WooCommerce

Today, instead of wasting hours in crowded malls and stores, people love shopping online from the comfort of their homes.

E-Commerce in the USA is expected to reach $6.4 trillion in 2024.

In 2021, just on black Friday in the United States, total sales accounted for 9 Billion. Those have been the the highest on record and online shopping’s growth shows no signs of stopping anytime soon,

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a WordPress Extension/plugin and the world’s most popular eCommerce platform used by millions of small and large online stores.

Unlike other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce is open source and is completely free. to use.

One of the best features about WooCommerce is that it puts no restrictions on how you design your store, what functionality you add to ir or even how you choose to run your business.

Factors that make WooCommerce the Best E-Commerce platform

1. Easy Customization & User Friendly Experience

Even if you do not know much about programming or how to code, you can still enjoy all the flexibility and customization in selling your products with WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is easy to install and configure, even for total beginners. Just by installing the WooCommerce plugin and its default settings, you can set up a store in minutes.

Once WooCommerce is installed, you can easily configure and manage everything from one user-friendly interface. This includes product costs, sales prices, detailed images, associated taxes if applicable, shipping fees, stock levels, and plenty of other functionality.

WooCommerce allows customers through the Account Management functionality to track their past orders and can check status updates about the delivery of their purchased items. It offers numerous short codes and widgets with which you can give the best personalized look to your website

In addition, WooCommerce allows you to sell different product types such as  physical goods, memberships, virtual or even downloadable products.

1.2 WooCommerce Themes

There are thousands of beautiful WooCommerce theme designs, that you can choose from, to start your online store. Each of them comes with easy-to-use customization options, and many of them are available for free. Most premium WooCommerce themes allow users to customize the look of feel of your online store so that it looks exactly how you want it to look.

2. Easy to Track Online Store Analytics

One of the key benefits of WooCommerce is achieved through its analytical tools and their ability its to give you all your sites’ statistics.

You can analyze your marketing efforts, by accurately predicting trends. Figures and stats related to your online sales, customers, reviews, social media reach are all beautifully displayed via graphs, pie charts, bar charts.

3. Support

It is natural for new online store owners to be concerned with any technical issues that might affect their online stores.

The beauty of WooCommerce, is that offers support in the form of chat forums, video tutorials, online references and its customer support personnel are ready to resolve any issue you might be experiencing with the platform.

Online references such as WordPress.org offer support forums for any plug-ins, where users can pose their questions and an Army of a community with help you solve your issues.

In addition, as a last resort, there is a huge pool of WordPress and WooCommerce developers that can solve the most challenging problems in the shortest amount possible without breaking your budget.

Steps required to open an online WooCommerce store

  • 1. Selecting a Hosting Provider, a host
  • 2. Installing WordPress (Usually it is a 1 click install process)
  • 3. Selecting a WordPress/WooCommerce theme.
  • 4. Installing and Configuring WooCommerce
  • 5. Adding products to your online WooCommerce store
  • 6. Using plugins for additional desired functionality

List of the fastest and best looking WooCommerce themes

Astra Theme

Astra is fast, fully customizable & beautiful WordPress theme suitable for blog, personal portfolio, business website and WooCommerce storefront. It is very lightweight (less than 50KB on frontend) and offers unparalleled speed.

Built with SEO in mind, Astra comes with Schema.org code integrated and is Native AMP ready so search engines will love your site. It offers special features and templates so it works perfectly with all page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, Divi, etc. Some of the other features: # WooCommerce Ready # Responsive # RTL & Translation Ready # Extendible with premium addons # Regularly updated & Designed.

Astra is fast, fully customizable and WooCommerce ready theme that you can use for building any kind of website

BeTheme

Be Theme has one of the Biggest libraries of 650 pre-built websites with an intuitive website installer.

You can mix and match features from different demos as you like. In addition, it contains 4 dedicated visual builders. Betheeme allows you can build the WooCommerce website you exactly want to build. It is fully compatible with elementor and has hundreds of pre-built sections to speed-up your workflow.  Betheme is also mobile friendly and is among the list of the fastest themes on the market.It has hundreds of pre-built sections to speed up your workflow. It is one of the fastest themes on the and is fully compatible with elementor market

ShopTimizer

Optimize your WooCommerce store for speed and conversions with Shoptimizer a theme purely dedicated to WooCommerce.

Shoptimizer is a FAST WooCommerce theme that comes with a ton of features all designed to help you convert more users to customers.Shoptimizer includes additonal field for WooCommerce categories which allow for far better SEO spidering.

The theme is also mobile responsive and looks great on any screen,

Neve Theme

Neve is a super fast, easily customizable, multi-purpose theme. It’s perfect for blogs, small business, startups, agencies, firms, e-commerce shops (WooCommerce storefront) as well as personal portfolio sites and most types of projects.

A fully AMP optimized and responsive theme, Neve will load in mere seconds and adapt perfectly on any viewing device. While it is lightweight and has a minimalist design, the theme is highly extendable, it has a highly SEO optimized code, resulting in top rankings in Google search results.

Neve works perfectly with Gutenberg and the most popular page builders (Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, Divi). Neve is also WooCommerce ready, responsive, RTL & translation ready

Ocean WP

OceanWP is the perfect theme for your project. Lightweight and highly extendable, it will enable you to create almost any type of website such a blog, portfolio, business website and WooCommerce storefront with a beautiful & professional design. Very fast, responsive, RTL & translation ready, best SEO practices, unique WooCommerce features to increase conversion and much more. You can even edit the settings on tablet & mobile so your site looks good on every device. Work with the most popular page builders as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, Visual Composer, Divi, SiteOrigin, etc… Developers will love his extensible codebase making it a joy to customize and extend. Best friend of Elementor & WooCommerce. Looking for a Multi-Purpose theme? Look no further!

Generate Press Theme

GeneratePress is a lightweight WordPress theme built with a focus on speed and usability. Performance is important to us, which is why a fresh GeneratePress install adds less than 10kb (gzipped) to your page size. We take full advantage of the block editor (Gutenberg), which gives you more control over creating your content. If you use page builders, GeneratePress is the right theme for you. It is completely compatible with all major page builders, including Beaver Builder and Elementor. Thanks to our emphasis on WordPress coding standards, we can boast full compatibility with all well-coded plugins, including WooCommerce. GeneratePress is fully responsive, uses valid HTML/CSS, and is translated into over 25 languages by our amazing community of users. A few of our many features include 60+ color controls, powerful dynamic typography, 5 navigation locations, 5 sidebar layouts, drop-down menus (click or hover), and 9 widget areas. Learn more and check out our powerful premium version at https://generatepress.com

Conclusion

Traditionally starting your own business had barriers to entry such as securing enough capital to create a store.

Thanks to the internet, WordPress and WooCommerce any adventurous entrepreneur can gain financial freedom by building their own online E-Commerce Store.

This is also a great time for women entrepreneurs,Fashion is the largest market segment with sales growing at 9% a year and they will reach 1 trillion 164 Billion  (1164 Billion) by the end of 2025.

The Risks associated with E-Commerce are minimal and for an average cost betweem 60-200 dollars, you can build the store of your dream. Honestly starting your own E-Commerce store is the cheapest way of achieving being in control of your financial freedom.

So, What are you waiting for ?


Article Written by Mark Sayegh on 1/13/2022