WordPress is a world-famous project for managing your content. It has been dominating the internet for quite some time. With its advanced functionality and ease of extension, no doubt WordPress is a very popular software. Also, a primary feature is that it is open sourced and free to use. What more can one ask for?
Do you know that you can run your own E Commerce Project from a WordPress installation? Not only this there are extensions (known as plugins in WordPress) that can connect with other useful utility sites such as MailChimp and payment vendors to set up complete E Commerce suite.
Let us examine a few of these plugins that can help you with E Commerce journey.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a plugin that extends your WordPress installation into a full-fledged E Commerce Solution. WooCommerce is designed and developed by the same company that developed WordPress, so be rest assured that you are getting the same power of open source and freedom that comes with it.
You will get a full store front design that you can customize for your requirements. The theme store is full of themes that you can use for your own needs.
In addition to the themes, you get well tested shopping cart system that as per their documentation helps convert more shoppers. They also provide integration with multiple payment vendors, taxation calculation and shipping options a breeze.
Because it is hosted on your own server, you own the data and it is not shared with any other entity until you explicitly provide permission to do so.
Like any other open system, you can interact with WooCommerce using their APIs and extend it using hooks.
In addition, if you have the required skills, you can even contribute to the development of WooCommerce product.
MailChimp for WooCommerce
What is E Commerce business without marketing? A great tool that I personally used for my own business was MailChimp. It is a great way to automate your Campaign processes.
You may need to send email when a user signs up or buys a product from your website.
You may also need to automate your campaign processes as to what happens on a periodic basis with your existing contacts or customers. Do you send them promotional offers, or do you just like to send them tips related to your product usage. OR would like to find how much they are satisfied with your product that they have purchased. All these things are automated using MailChimp website.
However, wouldn’t it be better if you could do this from your WooCommerce based website? That is where MailChimp plugin comes in.
Using the plugin, you can automate processes related to signups. You can show them sign up popups that directly add them to a Mailchimp account. Check out more features at their plugin page
SureCart
SureCart is also a WordPress plugin that even though it provides an E Commerce function, outsources intensive operations such as tax calculations and payment processing on its own server rather than your own.
The idea is that your server may not be able to handle excess loads during peak times and performance because the database may not be optimized. It is because often scaling of E Commerce solutions comes with additional problems of database management and server performance during peak times, for which you do not want to spend time and resources.
Also, it is a common problem in any WordPress based system that some plugins interfere with each other because of the way they have been coded and cause breakdown in the site.
SureCart plugin avoids the above issues because your E Commerce system will use infrastructure provided with the SureCart cloud solutions.
Photo by Markus Winkler:
Leave a Reply