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When To Avoid WordPress WooCommerce for Ecommerce
With more than 500 ECommerce platforms on the internet today, it becomes difficult to choose the best one for your online business. WordPress has gained huge popularity over the years and are known as one of the best content management system on the internet. You’ll often find many tutorials on the internet walking prospective entrepreneurs through the process of building a site without prior knowledge of programming languages. WordPress is the platform most of them use. If you are already looking to set up your ECommerce store prior to this post, there’s a high possibility you had WordPress on your mind but before you go ahead, check out the following facts about WordPress, its strengths, and weaknesses.
WordPress is best for:
Blogging – WordPress boasts of about 60% of the Content Management System (CMS) market signifying that millions of sites are already using it. Blogging is the method several entrepreneurs have turned to in order to make some good cash from the internet so if you want your platform to look more of a blog, then continue with WordPress. With its ECommerce plugin, you can sell a few products comfortably in addition to your blog.
Simple Products – With WordPress woocommerce plugin, you should be looking to sell simple products with limited variations and no customizable options on it. Example of such products are electronics and home equipment since they come in only one layout and color. Products such as these do not require much pictorial detail so customers might not be too interested in scanning round the product before paying for it. Note that there are few large ECommerce sites out there utilizing WordPress so it’s not as if ECommerce platform is completely out for WordPress; however, you’ll be better off using dedicated ECommerce platforms.
Limited catalog – Although WordPress usually advertise that their ECommerce platform is capable of containing thousands of products, dedicated ECommerce platforms will still perform better than WordPress. A typical example is the ability for you to add as many payment processors as possible with dedicated ECommerce platforms, unlike WordPress plugins that limit the amount of payment processors you can use for your site. If you don’t plan having a sophisticated site with several catalog styles and features, then WordPress is good for you. It’s possible that you are more interested in blogging and would only fancy selling a few products to support yourself; WordPress would do the job for you effectively.
A Demo or Quick Store – If you are one of those WordPress Gurus already using it effectively for blogging, you might want to try employing your WordPress knowledge in opening a quick online store. Probably you are thinking of going in the direction of ECommerce and want to first run a Demo to see how it works and if you’ll be able to succeed in the niche. With WordPress ECommerce platform, you can easily learn how a typical ECommerce platform operates and use it to make some quick cash off a few customers on the internet. If you play your cards well, you might end up gathering enough money and experience which will surely prove useful if you decide going into large ECommerce business.
WordPress Should be avoided for:
Complex Products – WordPress ECommerce plugins like Jigoshop and WooCommerce are not really good for creating complex products with large amount of variations so most programmers add additional third-party plugins in order to find a way around it. These additional plugins increases the complexity of the process so it’s best if you just go with dedicated platforms that have all the features you need embedded in itself already.
Unreliable Programmer – Several ECommerce entrepreneurs prefer setting up their ECommerce stores themselves. This is not a bad idea if your plan is to start the business on a small scale as you may find it difficult to incorporate sophisticated features and layout on your site. It becomes more difficult or even worse if you use WordPress because they don’t run a dedicated ECommerce platform where things would have been easier for you.
As a new version of WordPress including updates and security patches are released, you’ll need to update your WordPress version and also update the ECommerce platform you are using. If you have other third-party plugins installed, you’ll need to update them too. After performing all the required upgrades, you’ll have to run a test on them before going live with them. Now if you run your site yourself, or use the services of an inexperienced programmer, you might run into problems here but if your programmer is an experienced one, he/she will definitely breeze through the process with ease and you should have your upgrades installed in no time.
Conclusion
In many instances, WordPress WooCommerce is a great choice for your ECommerce store. However, sometimes, it might be a bad choice and here we describe when.
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