Anyone using Woocommerce?

MikeJDS · Mar 21, 2015

Had a poor experience with Woothemes in the past, so ever since I've tended to skip over what they do.

However, on looking for an ecommerce solution it appears that Woocommerce has a lot to offer.
I'm sure many of you will have had experience of using this, so can you give any advice to someone starting from scratch?
From what I undertstand the WP plugin is free, but offers many paid extensions.
I'm not that clear what the free version can do on it's own. Or whether it's going to end up a bit of a con..
What kind of outlay can I realistically expect to get a store up and running?

If anyone could show me any working examples, that would be great.
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks

ian · Mar 21, 2015

Currently investigating all of this for the redevelopment of a current ecommerce business. WooCommerce on the face of it is very impressive, with easy use within Wordpress, however, free is free, and as you dig down, you find more and more functionality missing that you'd expect as part of other shopping solutions. Don't forget also that it is designed as a plugin on a non-commerce platform, so isn't tailored that well to suit.

There are many plugins available for it, and you'll need quite a few of them, which makes it quite expensive, but the basics are there. What I found quite quickly was an inability to add shipping options based on service, weight and location; there is a free plugin which does some of it, but you'd expect this basic functionality of a proper solution.

I'm probably going to pass on WooCommerce and look for something more bespoke should I decide to continue.

If you haven't already checked out cs-cart, have a look. It isn't that well supported, and technical assistance is from Russia where they are based so time differences mean no quick replies, but the back-end itself is very good and clean script, so no massive issues with speed on a relatively good server.

Avoid Magento unless you want to spend a fortune on a dedicated server and tailored customisation so it runs at anything better than a snail pace!

suggs · Mar 21, 2015

I used wooCommerce on an old project, it seemed ok but i quickly ran in to compatibility problems along with some other little bugs

Admin · Mar 21, 2015

moved from "General" board

bensd · Mar 21, 2015

I use opencart which is free - does most of what you'll likely need but also has a ton of free/paid mods

Admin · Mar 21, 2015

Shopify

I see a lot of people using Shopify

Shopify makes it easy to open an online store by providing all the tools and help you need. Click here to try it for free!

I might try that myself soon as someone asked me to set them up an online clothing store selling custom t-shirts. If I do it I'll post back here what I find out, you can never really tell until you try to build something.

Admin

monaghan · Mar 21, 2015

WooCommerce is fine if you know what you are doing with WP and if you want to you can extend capabilities by the usual wordpress plugin systems. Have a fiddle about, if you aren't comfortable you've only lost a bit of time (unless you pay a developer to make changes). The API on WC allows quite a useful range of remote functionality if you are into programming.

As others have said, WP wasn't designed as a shopping platform and any system not designed for it will have compromise, so you'll really need to try a few systems and see what fits your particular need.

max99x · Mar 21, 2015

I use Magento and you get the benefit of it being free which means the money saved you can invest in decent hosting and customisation

MikeJDS · Mar 21, 2015

admin said:
moved from "General" board

Sorry Alan - It was late.

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Thanks for your comments..
I've heard good things about Magneto. Although haven't really got the time to learn something new, so would rather stick with something running on WP.
Opencart may be an option.

I can see the costs could soon mount up with Woocommerce if the functions I need are lacking so will have to have a much closer look before going ahead. It also seems most of the licences need renewing annually.

The reason I found it appealing is I need to build a site for an eBay store and Woocommerce seems good, as many platforms also support it which makes it very flexible. Plus it works 'both ways' with eBay.

Does anyone have any example sites they could share?
(PM me if you prefer.)

monaghan · Mar 21, 2015

If you need to code anything for Magento it starts to add up quite quickly as the API's are quite complex and a lot of the programmers seem to charge a premium for development. You can do a lot to extend Magento, but you can also do a lot with other platforms such as WC.

I'd suggest do a basic unthemed test site on a few platforms and bolt in as much of the functionality that you can find to meet your basic requirements and then compare how each platform responds and choose what actually works for you.

WC is not that complex to extend and that's the platform I've currently got on the test bench for one of my projects. I've done API work for customers with both WC and Magento, WC is definitely much easier to code against and you can probably get most WP plugin developers to code against WC, but Magento has a huge level of capability and documentation and you can (with time) do just about anything with it so you really have to work out exactly what you need and then pick the corresponding platform for your shop.

With WC you can get a shop up and running very quickly, Magento takes more time and effort, but is probably more robust for a large or high volume store.

spiderspider · Mar 22, 2015

We use WooCommerce on a simple site to add eBay listings (will PM you link).

We use the ebay plugin and it works well.

There used to be a plugin called 'WP Avengers' that was very good for woocommerce, but is now longer available.

MikeJDS · Sep 27, 2015

*Thanks admin for re-opening the thread.

Thought I'd do a little follow up on this as I always appreciate the help & advice I get from Acorn members & someone else might find it useful if thinking along similar lines?

I ended up going with Woocommerce.
Despite my reservations with a past experience and the expected costs - I'm glad to say that so far I have been pleasantly surprised.

I found it was relatively quick & easy to set-up (did it by the book) & I'm very impressed with the functions available.
I've only really needed to purchase a couple extra plugins so far, as I wanted to extend the product variables etc.
My fears of ever growing costs to get what I needed - Haven't proved to be the case as far as building the site was concerned.

The best thing I've found is that Woo is capable of doing just about anything you would want.
There seems to be a large number of develpers constantly working on extras to improve it & it can hook in to just about anything you would wish for.
The scalabilty seems endless!

My only niggle is trying to get the API to connect to their IOS app.
Tried time & time again but always seems to fail. (But that's only an extra)

But all in all a thumbs up from me for Woo!

Thanks everyone!