What is WooCommerce? How to Install WooCommerce and Set Up Shipping Integration?

With each passing day, the number of people entering e-commerce is increasing in Turkey as well as around the world. New online sellers face many options when it comes to choosing a platform.

Here lie the monthly subscription system, which is Shopify's model, and open-source infrastructures such as Magento and WooCommerce. Among these, is the simplest possible solution or the method that is possible to scale in the future best?

More than 2.3 million e-commerce sites around the world are powered by WooCommerce. The biggest reason for this is that it offers suitable options for users who are new to e-commerce. For long-term plans, however, it may create a disadvantage in the future. So, is WooCommerce enough for you too? Keep reading to find out.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is designed to make it easy for small and medium-sized online sellers to sell their products and services on their websites.

With WooCommerce, you can set up and manage a virtual store, process payments, and track shipping processes. It is a popular choice for creating an online store due to its user-friendliness and easy integration with WordPress, a widely used content management system (CMS).

Now that you know what WooCommerce is, let's take a look at its origins. In 2011, two developers, Mike Jolley and James Koster, launched WooCommerce after working on a clone of the e-commerce plugin Jigoshop.

In 2015, WooCommerce and its sibling plugin WooThemes were acquired by Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. When WordPress and WooCommerce joined forces, the growth and spread of WooCommerce accelerated even further. Today, Automattic continues to be the active developer for WooCommerce and keeps competing with its rivals in the market by developing the plugin day by day.

What Does WooCommerce Do?

WooCommerce accommodates and integrates all the needs required for an online business. It offers suitable options for all your needs, from receiving orders to shipping the product and the return process.

Downloaded more than 30 million times by users so far, WooCommerce powers millions of stores on the internet. The main reason why it is preferred so much is that WooCommerce has an easy setup and usage. For this reason, it is one of the first choices for beginners in e-commerce.

WooCommerce allows you to turn a WordPress website into an e-commerce store within minutes. Since it works compatibly with all necessary components for e-commerce, it can automatically handle many question marks such as the shopping cart and payment methods.

How Much is the WooCommerce Setup Cost?

WooCommerce has no setup costs. Since it is a completely free application within WordPress, you only need a WordPress installation. At its core, WordPress is also a free CMS, but you have to pay a fee for hosting and a custom domain name. These prices vary according to the hosting packages and the type of domain name you want to purchase.

What are the Advantages of WooCommerce?

There are many advantages to using WooCommerce. We can list these advantages as follows:

Cost

WooCommerce is a completely free plugin and continues to receive updates regularly. Therefore, when considered in terms of cost, it offers businesses the opportunity to create an e-commerce site without making any additional expenditure.

WooCommerce Plugin and Theme Variety

Since WooCommerce works on the WordPress infrastructure, you can use thousands of paid or free plugins running on WordPress and customize your site. For example, you can start accepting payments smoothly and securely by using payment gateway plugins such as iyzico and payTR. Additionally, there are thousands of paid or free themes developed for website design. You can easily edit and publish your site by choosing the one that suits you among these.

Analytical Structure

You must be wondering which products your customers are interested in. By using plugins like Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, etc. with WooCommerce, you can analyze your site in detail and create a growth strategy based on the data you obtain.

Ease of Installation

Setting up WooCommerce does not require any coding knowledge. You can easily complete the installation by just following certain steps. I will be explaining the WordPress WooCommerce Installation in detail later in the article.

WooCommerce Community

WooCommerce is a free and open-source plugin made by WooThemes and developed by Automattic. Free and open-source systems are supported by communities. WooCommerce also has a large international community. Therefore, when you experience any problems, thousands of people can support you. You can solve your problems by communicating with thousands of people on WooCommerce forums or Facebook groups.

What are the Disadvantages of WooCommerce?

While WooCommerce offers a host of advantages, there are also some disadvantages to using this popular e-commerce platform. These disadvantages include limited customization options, lack of customer support, and lack of scalability. We can list them in detail as follows:

Limited customization options

One of the main disadvantages of WooCommerce is its limited customization options. Although you can find a range of plugins and themes to change the look and feel of your store, there are still limitations to what you can do. If you have competitors with major innovations, you might experience various deficiencies at this point.

No customer support

Another disadvantage of WooCommerce is the lack of customer support provided by the company. If you encounter any problems with your store, you will need to get help from the community or hire someone to help you solve the problem.

Lack of scalability

WooCommerce can be a great platform for small and medium-sized businesses, but some issues arise when growth gains speed in the future. If your business starts to grow rapidly, you may need to look for a more robust e-commerce platform that can handle the increased traffic and sales.

How to Set Up WooCommerce?

1. Create a WordPress Account.

We mentioned at the beginning of the article that WooCommerce is actually a WordPress plugin. For this reason, you must first create a WordPress account. Then, you can start the store setup immediately by installing the plugin onto the WordPress account you created.

2. Install WooCommerce.

After opening your WordPress account and installing it on your device, you will see the «Plugins» tab in the menu on the left side of your dashboard. When you click it, you should find WooCommerce in the app store where plugins you can install on your WordPress page are listed, and follow the steps "Install Now" and then "Activate Now".

3. Create Your Store.

After running the setup wizard, you must first fill out the page where you will enter your store details. Subsequently, WooCommerce will ask you for industry, product, and business information, and redirect you to the relevant page to choose the theme that will be the appearance of your store. After choosing the most suitable theme for your business, congratulations, you have completed the setup!

4. Start Selling.

Finally, in order to make your store fully operational, WooCommerce will show you a to-do list. When you follow the necessary steps, your store will be completely ready for your customers to visit and purchase your products.

5. Connect to Navlungo International Shipping Integration

Set up the Navlungo international shipping integration for free and ship your products worldwide with the best shipping rates

How to Integrate WooCommerce with Navlungo?

With WooCommerce, from our marketplace integration family, you can now easily manage your international shipments on the Navlungo platform and get comparative quotes within seconds. While your orders are automatically uploaded to our system, you can dedicate the time you save to your trade!

You can follow the steps below to integrate your WooCommerce store with the Navlungo dashboard:

• Log in to the Navlungo digital logistics platform and click on the "My Integrations" heading.

• To connect the WooCommerce marketplace, click "Add New Marketplace" and then click WooCommerce, which is one of the marketplaces that appear; add the requested Store URL and Store Name below and connect your store immediately.

• Accept the store connection approval requested by WooCommerce.

• Select billing details or add a new one, then click "Add Marketplace".

Congratulations, your store is connected!

What Are the Outstanding Features of WooCommerce?

Although WordPress came to the fore especially for producing blog content when it was first established, it became important for many entrepreneurs' online stores over time as e-commerce trends increased.

On the WooCommerce infrastructure, you can integrate other services required for e-commerce, and manage your commercial processes such as payments, shipping, and member analysis much more easily. With its countless features and plugins, you can design your website as you wish, sell any product you want as much as you want, and add payment, shipping, and language options.

We can list the features of WooCommerce, which has more than 400 official plugins and is developed by more than 2,000 developers, as follows:

• Supported by WordPress: WooCommerce software is built on WordPress, one of the best content management systems in the world.

• Superior protection: It is regularly audited by Sucuri, one of the industry's most recognized security companies.

• User-friendly dashboard: WooCommerce has a dashboard that its members, with countless features, can use easily.

• You can sell any product you wish: On WooCommerce, you can sell everything from physical products to digital products, software to plugins, subscriptions to content. There are also various plugins for sales models such as dropshipping.

• Unlimited product and variant options: You can add unlimited products to your WooCommerce-based e-commerce site, and if these products have different models, you can also add unlimited variant options. In many other infrastructures, product variants are limited.

• Language and currency options: Language and currency options are also available based on your location. You can add the desired language, currency, and measurement units to your website. In addition, by getting extra plugins, you can turn into a website that supports multiple currency and language options.

• Countless themes: WooCommerce is designed to work seamlessly with known and loved themes, including WordPress themes and many popular themes on the internet. You can choose any of these countless themes and edit it according to your needs.

• Reliable payment systems: WooCommerce supports many online payment systems. By setting up your virtual POS and bank agreements, you can start receiving online payments in a few seconds.

• Order management: WooCommerce controls the stock levels of your e-commerce site. It retains the stock of a canceled order, notifies you of low and out-of-stock products. It removes out-of-stock products from sale. It also handles order management and tracking.

• Different email templates: You can select ready-made templates for emails to send to customers, for example, after they make a purchase or when their orders are completed.

• Free shipping option: With the plugins you add to your sales in WooCommerce, you can offer free shipping benefits to orders above a specified threshold. Multiple shipping options are also available among the plugins. At this point, for entrepreneurs heading abroad, you can send cargo all over the world with the Navlungo WooCommerce plugin and manage the process through a single panel.

• Search engine optimization: WooCommerce is one of the best platforms for SEO practices. You can increase your organic sales with SEO.

• Discount coupons: You can create coupons for special offers and campaigns for your customers, such as a fixed amount, a specific discount rate, or free shipping.

• Store performance reporting: You can view your sales, refunds, and coupons over time, and analyze the best-selling products and categories in your store.

• Tax options: It enables taxes to be calculated automatically based on the country you are in and the product category you sell.

What is a WooCommerce Theme?

WooCommerce theme is a general name given to WordPress themes that have been prepared as e-commerce-oriented. WooCommerce themes are products used by those who want to make sales.

Just as you can find many themes on external websites, there are also many themes you can examine directly via WooCommerce. The best part of WooCommerce themes is that they can be easily customized. For this reason, you can customize by choosing the theme that is close to your business and your imagination.

How to Choose a WooCommerce Theme?

It is possible to come across hundreds of WooCommerce themes on the WordPress dashboard or external websites. So, how to choose a WooCommerce theme? You should pay attention to the following when choosing a theme:

• Determining the Priority

Before starting to choose the right WooCommerce theme, the purpose of the website should be clarified. Adopting a style suitable for your industry here will provide convenience for your users. For example, themes where images come to the fore are more suitable in a clothing store.

• Responsive

While having a responsive design used to be just an option, it has now become a necessity. The theme you choose must be usable on different devices and screen sizes such as desktop, mobile, and tablet. It is hard to predict which platform your users will choose to use you, so you must target them all.

You can also use the Responsive Design Checker to see if the theme is responsive

• Compatibility with plugins

A plugin is a piece of software that can integrate with your site. It allows you to build almost any type of website, from e-commerce to portfolios and directory sites, by adding new features to your site or extending existing ones. If you are planning a long-term strategy, be sure to pay attention to its compatibility with plugins when choosing a theme.

• Browser compatibility

When you develop a website, you want as many people to visit it as possible. Visitors use various browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and Safari. Check if the theme is compatible with these browsers. If not specified, try to perform a manual test to get the best results. You can use PowerMapper to check different types of browser compatibility.

• SEO Friendly

The key to driving traffic to your website is SEO. In this section, the sum of coding techniques is utilized. If you know how to read the code, you can look at the source code to see if it is optimized for SEO. You can choose SEO-friendly WordPress themes to optimize better in the future.

• Load Time of the Site

If a page takes longer than three seconds to load, 53% of mobile site users will leave the page. The numbers show that we should always pay attention to the loading speed of the site. We must keep this in mind when choosing a theme. To keep users engaged and continuously on the page, you might consider evaluating the theme's loading time. You should lean towards those that are optimized to speed up your site.

• Regular Updates

WordPress is constantly updated and it is important that the theme you choose is also updated from time to time. Without a constantly updated theme, you might miss out on many new features that can provide a better user experience.

What are the Differences Between WooCommerce and Shopify?

While Shopify sets the pricing, WooCommerce is more flexible. Shopify's prices range from $29 to $299 per month. As you move up, you unlock more advanced features such as professional reports. WooCommerce is free, but it comes with additional costs, including hosting, domain name, and security.

Shopify's set pricing plans make it easy to track your expenses. On the other hand, WooCommerce is open-source software that makes setup free. However, you need to pay for:

• Hosting ($35 – $50/month)

• Security ($0 – $200/year)

• Domain Name ($10 – £20/year)

• Extension fees ($0 – $100/month)

It is worth noting that all the above fees are included in your Shopify plan.

Is WooCommerce Paid?

Although the WooCommerce plugin is free, the domain name and hosting required for the setup of your WordPress-based website are subject to a certain fee. This fee is shaped according to the details of the services you will use.