WooCommerce Review - A Good Way to Sell on WordPress?

what's up guys Paul here from e-commerce girl that code at UK and in this review video I'm going to be looking at the world's most popular e-commerce platform WooCommerce now welcomers is an extended loan platform like a lot of the other platforms our review instead where commerce is a plug-in for the WordPress CMS and WordPress is the world's most popular website builder by far so it was only natural at at some point there is going to be a way to sell via the WordPress platform our commerce used to be a completely independent plug-in used to be a completely different company it was actually acquired by the automatic group which is the kind of group behind the actual WordPress platform and it become the official ecommerce plugin for the WordPress system so that's made it really really popular in its scene of a lot of competition over the years to become the biggest and most popular e-commerce platform in the world and for this review it is a little bit awkward because there's a lot of things that I can't compare directly with other platforms because WordPress is a self hosted solution which means you're responsible for sourcing the hosting then you install the software on it afterwards it's completely different to the lights of Shopify or BigCommerce which is a hosted solution so I'm going to try and keep it as much the usual structure as I do in my review videos with that said let's jump into my computer so it can get started with this review now the first thing I did want to show you is just how popular this platform is now this is the WooCommerce homepage and if you scroll down if you look here it's been downloaded over 90 million times and that doesn't mean say there's ninety million websites out there running on WooCommerce but the actual plug-in has been downloaded over 90 million times that's incredible that's like mind-blowing figures I know that quite a few of those are mine because I've downloaded it for a few sites because I have actually ran a WooCommerce store for a couple years so I do know the platform quite well and there's a good bit and the bad points which I'm going to cover in this video but I'm going to jump into e-commerce god that code at UK just because there's some stuff that I've covered there which I can go over now the first thing I want to talk about is blue commerce price now yes we're commerce as a plug-in itself is completely free to use you will never be charged for the basic we commerce plug-in but that doesn't mean to say that it's completely free because when you're using a wordpress site you need to have hosting so you need to be paying for hosting every single month there are free hosts out there but really they're not really that good and they're definitely not a great option for ecommerce sites so you do want to buy some decent hosting and if you want to check out what I think are the best hosts if you go into e-commerce god that kill u K I've got a post I'll link leaving the description below to which is who I think are the best hosts for e-commerce sites now that is the one aspect when it comes to pricing of WooCommerce is the hosting but there are other things you do need to factor in when it comes to the pricing of would commerce the first thing is is plugins plugins there are a huge selection of free plugins out there but occasionally you will need to buy a premium plug-in and these can range from a few dollars up to a couple of hundred dollars and the reason you may need to buy these premium plugins is because sometimes the free ones just don't do enough and a lot of the free plugins don't have the specific integration with WooCommerce that is a paid feature of a lot of the plugins Yoast is a great example for this yes you can use it with or you commerce with the free one but it has much better integration when you go for the premium package so that is one of the things you do want to consider is how much the plugins are going to cost and you don't want to invest too heavily in plugins because it can make will commerce really really expensive really quite quickly if you're not careful another pricing thing is themes but I'm going to cover that in a little bit more detail in a little bit so what features do you get with the WooCommerce plug-in well the core WooCommerce plug-in is actually pretty light on the features to be honest and it's been designed this way because it's a very flexible and versatile plug-in and the way it's been designed is to just offer you basically the core features of e-commerce so you get a shopping cart so people can buy on your website and you can sell physical or digital straight away with the WooCommerce plugin so it doesn't matter which kind of business model you're going for you can sell those kind of product the only real ecommerce feat you get with it is you can create discount codes and discount coupons in the native core plugin which is quite a good feature to start with this is a premium feature on other platforms so that's pretty much it when it comes to the features of WooCommerce but you do get all the features of the WordPress platform as well and one of the main features and benefits of using WordPress is it's SEO functionality and SEO ability because WordPress is really good for SEO especially when you use good SEO plugins and one of the main features you get is the blogging software that's built into WordPress and this is where you can really make your WooCommerce site stand out from so many other websites because the blogging feature and the blogging functionality is just so much better than any other platform out there but yeah it does come pretty light on features and that's where the WordPress plug-in library comes in and I'm going to show you this quickly so I'll jump into this is my demo store demo WordPress site that I've installed with commerce on and if you just go down to plugins add new when it loads and if you type in WooCommerce here you will see how many plugins come up and there's over 7,000 plugins that have WooCommerce mentioned in the description and there is offer a variety of different functionalities from payment gateways to blocking websites to subscription sites to membership sites all these kind of things can be done with WooCommerce as long as you choose the right plugins to go with the core WooCommerce plug-in so there is a lot of functionality potential and lots of feature potential with the WooCommerce platform but as this core platform it is very very light so the next thing I do want to talk about is the hosting and performance of WooCommerce and it's something people do talk about is the WooCommerce doesn't form that well but there's a lot of elements that goes into how well we're commerce does or doesn't perform because it's a lot down to you and how you've configured your site and the hosting you choose as to how well your work on their site performs I managed to get my site working really quite quickly when I was using it because I had it optimized I was a good WordPress hosting I used good optimization plugins and I was optimizing my images and things like that and this is where it makes a big difference to how good or bad your WooCommerce site is because you need to spend time configuring it and just gain it set up properly because if you just install it and then don't optimize it you're gonna have quite a slow website but it's kind of a benchmark I actually installed on my demo site I install the WooCommerce and I run it through kingdoms spital which is my testing Talde I use whenever I do performance testing on platforms and he actually returned a nine point nine five second load time which is really really impressive and beats a lot of other platforms now obviously this is a very basic install it just had WordPress and it just had blue commerce there was nothing else going on in there there was no optimization plugins it was on the basic storefront theme which is a theme that's made by WooCommerce so it does work really really well with it and I had no other plugins or anything else slowing it down so this is only a basic benchmark but it's not hard to get and sub to second load time for a work on a store I know that from personal experience click done it myself and as you can see I have wrote a short guide on e-commerce gold and how you can make your web commerce site faster so if you're going to use WooCommerce I would suggest checking that one out the next thing I want to talk about is the theme selection on the WooCommerce platform now WordPress has eight own theme library just the same as it's going so including library and if you actually search WooCommerce in the WordPress theme library it will generate over a thousand results for themes that are compatible with the WooCommerce plugin now some of these have very very good integration and are built specifically for WooCommerce others are themes that just have limited WooCommerce integration so you do need to try these themes and see which one you think is best and which one has a lot of really good integration features so it works properly because you can run into some issues with themes if the integration isn't that great but outside of the WordPress theme library there is a selection of free themes and there's hundreds possibly even thousands of premium WooCommerce themes out there now you can buy these direct from developers such as theme oil or you can go to an online marketplace and the best one out there in my opinion is theme forest which is part of the in Bartow Market group and if you actually type we commerce in here you will see how many results there are another six thousand results just for where your commerce are the theme forest now this isn't factoring in all the ones you can buy direct from developers so when it comes to theme selection and nothing even comes close to work on us it really really doesn't none of the hosted platforms can come anywhere close to competing so that's pretty much an overview of the features and everything you get with will commerce so let's jump in and see what it's actually like so what's it like to get started with WooCommerce well we commerce is a little bit more challenging to set up in some respects than some of the other platforms because if you're starting this website from scratch you actually need to get WordPress setup first before you can get WooCommerce setup now if you wanted me to do a video on that and showing you how to get WooCommerce set up properly and get it running so you've got a good foundation to build your online store leave a comment below and I will get around to doing that as soon as I can but I want to know that people actually want me to do that before I go ahead and do it so I will go through in that video if you want me to do it all the steps you need to do and a lot of things that are missing from a lot of guides out there and how to set your properly but to get start with WooCommerce once you've got WordPress installed is pretty easy you just go to the add plug-in section under the plugins and you type in WooCommerce and it's always the first result that comes up simply click install then activate now on your first install you will be taken through a short setup procedure where you set up your business information your PayPal gateway so your basic delivery methods things like that it's a pretty good way to get started with the WooCommerce platform now if you are going to be using WooCommerce I would highly recommend that you also install this plug-in as well the PDF invoices and packing slips because it fills a big hole in the WooCommerce functionality and I'm going to demonstrate that for you in a little bit it's obviously you can see that I haven't installed it all I've got is the core WooCommerce plug-in on my demo site it's pretty simple to get started with the WooCommerce plug-in simply install it activate it follow the online guide it is worth going through it because it does take you through the base of things you need to do in order to get WooCommerce set up properly so once you've got it all set up it's now navigating around it now the work press dashboard in my opinion is one of the best dashboards out there and it's definitely being the kind of inspiration for a lot of other platforms cuz a lot of other platforms have gone for this side navigation menu now where commerce comes in with this little section here three headings this analytics one is nope that never used to be there it just used to be WooCommerce and product and this is where you can start setting up your website you can start saying all your products your categories and things like that so let's jump into that and show you what it's like to create a new product on the week on their system now there's two ways you can do that you can either go into products then add new or you can just go on the hover menu and click add new straightaway now that add new product page is based on the old WordPress editor it's not based on the new Gutenberg editor that is just for posts and pages instead they've stuck with the original one because it just works really really well as a way of setting up a product so saying up a new products on Commerce is really really simple once you've gone to the add new page simply enter your product title and it will generate a URL based off this now to start with you do want to set your permalinks up properly which is done under the settings menu here so that you're actually using your product name as your URL because if not it will just generate random numbers or generate dates do you want to set your permalinks up first I'll show you quickly how to do that so you go on settings permalinks wait for it to come up and you always want to go with post name if you use any of the other options it doesn't generate a very nice URL SEO friendly URL for your products instead you want to go with post name because this will use your product title so that's how you set up your permalinks once you've done that it will generate a nice you are out for your product so when you go into the add new product type your product name and this will become your URL now this is your main description right here now WordPress is a little bit different than some other platforms because you actually get two descriptions within WordPress this is your full description and this is what sits below your products images and this is where you want to include the body of your information so any specifications things like that is what you want to include in your description because this is going to be what search engines pick up on it's why it's going to read and pick out the information for your products you then get the specific WooCommerce section now this is where you set your price you say your inventory your shipping linked products attributes attributes are a really good thing to set up online commerce because it does help your site rank and it also helps you organize your products a little bit better and people can use this if you set your sidebars up within WooCommerce so people can filter by attributes and so you can have color size any kind of attribute that goes to the product you can set up in here and then you can set a filter system up in your sidebar and it just makes it easier for customers and visitors to your site to be able to navigate your site and find the exact product they are looking for the custom product attribute is a really useful feature and it's worth reading or funny and learning how to use this because it will be beneficial to your site and then you've got your Advanced section so you can I purchased notes and things like that there are also more options you can get and this encourages you to install additional plugins from the WooCommerce team so it's up to you if you want to investigate that and then you move on to your short product description now this is what sits next to your product image so you've got your product image there and your short description there now this can vary from theme to theme because different themes have different layouts but generally that's the way these to have your image your short description then your full description will sit below both of these so this allows you to add a lot of content to your product page and potentially more content that you can get with other platforms because you have these 2 product sections so that's how you set up your new products you can then also choose your product category add your products images here now product images is split into two sections so you've got your main product image and this is what will appear on the category pages and things like that and then you have your product gallery so if you've got additional pictures so if you've got it from different angles or you've got different colors things like that that's where you will put those images right there now you can set up variations on WooCommerce as well but you do need an additional plugin to do that unfortunately you can't do it in the core plugin you do have to install an additional one for that and that's where it comes in there's lots of plugins you can install that can add a variety of functionality so you can really customize WooCommerce to be exactly how you want it to be adding a new category is really simple as well much more simplified than the product page you just type in the name and then you will automatically generate you URL because its logo and WordPress which isn't the nicest name in the world but it automatically generate you an SEO friendly URL which is really really good and you can create as many parent and subcategories as you want on the work on this platform this is really good for creating a nice product hierarchy and when you factor that in with the project's attributes as well it makes it really easy to navigate and search around your products on the WooCommerce platform it's one of the things I really do like about it and it's very SEO friendly in that respect because it's easy for search engines to crawl your site and see how things link and go into one another it's one the reasons why WordPress and WooCommerce is so good for SEO so back to your product categories and you can easily go in and edit these you can turn these like main categories into subcategories if you want to reorganize your hierarchy it's really really simple to do so how do you manage your inventory while in WooCommerce once again it's slightly different to everywhere else because they've got a quick edit feature and this for anybody who's used press before will no this is you can edit certain things because this is usable whether it's your post your pages your products this feature is available and any basic content you put on your WordPress site but when it comes to WooCommerce what you can do is you can go in you can edit the SKU of the product you can edit the title the URL if you've got it set to manage inventory within the product page if you've selected that option you will also have an option in here to edit your inventory directly from this menu and then you just click update and you'll automatically change all that for you so you don't have to go back into the product to edit all of these things just makes it really really easy to manage your inventory you can also change the product category as well if you want all this can be done from this quick edit menu it's one the best ones out there for managing your inventory in the product overview page you can also do bulk edits as well because you can select multiple products click on edit and it will allow you to make some changes to the product you can't change product titles or things like that be contains categories you can change prices things like that so you can do discounted prices directly from this menu this makes the product overview section of WooCommerce really really good and you can just do so much from the products the only reason you really have to go back into your product is to change the description or to change the images to do anything else you can do it all from this main overview menu which is really good and if you have a large inventory it makes life so much easier because you can just literally go through and quickly edit things and get things done really really quickly now the next section is order management now I created a test order just for this video so you can see what it's like and this is where you need that additional PDF invoices and packing slips plugin because there's not a lot you can actually do from the order management page the order overview management page in blue commerce because if you select the products of bulk action you can just change the status you can't print off packing slips or anything like that from the main order overview menu when you install the PDF invoices and packing plug in you can print off all your invoices in bulk or individually from this order overview menu and this just makes life so much easier when you've got a large number of orders coming in now in the native plugin there's no way of printing orders off so that's why that will the plugin is so useful even if you click on the order there's still no way of printing it off you just can't do it directly from the court WooCommerce plugin it just doesn't work because there's no functionality but if you want to manage it all from your dashboard and you want to print the invoice off directly from your WordPress dashboard then you are going to need that PDF invoices and packing service plugin best thing is about it it's free to use and it offers all that functionality straightaway as soon as you installed it and it just integrates really really well I am really surprised that automatic to omou commerce haven't actually acquired that plug-in and just made it part of the core wood commerce setup because it just makes sense it's pretty much everybody who installs WooCommerce will automatically install that plug-in as well because it just makes life so much easier so thanks how you add new products you manage your imagery then you manage your orders but what about theme customization so as I said there's lots of themes available for the WordPress and WooCommerce system but how do you go about customizing your theme well what you need to do for that is once you've installed your theme and another quick tip with WordPress is if you are using a third party theme always create a child theme for it because when you don't create a child theme any updates to your theme will automatically undo any changes you've made so if you've made any change to the code or anything like that it will automatically override that when the theme updates whereas if you create a child theme any updates to the parent theme won't affect your child theme any change you make will remain so that's one of the things you do want to do is always make sure you create a child theme whenever you're using a theme on WordPress all.we commerce and the best way to customize your theme is to go into the front end of your website and you use customize here I click this button and it will bring up a selection of options that you can do to your site so when you go into the customizer you will see a variety of options here and it will depend on the theme you're using as the homie option you get here because I said some have really good WooCommerce integration or there's not so great and it will depend on the developer how many options they bring for customizing your store now this is storefront this is like the default WooCommerce theme that's made by WooCommerce so the integration is really really good and you do get lots of options and there's lots of things you can do within this menu to really customize the way your word for us and week on our site looks so if you're going to work on our settings you can actually edit your category page you can also go in and edit your product page and product images and this means that you can start customizing how your site looks let's say it does depend on the theme you're using some of them are really good some of them aren't great now while up in the front end of my site you will see that there's a few headings here these are auto-generated pages by WooCommerce as soon as you install it it will generate these pages now you don't have to leave these here if you don't want to just go into your appearance menus and you can actually remove these from the menu they just automatically populate as soon as you install it because this is how buchanan's works on wordpress it creates pages for these sections so your check out your my account page your shop page your car it will automatically generate these and the page format which you can see if you go to pages there's not much editing you can really do to majority of these pages because they just work on WooCommerce short code so if you're going to check out for example you will just see a shortcode for WooCommerce checkout so you want to leave these pages alone and just let them do what they need to do which is allow people to buy from your site now there is a new section that's been added to WooCommerce recently and I'm going to cover that right now which is the analytics now it does take a little while to load I'm not sure why this is but it gives you a good reporting breakdown of your order so you can see only returns you've had sales there's a lot of information within the analytics section and it either really really cooks it was something that was very lacking on the WooCommerce system originally because you needed to install basically third-party plugins in order to get good analytics how your store was doing but we're commerce have worked on these and added lots of analytics to the plugin so you can do lots of analyzing of your still see how you perform and see how well you're doing that is seat the amount of visitors you're getting to your site where they're coming from things like that you will need to use another plugin there are a lot of options out there if you want to just use Google Analytics you can use that my personal preference is along with Google Analytics is I like jetpack I like their analytics that they do because it shows real time visitors your site where they're coming from and what pages they visited I really like that when it's my personal go to one I use it on pretty much all of my websites just cuz it's alive you see exactly what's happening on your site so that is the new analytics feature within WooCommerce I really like it's definitely a great addition to blue commerce plug-in there's one thing I just remember that I didn't cover earlier in the video and that's payment gateways aren't WooCommerce and this is quite an important thing because with a lot of other platforms you get a lot of payment gateways built into it you don't get that with WooCommerce the only payment gateway that's actually built into the core plug-in is PayPal standard if you want any additional payment gateways and you have to use additional plugins now there are ones available for PayPal Express and stripe from the WooCommerce team but these actually don't get rated all that well by people have used them but there are ones from third-party developers that do get far higher ratings if you want to use any that aren't free so I think the free ones are paper Express stripe cloner not checks outside of these ones if you want to use more traditional payment gateways such as like WorldPay or sage pay you do have to pay for these plugins and these can be brought directly from with commerce but they're not that cheap they actually come in at $79 per plugin and that's an annual fee so you do need to factor that in if you are using any of these more traditional payment gateways I'm not sure why they are so expensive but it is an extra cost that can be incurred if you are using them generally the integration is really really good but it's just something I wanted to cover because it's something that's very specific to WooCommerce is that you don't get many payment gateways in the core one you have to install additional plugins to get these payment gateways working with your site just one more thing that I wanted to cover because that is quite important so my conclusion of WooCommerce is any good yeah I do like the WooCommerce plug-in there's a reason why I used it for over two years on my own site because it works and it works pretty well now you do end up installing quite a few additional plugins to get it working properly because there's a lot of things that you soon find a missing from the core WooCommerce plugin the first thing I noticed was not being able to print off invoices so that's my PDF invoices and packing tips come in and it's just other things you'll find that are missing but even though they are missing there's usually a plugin out there that will solve that problem for you it's not like with some other platforms where if that features missing you're kind of gonna have to live with it and you're stuck with it you generally don't get that root Commerce because somebody's probably had the same issue that you've had and they've contacted somebody although developed their own plugin to solve that problem now while it is a really good platform and there's so much versatility you get with the platform in terms of what you can do with it theme selection the amount plugins you can use for are a few things that aren't great with the plug-in the thing with it being an open-source platform is you are responsible for the security of your sites and so you need to make sure that you've chose the host that has a very good security on their servers and then you are responsible for making sure your site's secure so you've got to make sure your SSL Certificates good you've got to make sure that your general website security is good this is something you don't have to worry about with fully hosted solutions or even or the WordPress integrations such as ecwid because they take care of that for you on their servers they take care of all the checkout process with the Commish you are responsible for that and it's the only real negative I do have with the system for some people they just prefer having the peace of mind of that fully hosted checkout process so they know that all that secure they don't have to worry about that but if you're happy with dealing with yourself then blue commerce is a great option especially if you want somewhere just slightly different to a standard ecommerce store WordPress WooCommerce will definitely give you the base to build that kind of unique ecommerce site oh so that is my conclusion of WooCommerce if you've enjoyed this video I would really appreciate if you could smash that like button because it really does help with the YouTube algorithm and grow in this channel so thanks so much for watching guys stay awesome and I'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 2,004

Keywords: ecommerce, e-commerce, ecommerce review, e-commerce review, ecommerce platform, e-commerce platform, WordPress, Wordpress, Woo, WooCommerce, WordPress + WooCommerce, Online Store, Online Shop, Ecommerce Website, E-commerce Website, wordpress ecommerce

Id: qOVMlcptIZE

Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020