Time and time again people say to me, “Isn’t WordPress just for blogging”. Time and time again I say to the people who say this, “No”.  It is in fact a powerful platform for web sites of of all kinds. One thing I want to focus on in this post is the use od WordPress for ecommerce.

WordPress has it’s origins as a blog platform, that is true. But now one in 6 websites worldwide use WordPress as their web platform, for all type of different websites, not just blogs. WordPress has evolved beyond being a blogging platform to something much more.

The naysayers (there are always naysayers) will say some reason why this shouldn’t be. The argument is usually along the lines of, “But it’s not meant for that”. These people are I guess what you would call purists. Nothing can evolve, everything is a snapshot in time. “This (product x) is a content management system, whereas WordPress is just a blogging platform. You can’t use WordPress as a content management system”.

What arguments like these ignore is that WordPress is indeed being used as a content management system. In fact more than any other platform. Why is that so? Is it because of the massive amounts of marketing put into the selling of WordPress? No. Actually WordPress is free.

So what other reason could there be? Why is WordPress a market leader? Well since there is no profit in the selling of it, there can only be one other reason. It is good at what it does.

So onto eCommerce. What about WordPress for eCommerce? Not a good idea? Well actually once again not true. There are several offerings for eCommerce available for WordPress, but in my opinion there is only one that is worth considering and that’s Woocommerce.

The basic package of Woocommerce is free. I love that. How did it happen that we manage to get so much for nothing these days? An entire website can be built with zero software cost as part of the budget.

Woocommerce does sell premium addons, but these are not really expensive. Also, you can create a fully functional shop without these addons. In addition to this, many other developers have written addons that have similar functionality to the premuim addons sold by Woocommerce that are free.

Of course the big question is, how well does it work? No one wants a site that’s full of bugs – a nightmare to run. Well the answer to that is very well. In the Woocommerce sites I have created, I have had no signficant problems.

A possible issue could be scaling. That is, how big a site can you make with Woocommerce? I must confess I am not sure of the top end, but a bit of research for this post found that there are sites out there using Woocommerce with 20,000 products in their product database. I think that is more than adequate for just about anybody who is reading this article. For really big eCommerce sites, you may want something more robust, but what we are talking about here is companies that have huge IT budgets.

To find out more about Woocommerce, you can check out their website – https://woocommerce.com/

Of course, if you need an eCommerce site created, I would be more than happy to hear from you.

 

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Shaun

A computer specialist who has had a long and varied career in IT, starting with the days of Novell, progressing through Microsoft on the way to Cisco and network security. Now running Revolution Web Design, to provide customers with great Web Design, SEO and digital strategy advice.

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