The answer is a resounding ‘yes’! WordPress is the most popular content management platform on the Internet with 43 percent of sites choosing it. On top of this, InfluencerMarketingHub says retail giants like Walmart, The Home Depot, and IKEA trust WordPress with their online business.
Each of these companies earns billions online annually. This signifies that customers trust their sites and go to them with the expectation that they’d have a positive user experience every time. All of this is powered by WordPress. While your business may be smaller, it can also take advantage of WordPress’ suite of tools to create the results that you want for your online store.
A WordPress For E-Commerce Website – Setting Up
If you’ve run a brick and mortar for most of your business life, think of what you’ll need if you’re moving to sell products online. You’ll need product pages to display your goods. You’ll need a shopping cart. Perhaps you ship internationally. You’ll need shipping and currency calculators. Or maybe you sell ebooks, so your customers will need downloadable links.
You’re not done yet. Do you rent a building for your brick-and-mortar? Your online shop also needs a home. You’ll also need a domain name and someone to host your site. Do you have a maintenance man come in on occasion? Similarly, you’ll need customer support to help you maintain your site.
Just as you may have an alarm or camera system protecting your brick-and-mortar, you’ll need security for your online store too. You must have a safe way for customers to pay for their purchases.
WordPress has you covered on all these bases.
You Can Customize with Plugins and Extensions
There’s a reason WordPress is so popular. There are over 58,000 WordPress plugins available, many of them for eCommerce. One of these, WooCommerce, has the second highest market share of all eCommerce platforms. These are just some of the features you can get with the WooCommerce plugin:
- Online Store
- Flexible Ordering
- Sell almost anything (physical and digital)
- Offer discounts
- Email marketing
- Data security
- Mobile friendly access
- Track orders
- Accepts multiple currencies
- Shopping cart
- Inventory management
- SEO management
- Social media integration
Want to know the best part? WooCommerce and many of these features come free of charge, all of which is good news if you’re like most small business owners and want to get the most out of your money. Should you need to scale your business, WooCommerce can be further tailored to match your needs as you grow.
Plus, WooCommerce isn’t the only WordPress plugin in town that can give you eCommerce superpowers. Depending on what you intend to sell, the functionalities you need, and the user experience you want to create, you can take a look at several other plugins.
For instance, Easy Digital Downloads may be a good choice if you sell digital products and its free plan comes with almost all of the features listed for WooCommerce. If you offer courses, Member Press may be better for you. It’s a learning management system that lets you set up a paywall and subscription services for your educational material.
There’s also BigCommerce, which is best for online businesses that are looking to scale their operations. While BigCommerce has its own platform, there is also a WordPress plugin that combines the best of both platforms. You get the customizability of WordPress with the multifunctionality of BigCommerce. BigCommerce allows you to easily integrate all of your current social media and marketing channels and consistently gets mentioned by reviewers as having advanced SEO capabilities that can help you drive traffic to your site.
Having just given you a peek into the wide world of plugins, a few caveats are in order. Plugins are supposed to enhance your site. But there are times when the wrong plugin can make your site slower or unstable. Plugins don’t always play well together and if you’re a beginner, there’s likely to be some confusion about what will work best for you.
If you’re in any doubt while building your WordPress eCommerce site, get a skilled WordPress support company to help you.
WordPress is a secure platform
WordPress is a great choice for your eCommerce site because of its security features, which are regularly updated to ensure that WordPress sites are as safe as possible.
Because WordPress is an open-source platform, that means the source code is available for anyone to view and modify.
This can be a double-edged sword since potential vulnerabilities can be more easily identified and fixed. It also means that malicious actors can potentially find and exploit those vulnerabilities.
Thankfully, the WordPress community is large and active and discovered security vulnerabilities are quickly addressed with patches and updates.
In addition to the active community of developers and users who work to identify and fix security issues, WordPress has a number of built-in security measures to protect against potential threats. These include:
User authentication
WordPress has a robust user authentication system that allows site administrators to create and manage multiple user accounts, each with their own permissions and roles. This means that you can control who has access to different parts of your site, and you can revoke access if necessary.
File permissions
WordPress uses file permissions to control who can access and modify different files on your site. This helps to prevent unauthorized access or tampering with your site’s files.
Regular updates
WordPress releases regular updates to fix security vulnerabilities and add new features. It’s important to keep your WordPress installation up to date to ensure that your site is as secure as possible.
Security plugins
There are many security plugins available for WordPress that can help further secure your site. These plugins can add additional layers of protection, such as firewall protection, malware scanning, and brute force attack prevention.
SSL certificates
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are used to secure the connection between a website and a user’s web browser. WordPress sites can use SSL certificates to encrypt data transmitted between the site and the user, making it more difficult for anyone to intercept or steal that data.
Stand out with Customizable Themes and Templates
Alongside the plugins, there are many themes and templates available for WordPress, so you can create a custom look and feel for your website.
These themes typically include features such as clean and modern designs, responsive layouts that look good on all devices, and easy-to-use checkout functionality.
One of the benefits of using a WordPress theme for your e-commerce site is that it can save you a lot of time and effort. Instead of having to design and build your site from scratch, you can simply choose a theme that fits your needs and customize it to match your brand and style. This can be especially helpful if you’re new to WordPress or if you don’t have much design experience.
Even better, there are many different types of WordPress themes available for e-commerce sites, including free and premium options. Free themes are a great option if you’re on a tight budget, but keep in mind that they may not offer as many features or customization options as premium themes.
Premium themes, on the other hand, tend to be more feature-rich and offer more options for customization, but they usually come with a price tag.
When choosing a WordPress theme for your e-commerce site, it’s important to consider your specific needs and goals.
Some things you might want to consider are:
- The type of products you sell: If you sell a specific type of product, you may want to look for a theme that is tailored to that type of product. For example, if you sell clothing, you might look for a theme that has a clean and modern design and includes features like product filters, size charts and magnification tools.
- Your target audience: Your theme should be designed with your target audience in mind. If you’re targeting a younger, more fashionable audience, you might look for a theme that has a more trendy design. If you’re targeting an older, more conservative audience, you might look for a theme that has a more classic and traditional design.
- Your branding: It’s important to choose a theme that fits your brand and style. If you have a strong brand identity, you might look for a theme that allows you to easily customize colors, fonts, and other design elements to match your brand.
- If you can’t find a theme that suits you can contract a WordPress Developer to create a custom theme just for you.
Making the Case for WordPress and Ecommerce
WordPress and eCommerce do mix.
Its user-friendly interface makes it easy to set up and manage your eCommerce site. You can easily add products, create categories and tags, and manage orders and shipments without any technical expertise.
WordPress is a highly scalable platform that can handle small or large e-commerce businesses. You can easily add new products, categories, and pages to your site as needed, and you can use the built-in SEO features to optimize your site for search engines and attract more traffic.
It’s secure, with a number of built-in features such as SSL encryption, secure payment gateways, and the ability to set up multi-factor authentication for user accounts.
WordPress is also flexible and customizable, which makes it easy to tailor your e-commerce site to fit your specific needs and goals.
You can use a variety of plugins and extensions to add extra functionality to your sites, such as email marketing integration, social media integration, and customer review and ratings.
You can also use custom code to create unique and tailored experiences for your customers, such as personalized recommendations or special offers.
As an added plus, WordPress has a large and active community of developers and users who are constantly working to improve the platform and create new tools and resources for e-commerce businesses.
This means that you’ll have access to a wide range of support and resources to help you get started and grow your business.
The Only Other Thing You May Need
WordPress is a versatile platform with lots of online support but either because you lack the time to fully develop your site or the knowledge to optimize it, you don’t get the results you want.
The team at WP Support Specialists are waiting to answer any questions you have about the design, development, and launching of your e-commerce store on WordPress maximizing your site’s performance. Visit our website to live chat with one of our representatives or schedule a Zoom meeting.
