WordCamp Cape Town 2011

For the last part of the WooCommerce review series we tested a few of the extensions available for the core plugin. These extensions are premium and paid for, they extend the core functionality to allow you to build your online store.

Product to media link

This extension allows you to link your product images to the products posts you’ve created with one click, saving you a lot of time. Another cool feature is the ‘buy now’ button that you can add to compatible lightbox pop-ups.

PayPal Pro

Besides the standard payment gateways that WooCommerce includes, you can subscribe and activate the PayPal Pro plugin. Credit card payments are a common payment method that people use online. This plugin allows you to take credit card payments directly on your site. PayPal handles everything when your customer enters their credit card details. By using this plugin people will be less likely to leave your website during the checkout process. Unfortunately it’s only available in the UK, USA and Canada right now, lets hope it’s available worldwide soon! You also need an SSL certificate installed to keep credit card details safe.

Per Product Shipping

There is the possibility that some products may require a separate shipping rate. With this plugin you can define a specific shipping cost for an individual product. When people order multiple products with different shipping rates, the costs will combine at checkout to give one shipping total.

Sales Flash Pro

To attract people with your special price deals it’s a great idea to install this plugin. You can let your potential customer know exactly how much of a discount they will get on your product. You can choose if you want it to display the saving in % or the actual amount.

Table Rate Shipping

With this plugin you can customize your shipping rates with ease. You can define separate shipping rates based on location, price, weight or item count. You don’t have to add complex table rate shipping data, this interface helps you with the process of adding, removing and duplicating rates.

Conclusion

WooCommerce is a great plugin that makes it possible to build your own WordPress online shop easily and effectively, both in the backend, through simplified controls, and on the frontend, through good design. I experienced, as a beginner WordPress user, that you can build your online shop quite easily, especially with the support documentation that WooCommerce provides. I have tried almost all the features step by step, adjusting the various settings and options in the WooCommerce panel. You can pimp your website with the great themes that WooThemes provides and finally add products to your website. It will obviously take some time to add your products to your website depending on the amount you have.

To to see if all the features work, I went through the process of ordering products from the customer’s perspective. The ordering of products worked well as did the the payment gateways I tried. I also made myself a discount coupon and as WordPress rookie I was impressed by what I was able to do. I feel great that I was able to set up an online shop with my beginner knowledge of WordPress.

WooCommerce has provided something really excellent here and the plugin extensions they provide are awesome and will complete your online shop without a whole lot of extra complex coding – thumbs up from me!

Read the rest of our review on WooCommerce:

• WooCommerce Themes Review
• WooCommerce Core Plugin Review

WooCommerce

WooLabs, a division of WooThemes, has recently launched their first offering to the market, an e-commerce plugin called WooCommerce. This opensource plugin was developed with the aim that it will be as easy to setup and use as WordPress itself. Installing the plugin on a WordPress website gives you the ability to turn your site into a superior online store.

The WooCommerce plugin is built to function with WooThemes current theme repository and consists of all the setup panels you will need. From this panel area you can setup all the features for your online shop, like orders, shipping methods, payment gateways, inventory, reports and many more features. It’s important to note that while the free plugin gives you the ability to create and configure your online shop, to actually allow for transactions to happen, you will need to research the various additional plugins provided and purchase the ones you will need.

Product Management

Once the WooCommerce plugin is setup on our site, you can sell anything online, from physical through to digital products. The product management functionality is simple and intuitive to use. Adding a product is just as easy as writing and publishing a post within WordPress. A product can be categorised and tagged, just like a post is, and you can set your product types e.g. simple, downloadable, variable etc. You can also set up all the data for your product e.g. SKUs, weights, taxes, etc. Adding products to your webshop should be a breeze.

Screenshot of the product management screen in the back-end

Discount Coupon

Another great feature of WooCommerce is their discount coupon management system, which allows you to setup and allocate a variety of different types of coupons, assisting you to encourage your potential customers to buy your products. Each coupon can be set up with an expiry date, an amount and how many times it can be used. This is a great way to promote your products, generate traffic to your site and increase your sales conversion.

Ordering System

Because the ordering system is the most important part of any online store, WooCommerce has created an order management area that’s extremely simple to use. You can edit orders, manage your stock, track your orders, manage your client information and send invoices to your clients. There’s a very user-friendly order history section where you can track your order as it changes status by utilising the available filters (dates, customers, statuses). Each tab that’s contained within the order management panel is pretty much self-explanatory, and little, if any, help will be needed to use this effectively.

Payment gateways

WooCommerce supports a wide variety of popular payment gateways e.g. BACS (direct bank transfer), cheque, and Paypal. These are integrated into the backend and are free. There are other payment gateways supported, e.g. PayPal Pro, 2Checkout, PayGate etc, but there is a cost attached to these which you will need to investigate. We will discuss the PayPal Pro plugin later.

Shipping & Tax

The built-in shipping functionality gives you the ability to define your shipping costs per product, create a flat shipping rate across products or allow for free shipping.

There are a number of great shipping plugins that can be purchased from WooCommerce that offer loads of additional shipping features and functionality and we discuss these here.

The tax plugin is a very important feature. It’s very difficult to develop one that works across different tax structures across different countries, and it looks like WooCommerce has succeeded in doing just that.  With WooCommerce you can configure different tax rates for different regions, so when your online store goes international, this is a must have. All you need to do is set the region and % of tax and WooCommerce will do the rest.

Order Tracking

Your customer can track their order on your website by filling in their order ID and email address.  The customer then has a summary of their order and can check if their shipping and billing addresses are correct. One feature that’s missing that would be great to have is if your customer could receive an automatic email when the status of their order is changed in the back-end.

Reports

The built-in reporting functionality allows you to, at a glance, check your sales, orders, your store’s overall performance, or tab across to inspect daily sales, monthly sales, individual product sales, top sells and top earners.

Support

This is so often the most critical part of a theme and Woothemes provides comprehensive support documentation on their website. There are also video walk-throughs guiding you on using each feature. If you’ve never worked with WordPress before, the documentation and videos will be really helpful. There is also a forum where you can post support questions to WooThemes users who can provide you with assistance .

To continue reading part 2, theme review, click here!