WooCommerce Review 2021

Advertiser Disclosure

With so many people working from home and shopping online these days, e-commerce has been thriving more than ever. But not all online businesses are successful. When you want someone to buy your products, you want to show them that your shop is trustworthy and that your products or services are worth their money. One way to do this is by showing the number of reviews, quality of the products, and customer ratings.

There are many e-commerce platforms that can help with enhancing your online shop, but we’ll focus on WooCommerce in this review. Let’s look at what WooCommerce is, what you can do with it, its pros and cons, and package plans.

What’s on This Page

WooCommerce logo

WooCommerce

5/5

  • Completely open-source
  • Highly customizable
  • 100% free with paid extensions available

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a super popular e-commerce site builder and an open-source WordPress plugin. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, WordPress is a powerful website builder as well, but you can’t set up an online store unless you have an e-commerce plugin. And WooCommerce is exactly the plugin that you need — it is 100% free and packed with features. WooCommerce currently powers over 34% of all online shops and has been helping owners sell effectively.

Why use WooCommerce?

There are so many reasons why you should use WooCommerce if you want to take your online store to the next level. Many users have said that their sites went from “meh” to “wow” in just a few minutes after setting WooCommerce up. Not only that, WooCommerce is regularly audited by Sucuri — an industry leader in security — so you don’t have to worry about security issues.

We mentioned that WooCommerce is completely open-source. This means that you can edit and customize anything, including adding unlimited products and users or taking unlimited orders. The plugin also works seamlessly with other WordPress plugins.

WooCommerce Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Open source so it’s highly customizable
  • Great for WordPress users
  • Works with other integrations
  • 100% free
  • Users come from around the world

Cons

  • Self-hosted so you need to handle updates and maintenance yourself
  • Lots of add-on costs for hosting, development, maintenance
  • Updates may not work well with WordPress

How to use WooCommerce?

It’s easy to set up the WooCommerce plugin! First, add it to your WordPress site then activate it. You’ll then be greeted by an onboarding wizard which will walk you through WooCommerce’s basic settings. After that, you’ll create four essential pages for your store: account, checkout, cart, and shop. Then, you’ll choose the location of your store, currency you’d like to use, and the types of payments you want to accept.

Next, set up your product catalog. This is where you can add photos and descriptions of your products, whether they are physical or digital. You’ll also be able to set their prices here.

Our Rating Process

To help you make a decision on whether or not WooCommerce is the right e-commerce plugin and site builder for you, we’ve assessed the product based on 4 criteria: payment options, order and customer management, website building capabilities, and optimization flexibility. Each of these criteria will receive a score out of 5 points so you know where WooCommerce stands against its competitors.

Payment solutions –  4 / 5

The basic WooCommerce plugin includes WooCommerce’s own payment processing solution that allows customers to buy products directly on your site, without having to be redirected to an external payment processor. By default, WooCommerce ships with PayPal, but you can also choose to accept checks, cash on delivery, and bank transfers. If you want to use additional payment gateways to reach more users, you’ll have to use their extensions. Some of these extensions cost money, so do some research on which payment gateways your customers usually use before paying for them! 

You can also view and manage all your transactions within WooCommerce.

Order and customer management –  4.8 / 5

A successful online store cares about the end-to-end customer experience. First, WooCommerce allows guest checkouts, which is great for users who want to do a one-time transaction. Second, you can customize your emails to customers so they stay notified from when their purchase is confirmed to when their order has been delivered. Third, you can easily manage your inventory with WooCommerce — the plugin allows you to track stock levels, keep tabs on low and out-of-stock items, and hide items that are unavailable.

Fourth, you can offer your customers one-click refunds, so they can rest assured that they can get their money back should they change their mind. Last but not least, you can distribute your workload by adding shop managers to manage orders and view reports.

Website building capabilities –  5 / 5

When your website is one that your customers love, they’re more likely to come back and buy some more of your products. WooCommerce lets you work with each year’s default WordPress themes and many other popular themes from around the web. You are also free to customize your site, from the homepage layout to the buy button, to stand out from the competition.

To make the shopping experience smoother and easier for your customers, you can write blogs, add products, create landing pages that go straight to checkout, add categories and tags to help customers find what they need easier, show product ratings and reviews, set currency and language specific to your location, and add filtering capabilities.

Optimization –  4.5 / 5

There are a bunch of things you can do to optimize your website and make it even more unforgettable for your customers. For example, you can offer your customers coupons or special deals, feature top products or recently viewed products, and view refunds.

On your end, you can easily see how your store is doing by adding sales, orders, and an at-a-glance status summary window to your WordPress dashboard.

Package Comparison

Product Details

Basic

Mid-Range

Advanced

Hosting fee

$6.95

$8.95

$12.95

Theme

Free

Free

Professional themes for an extra cost

Plugins

Free

$25-100/year

$100-150/year

Developer fees

Free

Free

$1,000-6,000

Security

$10/year

$150/year

$150-450/year

Domain name

$15/year

$15/year

$15/year

Technical / Product Details

Product Details

Specs

Supportd languages

Multi languages available through the WooCommerce multilingual extension

Compatibility

WordPress

Restricted countries

N/A

Customer support

Available via message on their Contact page

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WooCommerce payment secure?

The short answer is yes, WooCommerce payment is secure. Since WooCommerce is built on WordPress, you can rest assured that a WooCommerce site is as secure as any WordPress installation. Make sure you keep your WooCommerce site up to date so the security features are the latest available. To be extra safe, only buy WooCommerce-related plugins so you know that their code is trustworthy. WooCommerce has made it very clear that they stand behind their products and are staking their reputation on their security.

What are the disadvantages of WooCommerce?

There are many advantages to using WooCommerce, but of course, it’s hard for any software to be free of flaws. While it’s great that WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it also means that you can’t use it in sites that WordPress doesn’t host. This is especially unfortunate news for businesses who don’t have their websites on WordPress. To use WooCommerce, they would have to build a new site from scratch.

What are important considerations before using WooCommerce?

While WooCommerce is free to download and install, their extensions are often not free. In fact, for them to operate at optimum capacity, you may have to pay up to hundreds of dollars a year. A popular extension that people get is the additional payment gateway. The more advanced you want your site to be, the more additional costs you’d have to pay. But if all you need is a simple e-commerce store, then a basic WooCommerce plugin would suffice.

Related Articles