218 - 'E' is for eCommerce

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

It’s another of our chats in the series called the ‘A-Z of WordPress’, where we attempt to cover all the major aspects to building and maintaining sites with WP.  Today is ‘E’ for…

Ecommerce

Preamble

Ecommerce takes different forms in the WordPress space:

• WooCommerce
• Easy Digital Downloads
• Stripe Add-Ons and PayPal integration with forms, such as Gravity Forms and Fluent Forms
• Specific plugins and themes aimed at one kind of industry or service (LMS/memberships, event or appointment bookings for example)
• 3rd Party – Big Commerce (via BB), Shopify (via WP Shopify)

Personal Stories

David:

I owe much to WordPress Ecommerce. If I had not run a WordPress shop for five years, I don’t think I would have had the experience with WordPress to build client sites. I don’t think I would have been able to have set up a part-time business that gave me the confidence to leave my primary job.

I don’t think most clients know what they are taking on when they first think about taking money online. They’ve likely not thought about email communication, refunds, data protection, accountancy, processing. They mostly just thought about money coming in (as we did)!

Nathan:

I am literally terrified of Ecommerce and all the hassles that it brings, which is why I simply don’t touch such sites any more. I know that the burden is easier in WordPress, but it’s just not something that I wish to be involved with these days. It’s curious that I have this level of anxiety about Ecommerce, but there you go. I’ll happily let others have that slice of the pie!

Points worth noting

There are other open source ecommerce platforms (Magento and Open Cart) but none appear as easy as WordPress if you need something set up quickly and easily. In fact, platforms like Magento are a career all by themselves.

With open source software you can do things like change the checkout experience and change the entire shopping process. This might not be possible or incredibly expensive elsewhere when using non open source platforms.

You can keep all your accounts on one platform with WordPress too, but this ends up with a heavy database, but at least you’ve got all your eggs in one basket.

WordPress pricing has been erratic over the years. WooCommerce dropped the 50% discount and the bulk paying discounts. Easy Digital Downloads increased their prices on all extensions by 50-250% as an early Christmas present in 2016!

However, GPL gives us freedoms over budgets which proprietary systems will not. You don’t have to pay for support and updates. You just need to keep it maintained and well oiled.

There’s lots of responsibility with self hosted ecommerce. There’s the hosting itself, security, GDPR. The list goes on and on and you need to understand what you’re getting yourself into and make the time to keep up to date with any changes in legislation which might affect your website.

WordPress solutions are not created equally. What kind of knowledge do WordPress developers have before the setup? Most are fairly small companies. No consistency of quality in our industry and one site could be built ‘perfectly’ whilst another is just hanging on for dear life, just waiting to break on the next update.

But maybe those who feel safer with the likes of Shopify, Wix and Squarespace may like the GoDaddy deal with WooCommerce?

WordPress does not seem like the best fit for all industries. Hotel or multi room booking systems seem to be lacking. Appointment booking is also a little hard to navigate. That’s not to say that it cannot be done, more that it’s not as mature as a regular shop selling shoes or other widgets.

Ecommerce related

Plugins which offer simple payment options:

WP Simple Pay

Accept Stripe Payments

Gravity Forms / Ninja Forms / WP Forms / Fluent Forms

There’s a bunch of Stripe and Paypal addons for many other plugins – too many to mention them all here.

Extensions to build on top of other Ecommerce options:

Yith

There’s also many themes specifically built for WooCommerce:

Astra, GeneratePress, The Page Builder Framework, and most of the newer multipurpose themes have integrations with WooCommerce so that you don’t have to do much (if any) heavy lifting to get a decent shop off the ground.

Most of the modern themes, such as Blocksy, Kadence, Neve are supporting WooCommerce in their free versions (carts in the headers, easy ways to turn on and off WooCommerce features and rearrange things in the shop, archive and product pages, they even add in nice content such as security reassurances which are not in WooCommerce).

Flatsome has over 150K downloads!

Conclusions:

WordPress has you well covered if you start with a regular generic site and later decide to take money online.

If you wanted a shop from the start or want to take money in a particular industry it is less clear if WordPress is the best solution. But you cannot argue that WordPress and Ecommerce are thriving and a healthy place to be right now.