Because I wasn’t able to come up with something more clever, Wednesday will be dedicated to at least one WooCommerce topic here on the blog. There just aren’t any other days that start with “W”, so it is what it is 😆
For this inaugural post, I quickly just want to talk about what WooCommerce is and, maybe more relevant to this blog, why I care about WooCommerce (and you should too!).
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is—in the simplest terms possible—a WordPress plugin that allows you to sell things online. If you’re looking for a more complex definition, it extends the WordPress platform to add functionality for adding products, setting sales options, allowing customers to add products to a cart and checkout, and for customers to make payments online. Over many more Wednesdays, I’ll certainly dive deeper into the details of what each of those looks like.
WooCommerce itself is also built to accommodate being extended by plugins. These additional plugins further enhance the WordPress ecommerce experience by providing features like memberships, buy online pickup in-store, pricing by material measurements, on-demand products, accepting payment methods, and much more!
Why WooCommerce, though?
Glad you asked! Or, at least, I’m sure you were going to. When TJ and I started building WordPress sites around 2015, we were quickly tasked with recommending a way for our agency’s clients to be able to sell their products online. We tinkered with a couple of the “top 5” ecommerce platforms for WordPress at the time and settled into WooCommerce pretty fast. It was clean, fast, intuitive, and seemed to intentionally do things “The WordPress Way”™.
With a couple of WooCommerce projects under our belt, we took on a larger WooCommerce project at the agency and got to learn even more about what’s under the hood. The more we developed pieces for WooCommerce, the more we validated our choice to go with this system.
Unfortunately, that large project was our last together at the marketing agency, but we’ve both continued to be enthusiastic about WooCommerce and the direction of the project. I, personally, went on to work for a company that specialized in WooCommerce plugins called SkyVerge—which was later acquired by GoDaddy. More on that soon. 😄
Each Wednesday, we’ll cover a topic that relates to WooCommerce in some way. It could be about a plugin, a WooCommerce campaign, a payment gateway, the community, or a person in the space we think you should know about. Stay tuned for more!
