Why WooCommerce? It’s fast, flexible and fully customisable

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform for WordPress, and it offers a powerful set of features that can help you build an online store quickly and easily. It supports a wide range of payment gateways, shipping methods, taxes, currencies, and languages. Plus, there are thousands of plugins that add even more features to your store.

WooCommerce is a free and open source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It’s developed by WooCommerce, a subsidiary of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

WooCommerce is a powerful tool that allows you to sell anything online – from physical products to digital downloads. It’s easy to use and can be customised with thousands of available extensions from the WooCommerce Marketplace.

Extend WooCommerce with extensions

WooCommerce is free and open source, which means you can download it and install it on your website for free. There are also a number of premium extensions available that you can purchase to extend the functionality of your store.

Payment gateways

WooCommerce offers a variety of payment gateways to accept payments online. WooCommerce is compatible with hundreds of payment gateways through extensions available from the WooCommerce Marketplace, making it easy to setup and integrate with any system.

WooCommerce integrates with leading payment gateways including Stripe, WorldPay, PayPal and more.

When you’re shopping online, you want to complete the checkout process as quickly as possible. With a compatible payment gateway, WooCommerce makes this easy by supporting Google Pay and Apple Pay. You simply follow the checkout prompt and select your delivery address and payment details. Your order will be processed quickly and securely.

If you’re starting from scratch or looking for a fresh start, we highly recommend WooCommerce Payments—built in partnership with Stripe, it’s a fully integrated all-in-one payment gateway that enables you to monitor transactions, handle disputes, and track deposits without leaving WordPress.

Shipping methods

Each business has unique shipping requirements. That’s why WooCommerce offers a variety of shipping methods to suit your needs. From flat rate to Royal Mail shipping rates calculated based on weight and dimensions, you can set up WooCommerce shipping to meet the needs of your business.

Available from the WooCommerce Marketplace, Table Rate Shipping is a WooCommerce extension that allows you to define multiple shipping rates based on location, price, weight, shipping class or item count. Table Rate Shipping is so flexible that it can handle the most complex shipping requirements.

Simplicity, flexibility and control over your online store

Product management

WooCommerce gives you complete control over your products — adding new ones, editing existing ones and even deleting them if necessary — all from your dashboard. You can also modify product details like stock levels, prices and more to help keep your products up-to-date at all times.

With WooCommerce, you can add, edit and manage your products from the same familiar interface you use to publish articles on your website. But don’t let its simplicity fool you – there’s room to grow as your business scales.

You can create all kinds of variations, such as colour or size variations. And if you sell downloadable digital goods, you can offer them to customers with a single click.

Duplicating a product is the best way to save time when creating a new product that is similar to an existing one. For example, if you sell a variety of products that are similar but not quite identical, it is more efficient to create one version and duplicate it (with minor changes needed) rather than creating multiple versions from scratch.

With support for image galleries out of the box, WooCommerce is an excellent choice for online stores that sell products with lots of images. If you need to show off your products in an attractive way, WooCommerce is a great option!

WooCommerce, by default, allows you to edit many aspects of a product in bulk. For more advanced control over products and pricing—and the ability to perform complex operations like price increases by attribute (say a brand, supplier or even category)—we recommend an extension from the WooCommerce Marketplace called Bulk Edit Products Prices & Attributes.

Order management

You can view your orders using the Orders menu item in the WooCommerce menu. This will display a list of all your orders including new and pending orders.

You can sort, search and filter this list by date, order status (processing or completed) and individual customer. You can see the most important information about each order at a glance in columns—and quickly access more details for specific orders with a quick view popup.

When you click on an order in the list you are taken to the order details page where you can see all the order information including order notes, a series of messages documenting events such as payment information and stock level status.

If you’re looking for a fast way to print professional looking packing slips for your orders, one extension that comes highly recommended is called WooCommerce Print Invoices and Packing Lists.

Complex migrations and back office integrations

Data is at the heart of your business. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to do what you do. That’s why it is important to ensure that your data migrations are handled properly, and that systems are integrated seamlessly.

At Kanuka Digital, we can help you with complex migrations and back office integrations so that your store runs smoothly from day one.

Migrating between eCommerce platforms can be stressful. We can use our experience to help you migrate your products and data into your new store and get you up and running quickly.

We will take care of all the technicalities when migrating data from one platform to another—from simple bulk importing of CSV files to complex migrations like Magento 1 to WooCommerce. Our migration service includes:

• Automated creation of all products.
• Automated creation of all product categories, tags etc.
• Automated creation of all variants (size, colour etc.) – if required.

Bespoke back office system integrations are just one example of the many projects that we have undertaken. We’ve built several applications that communicate with AutoTrader, using their application programming interfaces (APIs) to both pull and push vehicle data.

We’ve successfully integrated WooCommerce with our clients’ ERP, warehouse operations, logistics and finance systems by working with Patchworks and their pre-built connectors.

WooCommerce is fast

A fast website is a happy website. The faster your website, the more likely you are to convert a visitor into a customer — and the more likely they are to come back for more.

But what exactly makes a site fast? And how can you tell if your website is running at peak performance?

The answer lies in a combination of factors: well-written code, a good hosting environment and an understanding of how WordPress works.

There are many different things you can do to improve performance. Typically these fall into two categories, front end and back end.

Front end performance is the stuff you see in your browser. This includes things like:

• The overall size of the HTML page.
• The number of HTTP requests that are made.
• The file size of each requested asset.
• The number of web fonts loaded.

Back end performance is how quickly your site responds to requests, builds pages and delivers them. Some things to consider include:

• The reliability and performance of your website hosting.
• How many products are loaded on a single page. Avoid showing a massive number of products on a single page; instead, use pagination or lazy loading to load further products.
• If you have a large posts table and are frequently running queries across the entire database, consider switching to using taxonomies so that your queries perform better.

You can use tools such as GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights to assess your site’s performance.

There are often a number of quick-wins which can boost page speed scores. From optimising images (using WordPress’ built-in image resizing or plugins like Jetpack’s Site Accelerator) to compressing CSS/JS files with tools like Autoptimize (which also minifies HTML).

Using a full-page caching solution can provide substantial back end performance improvements, but it may also be masking a problem that should be addressed directly.

To get the best results, partner with an experienced agency. They’re able to identify bottlenecks using profiling tools like Blackfire and have a deep understanding of how WordPress queries work—so they write efficient ones!

WooCommerce is safe and secure

It’s not just about making sure your site loads quickly, but also about making sure it’s secure. No matter what kind of website you have, security should be a top priority.

You can have confidence in your websites’ security by knowing that it is built on the most popular and secure eCommerce platform.

WooCommerce is regularly updated. As we mentioned above, WooCommerce is a popular platform and is actively maintained by developers who work on it full time. This means that any security vulnerabilities are patched quickly and efficiently.

Keep your WordPress site updated

The first thing you should do is keep your WordPress installation updated. This will help prevent any known security issues from being exploited on your website.

Password hygiene

Use strong passwords for all admin accounts. Make sure you use different passwords for each account and that they don’t contain dictionary words or phrases that can be easily guessed. Also avoid using any kind of shared password — even with other people in your organisation.

Consider a password manager, software designed to help you create and remember strong passwords, and to save them in a secure place. There are several password managers on the market, and you’ll have to do some research to decide which one is right for you.

To learn more, see our dedicated post about how we approach WordPress security. It includes advice and our recommendation on password managers.

Two-factor authentication

Having a strong password is one of the easiest ways to protect your account – if someone gets access to your admin password, they can use that account to browse any sensitive data within WordPress and even exploit the site further by running arbitrary code. Using two-factor authentication (2FA) adds another layer of protection, since someone would need both your password and a second electronic identification mechanism, such as a code generated by an app on your phone or a code sent to the account owner’s email address when logging in.

We recommend that all admin accounts use 2FA. Our implementation enables 2FA for admin users by default and sends 2FA codes via email; however users can enable app-based verification if they prefer.

A codebase that is well written, lean and secure

It is important to note that any code written within the active theme and custom plugins should be written with care and security in mind. This is not just because it will be exposed to the public, but also because you are at risk of breaking functionally from other plugins. A well written, lean, secure codebase will help you maintain your website over time.

Minimise external dependencies by using existing WordPress functionality if possible (don’t reinvent the wheel!). There are a number of core WordPress concepts (post types, taxonomies and post meta) that, combined, provide developers with everything they need to build pretty much anything.

The skill and experience of your developer will play a critical role in the security of your site.

Backup

Backups are important in case something goes wrong, such as your site being compromised or deleted by accident.

There are a number of WordPress backup plugins. However, the best way to backup your website is by using server-side backups. Talk with your web host about their strategy for backing up their servers.

At Kanuka Digital, we do automatic server-side backups so that you can be rest assured your data is safe.

Fulfil your eCommerce vision

As a full-service agency with over 27 years experience, we take great pride in our creative and technical abilities. We’re certified WooExperts. WooExperts are certified by WooCommerce to provide top-notch design, development and support related to their platform. Our team of WooCommerce experts adhere to its rigorous quality standards, keep up-to-date with product development and hone their skills through access to the WooExpert Program’s training academy.

Our WordPress care packages provide ongoing support and maintenance. We apply updates and carry out periodic maintenance to our clients’ WordPress sites, ensuring a stable service. Our in-house operations team handle hosting, SSL, site monitoring, and server maintenance to ensure a secure environment for your site.

In addition to our eCommerce design and development services, a vital part of our offering is our commitment to help each client achieve success with their WordPress website.

Our team of digital marketing specialists know how to get your company in front of the right kind of audience—and keep them coming back.

We focus on creating a strategy centred around your goals and business objectives, then we create a plan to achieve those goals. Our team of specialists will work with you to identify the best techniques to reach your target audience, and then we’ll implement it all for you—ensuring that everything runs smoothly and effectively.

We hope we’ve convinced you that WooCommerce is a great choice for your eCommerce needs. With its flexible options, rich plugins, and focus on customers, it’s a great option for any business. If you want to learn more about how Kanuka Digital can help your eCommerce store with expert support from experienced developers, get in touch with us today!