June 2, 2023
The title indicates the incompleteness of this CMS if we are talking about a pure instance without any integrations. WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress, which takes this seemingly simple platform to the next level.
First of all, WooCommerce allows us to expand our blog with shop functions, but more on that in a moment.
WooCommerce was created in 2011 on the basis of the then very popular Jigshop plugin. Soon after, WooCommerce became the most successful plugin for extending WordPress with online store functions.
WooCommerce is the most popular and powerful ecommerce plugin for WordPress. It allows you to change your WordPress into the online store and offer your clients almost any type of product:
This powerful tool allows us to integrate with many payment gates and delivery companies. WooCommerce has its own mail system for automatically delivering emails to clients and shop owners about processing orders. You can also set up an automatic sending of invoices after the customer has made a purchase.
First of all, we need a theme compatible with WooCommerce. If you do not have the appropriate programming skills to write your own theme, you can choose one of the ready-made themes recommended for WooCommerce:
These themes are very flexible, clean and fast, perfect for small and medium stores.
It is very simple! All you have to do is go to the plugins tab in the dashboard of our WordPress, click the add new button and enter WooCommerce in the search engine, and then click install. After installation, turn it on by pressing the activate button.
It worked! You already have a full-fledged e-commerce system on your WordPress instance.
WooCommerce allows integrating our e-commerce with many payment gates, for example:
Typically, payment gateway integration is done in a similar way in each case. Let's take Przelewy24, which is the first item on the list, for a workshop.
Go to the website https://www.przelewy24.pl/do-pobrania/woocommerce and choose version 7.X, i.e. the latest version. You have to download the plugin to the local disk of your computer, and then in the WordPress dashboard select the plugins -> add new -> upload plugin to the server and find the file downloaded earlier. After selecting, click install. When the installation is complete, turn on the plugin with the button.
You already have a tool that will allow you to integrate your store with Przelewy24 payment, just link our account with WooCommerce, and you will do it in the following few steps:
Please note that each payment gateway requires the verification process of the store and the necessary activities and documents related to it to be activated.
Each connected payment gateway involves charging a commission on each transaction. Some external companies offer their paid solutions thanks to which the commission is lower, e.g.
In the case of payU, an alternative to a direct plugin from the distributor is a solution from WPDESK https://www.wpdesk.pl/sklep/payu-woocommerce/
This powerful tool allows you to extend the capabilities of an online store. WooCommerce has its own many add-ons, about which you can learn more on the main page, https://woocommerce.com/.
Thanks to them, you can offer products such as temporary subscriptions, auctions, courses, movies, rental.
It is also worth mentioning extensions that offer integration with the most popular courier companies responsible for the delivery of physical products, e.g. Inpost, DPD, DHL, FedEX. In addition, for even easier organization of orders, WooCommerce gives the ability to integrate with many applications such as apaczka.pl, baselinker or invoice.
When you decide to open your own store, you sometimes start your adventure with e-commerce through larger sales portals, e.g. Allegro, where you can put a given product up for sale by creating an account ourselves. It is convenient because you do not have to hire a programmer for this, you do not have to worry about verification through a payment gateway or integration with a courier company. However, you have to reckon with high commissions, high competition and additional paid options.
If you want to switch to WooCommerce and at the same time have a certain database of products on Allegro, you can easily integrate it with your own store through an additional plugin that will allow you to offer products from Allegro on WooCommerce, e.g. https://www.wpdesk.pl/sklep/allegro-woocommerce/
The website for Polish Red Cross in Rzeszów is our newest project with WooCommerce.
In this case I decided to write a theme by myself because it allows us to get the cleanest code and only this functionality which we really need. To management this website I used native WordPress page builder Gutenberg + Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
In the first step I added woocommerce.php file to our theme path and initialize there function woocommerce_content() to display all WooCommerce contents like orders, shop page, cart page etc.
In second step I added WooCommerce support function add_theme_support(‘woocommerce’) in theme init function in file functions.php
Third step is the installation of the WooCommerce plugin in way as I mentioned before in this article.
In this website, I used WooCommerce to allow users to send donations. To do this I decided to install additional plugin called Własna Cena Produktu WooCommerce https://www.wpdesk.pl/docs/wlasna-cena-produktu-woocommerce/
This plugin extends capabilities to allow users to add their own price for a product.
To avoid the cart page on the way to the order page, I deleted this path and wrote a new direction for the button Buy now in my custom theme.
As a payment gate for this WooCommerce, I have chosen payU. The integration with this payment gate is very similar to Przelewy24. About integration Przelewy24 I wrote here How to integrate WooCommerce with payment gate.
The website for Polish Red Cross in Rzeszów, you can see here http://pckrzeszow.pl/.
As you can see, simple project with powerful WooCommerce donation widget in a few steps 🙂
WooCommerce is a very powerful and flexible tool. As you can see, it will work both in larger stores or in smaller widgets that require payment, and anyone can handle it, so its usage is not an obstacle even for a person without programming skills. On the other hand, for developers it is a sea of possibilities and custom solutions.
Hubert Cep
Source:
https://raidboxes.io/en/blog/ecommerce/woocommerce-pros-cons
WooCommerce, or how to create a full-fledged online store from a "simple" CMS
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