for the functions and services of almost everything in your online store.

3. WooCommerce is versatile

As a plugin of WP, WooCommerce got seamless integration with WordPress, which is important because this means the value of one online store is relatively worth to be more than expected.

What may be impressive is that it could work with even digital goods. Despite sellers using WooCommerce to create online shops which are in secular view, the website also contains the potential to be more comprehensive according to your needs.

4. Access to numerous templates and extensions

There is a huge resource to choose from. With its amazing extensions store, users can find themselves all kinds of functional plugins no matter for free or with a paid plan based on their needs. Users can also reach thousands of templates on WP easily, and use them on their website.

However,  too many plugins sometimes also cause troubles: conflicts between plugins will be easy to happen. Not only that, overloaded apps will drag down the site speed and make the unnecessary maintenance cost even higher.

5. More preferred by online stores that content is highly dependent on

WooCommerce will be more preferred by some specific groups of users, for example：

– Store runners (or groups) with technical abilities so that to customize their stores or use unique functionality;

– Store runners who integrate content and products together more deeply and focus more on content;

– Store runners who are sensitive to cost.

Know More about WooCommerce 

Five WooCommerce plugin examples for 2021

▪ All in One SEO

All in One SEO is one of the popular WooCommerce WP plugins for SEO. With this tool, users can easily optimize the product SEO titles, images, categories, and tags; populate meta descriptions on your product page, to save your efforts on marketing to get more traffic.

▪ Google Analytics Pro

Google Analytics Pro is an extension used to analyze and manage your online store sales and more.

It will help sellers to track customer behaviors, order conditions, refund and cancellations, and so on then gives our analysis report. So you can have more control over the sales on your website and then plan on your next project.

▪ HubSpot

HubSpot is another useful and comprehensive WooCommerce plugin for marketing. What can be attractive is, that this tool can be free to use.

Users can track customers’ behaviors in the CRM, add live chat or chatbots access to provide a better shopping experience or create online forms and email marketing campaigns, and even more. All of the work can be done within the WooCommerce dashboard.

▪ RafflePress

RafflePress is a plugin to help sellers run better content in their online stores. It helps users to create giveaways to get more traffic and conversation rates. With its drag and drop builder with various templates, you can set up and finish the whole process more instantly.

What’s more, different ways can be built so that people can enter your contest, setpoints for each entry.

▪ CJdropshipping

CJdorpshipping is a one-stop supply-chain solution platform for eCommerce merchants. It has already launched its WooCommerce plugin version to help WooCommerce sellers to manage their order fulfillment, shipping, product sourcing, inventory, and more all through the dashboard.

Better than that, CJdropshipping is a totally free app, which means that sellers do not need to pay any membership fees, service fees, or maintenance fees. With 24 hours online assigned agent to provide support, sellers can get instant help anytime to optimize the processing time for their orders and bring their business to the next level.

Start your business with CJdropshipping

All-in-one dropshipping solution provider: product supplies, global logistics, free sourcing, POD, video shooting, and other dropshipping-related services.