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eCommerce is ever growing. Its present day renaissance is driven by several trends, such as the steady increase in mobile device browsing and businesses interconnecting real time systems to improve conversion rates, automate workflows and empower self-service. These business systems often include lead generation, live chat / help desk / artificial intelligence, shopping cart, customer relationship management, fulfillment / shipping, and accounting or enterprise resource planning software.
An organization’s migration from custom or legacy software into a popular modern platform in effect transfers away large portions of the software development responsibility, enabling a team’s concentration on the less mundane – the unique layer of content, configurations, data, and business logic modifications that sets any business apart irrespective of its platform decisions.
Core eCommerce “shopping cart” functionality consists of product management, categories and search, product variations and filtering, cart, coupon, checkout, shipping, tax, order management, refunding, inventory management, customer self-service, staff role bifurcation, and template management. These are both front end user interfaces and back end staff or administrator interfaces.
Standard web page templates are: product listings by category, individual products and variations, cart with tax, coupons and shipping, checkout with payments, and my account with profile and order history, sometimes saved payment method management.
Core functionality includes an App ( plugin / add-on / extension / component ) developer ecosystem offering small products that extend features with ease. There’s hundreds of popular extensions for many of the platforms. To name a few: subscriptions, memberships, booking / events, product kits and bundles, reports and segmentation, abandoned cart and drip email campaigns, and third party service integrations for – you name it!
Open Source
The primary benefit of open-source software is the freedoms these projects bestow. This applies to obtaining the software, customizing or even re-selling it and avoiding vendor lock-in.
The primary cost of open-source software is in hosting and maintenance. This means having a responsibility to keep up with the latest best practices or engage a vendor who supports the project.
Many open-source projects offer an official hosting solution, but due to the customizable DIY nature many if not most users pick their favorite third party hosting company to serve the software and connect it to their domain name. Then they update the software as needed pulling from the update server.
My focus is on WooCommerce, but I should mention there are plenty of comparable open- source eCommerce platforms available. Magento Community Edition, OpenCart and PrestaShop are popular choices. There are myriad choices and hybrid options too, such as an open source plugin for WordPress powered sites that integrates with an external commercial platform the user must sign up with, say for instance Amazon or eBay.
Proprietary
What’s the opposite of open-source? Commercially licensed proprietary software. Most everyday software fits into this category. It’s owned, managed, hosted (served) or distributed by a company that sells limited use commercial or end-user licenses. These licenses may be charged upfront or be monthly recurring and/or may levy transactional fees. One certainly has to agree to some lengthy terms and conditions in order to use these.
Popular eCommerce platforms in this category are Big Commerce, ClickFunnels, Shopify, SquareSpace, and Wix. This category also includes enterprise systems powered by Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and SalesForce to name a few.
Users do not own their copy of the software. Rather, they own their customer data and are just renting access to the software. If prices change, vendors become undesirable, services get frozen (yes, it happens), features change unfavorably, or anything really; users are at the mercy of the company who owns the software. If they want to leave they can download a somewhat cryptic spreadsheet of their customer data and have to figure out a way to migrate elsewhere.
On the positive side, the functionality can be similar despite the licensing differences. Proprietary systems typically have improved fluidity having been designed under stricter vendor terms or by a unified internal team. However, that may not be the case with third party Apps – in my experience those come in all forms and don’t always inter-operate as expected with the platform they service.
Another benefit of proprietary is when the company that owns it develops strong partnerships with services offering exclusive access to cutting edge features not yet available to the public or to outside developers referencing the application programming interface.
Considerable benefits can make at least experimenting with proprietary licensed software worthwhile. Plus, for some users who implicitly trust “the man” and prefer to forego as many decisions as possible, proprietary suits them! I’m reminded of the cliche that nobody ever lost their job for recommending IBM.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce has nearly 5M installations in the USA . This leading open-source eCommerce platform runs as a plugin to WordPress powered websites – which there’s a roughly 30% chance your website already runs. Based on my experience around one out of every four WordPress users already has exposure to WooCommerce.
Why is WooCommerce so big?
WooCommerce is a free to download mid-sized website component. It is based on and managed by the same team as the leading open-source website content management system, WordPress {dot} org – both managed by a charitably focused company called Automattic (with two t’s). These projects have a diverse international community serving a mission to democratize web publishing and encourage open-source citizenship. By its nature community software is standards compliant and highly customizable.
Also operated by Automattic; the WooCommerce Extension Store offers commercially vetted yet quite affordable premium plugins. If looking for the risk-averse “stable track” one may stick as exclusively to the official source as desired.
How to connect to this community?
Attend a nearby WordPress Meetup or a nominally priced WordCamp conference in a nearby city. Watch keynote speeches as well as informal volunteer speakers on WordPress.tv.
Users are free to employ official, unofficial (third party marketplace), open source repository or custom developed components that come in the form of plugins, themes, and code snippets written in the PHP programming language.
The built-in templates within the WooCommerce plugin are intended to function with any of the thousands of available WordPress themes, plus they can be customized through code using a few available techniques. CSS code can be added to apply design customizations as well. One theme in particular, Storefront, is developed by the core WooCommerce team and makes for a great canvas.
The WordPress Plugin Repository is a treasure trove of smaller as well as freemium (free version with a pro version for purchase) plugins. Most of these apply to your WordPress site in general while many are WooCommerce specific. All are claimed to be derivative works of WordPress and inherit its open-source GPL licensing .
Getting Started With WooCommerce
Hosting
The best value for smaller sites is with economy shared hosting. I like BlueHost for this use case. The maintainers of the WordPress project offer fully-managed business hosting at WordPress {dot} com for approximately $300 annually. Higher end hosting is categorized as Managed because the host takes responsibility for the core application integrity. Common providers include Liquid Web, pantheon.io and WP Engine. My personal favorite in this category is SiteDistrict. There’s also options with virtual private server hosting. That offers more stable dedicated resources, but I’d only consider this category for server configuration experts with the bandwidth to provide 24×7 uptime support.
Theming
As with all WordPress powered sites, your theme is very important. Select one that provides the flexibility needed today and looking years ahead. Theme change-outs can be
costly. It’s wise to pick a popular one. Look for frequent updates (~monthly) and evidence of a solid user and support base. If you can’t decide, just go with the default theme Storefront!
While WooCommerce works with all WordPress themes, I recommend picking a theme with stated support for WooCommerce. Compatibility in this sense means templates are verified and sometimes eCommerce functionality tailored or options bundled in.
Popular commercial WooCommerce themes I’ve discovered through research are: Avada, Beaver Builder Theme, Divi Theme, Flatsome, Genesis, ShopKeeper.
Picking Plugins
Typical eCommerce sites I see run 15-30 plugins. The more plugins you use the greater your exposure is to customization risks (security, performance, interoperability). Topping your list will be business critical plugins such as a forms plugin, a payment gateway or two, a drag/drop page builder (if not bundled into your theme already), live chat and an analytics plugin or two. Source your plugins from reliable vendors. Verify they are well downloaded, rated, updated and supported.
Handling Growth with WooCommerce
If you’re fortunate enough to be scaling WooCommerce there’s plenty to pay attention to.
Migrate to a managed host that can handle your growth needs. A managed host will support the integrity of your application. Its representatives will be available to log into your system and troubleshoot service tickets on your behalf – for example a slow site or errors showing up. They will take responsibility for automatic backups, automatic software updates, and security measures including a firewall.
In terms of server configuration, WooCommerce runs best with the latest PHP service v7.3. Refer to the WordPress Site Health tool or the WooCommerce Status tool (all core) to check up on your environment. Some sites benefit from object caching (server using RAM for more volatile) and/or page caching (server rendering pre generated content for unauthenticated user sessions). There is “warm up” time for these caches. All sites benefit from asset caching, preferably at the edge layer for example using CloudFlare. Asset caching includes image compression, browser expiration headers, GZIP file transfer and CDN (distributed image and static file serving). I also recommend enabling the minify setting for static files: HTML, CSS, and JS.
Regularly scan the performance of your site using WebPageTest.org. Ensure your first byte time is well under 1 second, page rendering is not much over 2 seconds, and fully loaded time is under 4 seconds. If you exceed these it can have a detrimental effect on conversions. The fully loaded page size should be within 2MB or else you will be losing mobile, overseas, and low bandwidth traffic.
If your site is having performance problems, hire a developer before you lose too much business due to website underperformance.
Also evaluate the relevance to your growing store of accessibility, EU data privacy, state and federal privacy policy requirements, trade industry regulations, payment card industry compliance, search engine optimization, and internationalization.
Finally, contribute back to the community by writing up bug reports for core and component vendors, sponsoring WordCamp conferences, and getting involved in your local Meetup group(s). After all, community software can only be what its members make it to be.