WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress. It turns WordPress from a CMS into an ecommerce site. WooCommerce has its own huge ecosystem and is the most popular (by volume) ecommerce solution in the world. Qala uses WooCommerce as the core ecommerce engine.
User experience
WooCommerce extends the core WordPress CMS to add ecommerce tools. It is possible to use just WooCommerce and to start selling but it is almost invariably extended through the use of plugins to add functionality.
On the front end, WooCommerce relies on theme compatibility in order to introduce pages, content and navigation elements necessary to an ecommerce experience. At its most basic, this includes a Shop page to list products, individual product pages that are structured to show prices, descriptions, the ability to add a product to the basket, Cart, Checkout, Confirmation and My Account pages. Because of the structured nature of ecommerce pages like a cart or checkout page, WooCommerce includes its own templates (including for emails) which can be overridden, modified or extended by the theme or plugins activated on the site.
Benefits
WooCommerce shares many of the same benefits of WordPress in terms of ease-of-use, ecosystem, track record. From an ecommerce perspective, it is worth emphasising:
- Excellent product marketing – with WordPress’ powerful CMS behind it, product marketing can be woven into every other aspect of a website to create unique digital experiences.
- Flexibility – with WooCommerce, you can sell physical or digital products and services on a one-off or subscription basis and in any combination. Combined with the flexibility of the underlying WordPress CMS this means that you can sell anything from T-shirts through to group corporate subscriptions for premium content, data and web services, event tickets, community memberships or digital downloads of music.
- Freedom – you are not restricted by terms of use (outside the GPL software license), leaving you free to sell anything to anyone, anywhere and at anytime in any way that you so desire.
- Scalability – WooCommerce, with appropriate resources and software engineering can scale up to accommodate high volumes (on both a continual load and peak basis) of traffic and sales.
- Extensibility and integratability – if you need additional functionality either by extending the ecommerce application or by integrating 3rd party services (such as a PIM, ERP, shipping solution or payment gateway) then you will almost always have multiple options for doing so either via plugin, API integration or custom code.
