As an avid WordPress evangelists, one of the most obvious missing elements in the arsenal has been a viable e-commerce solution. While options have existed for some time, none were great, and even the best of them required tons of time to adapt to your specific needs. And, as we all know, time is money.
About a year ago, WooThemes announced its intention to change the playing field and launched WooCommerce, an open-source WordPress plugin aimed at doing e-commerce right.
Fourteen months and several beta tests later and the reviews are in: WooCommerce is good.
The basic WooCommerce plugin is completely free to download and use. It’s built on top of standard WordPress Custom Post Types and straight out of the box, is extremely powerful with a lot of functionality. WooCommerce comes with all the standard features that you’d expect within an eCommerce plugin such as;
- Various types of reporting on sales, customers and stock
- Dashboard widgets that allow you to keep an eye on various aspects of your store from the main WordPress dashboard page
- Shipping & Tax settings
- Customers & Orders
- Product & Inventory
- Marketing & Promotions including the ability to add “coupons”
- And most importantly, various Payment Gateways & payment methods
If you’ve ever had to suffer through the frustration of developing with WP E-commerce (fair warning: don’t believe the hype), WooCommerce will make you absolutely jubilant.