What Is WooCommerce?

Date First Published: 18th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Applications

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what WooCommerce is in this article.

WooCommerce is a free and open-source ecommerce plugin for WordPress designed to make it easy to sell products and services on a WordPress website. It was launched on 27th September 2011, has become the most popular ecommerce platform on the World Wide Web used by online stores, and is written in PHP. WooCommerce was developed as an extension of WordPress, the most popular CMS, allowing users to build an ecommerce site from scratch or add shopping cart functionality to an existing WordPress site. As of now, millions of websites use WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is designed to be easy to set up and run. When installing WooCommerce, it is installed just like any other plugin and the setup wizard will go through basic steps to get the online store up and running. It will also go to the most important options so that there are no chances of missing out on a step. Before setting up a WooCommerce store, a WordPress website, a domain name, and an SSL certificate is required.

Note:

WooCommerce cannot be used without installing WordPress on a website.

Features Of WooCommerce

The features of WooCommerce include:

• Full control over every product.
• Unlimited products.
• Support for product variations, such as products available in different sizes and colours.
• Easy shipping. WooCommerce is designed to make it easy to get a product to a customer with built-in shipping options, including international shipping, local delivery, and local pickup.
• Tax management. Handling taxes is a built-in feature. Available options include custom tax rates, major tax rate calculation, and geo-location tax rates.
• Product reviews that can be enabled from the dashboard. Reviews can be allowed from verified customers only and a label will be displayed that identifies the reviewers as verified.
• Selling reports, allowing website owners to keep track of what they are selling, spot trends, and analyse data to plan future growth.
• Customer management tools, including accounts and passwords.
• iOS app, allowing website owners to check the product catalogue, product details, orders, and more from an iOS device.
• Over 450 extensions which add additional functionality to the ecommerce site. Instead of directly adding to WordPress, extensions are add-ons that only work if WooCommerce is installed first.
• Mobile-friendly ecommerce, allowing customers on mobile phones and tablets to have a good experience. Mobile ecommerce now takes up a large number of sales and WooCommerce is mobile-friendly, so there is no chance of missing out on a sale due to a customer's device.
• Customisable checkout process, allowing the checkout process to be customised from start to finish.
• Redirect cart, allowing customers to be redirected to their cart once a product is added.

History

WooCommerce was originally developed by WordPress theme developer WooThemes who hired Mike Jolley and James Koster, developers at Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop that became WooCommerce. It was estimated that WooCommerce was used by around 3.9 million websites in January 2020.

In May 2015, WooThemes and WooCommerce were bought by Automattic, the operator of WordPress.com and core contributor to the WordPress software.