Woocommerce Store; How do we build online store — the entire process explained

Did you know, that more than half of internet users (58,4%) by something online every week? That’s something, isn’t it? The e-commerce market grows rapidly — COVID-19 pandemic proved to be a powerful catalyst for the online sales sector. In 2021, retail e-commerce sales reached approximately 4.9 trillion USD worldwide and the score is expected to grow by 50% till 2025 (forecast from Statista). With the right features, you can sell many types of products and services — physical goods, digital products (like music, books, games), online services (course online, access to video conference) and more. You will also be able to offer your potential buyers various methods of payments (it is quite important to offer many types of payments, as — according to other Statista report) the modern techniques become more popular — mobile wallets had 44,5% share in e-commerce transaction value worldwide in 2021), which will result in high users’ satisfaction. But which tech stack is the best for an online shop development? We recommend to build online store with WooCommerce.

Why do we use WooCommerce for setting up an e-commerce project?

You have surely heard about WordPress. It is a popular CMS leveraged by businesses and individuals for building and managing websites. This solution is nowadays used by about 42,9% of all websites on the internet (W3Techs statistics).

WooCommerce is on the e-commerce plugins for WordPress. 20,3% of all WordPress websites are using it (so they have probably implemented some typical e-commerce features). This technology is open-source, hence it is free to use to everyone. This results in reduced cost of carrying out the e-commerce project. What is making it so popular among developers and why should you choose to build an ecommerce website with WordPress & WooCommerce?

Modular framework

What we truly love about WooCoomerce, is it’s modular architecture. The solution itself comes with a robust set of various features useful for e-commerce projects. Our developers can create a WordPress e-commerce website and then enhance it using chosen available plugins (both free and commercial), to provide a customer with a modern, functional online store and ensure great UX. If you decide to build your online store, you will benefit from this modularity twice, because you will get access to countless WordPress plugins and themes and hundreds of WooCommerce extensions designed for online sellers. Such an architecture stimulates developers’ community, by allowing them to work on new functionalities to improve the efficiency of e-commerce websites (new shipping or payment methods, loyalty programs and more).

WordPress-based, hence intuitive for clients to work with

Users pick WordPress for many reasons — one of the most important, is it’s simplicity and intuitiveness. Websites developed with this technology are easy to work with even for non-tech staff. Probably anyone can handle adding blog-posts or new products and processing orders. WordPress is not only easy-to-use for everyone, but also flexible and functional (and so is the WooCommerce as a child application of WordPress), which enables designers and developers to build quite unique e-commerce websites.

Useful CMS features

The content is of great importance in the e-commerce sector. It helps bring traffic to your online shop, promotes your products, enables successful search engine optimization and build your professional brand image. An e-commerce platform built on one of the world’s most famous has to be equally efficient when it comes to content management as the technology it is based on. WordPress and WooCommerce together provide users with content management features including blogging, creating landing pages, leveraging e-mail marketing and adjusting content based on the automated SEO guidelines from plugins such as Yoast WooCommerce SEO.

Many use cases — For digital and physical products

As we mentioned earlier, WooCommerce allows online sellers to distribute various types of products and services. Capability to sell different products and send them to the customer through the many channels resulted in creating new business models. Companies and individuals can nowadays sell a plethora of digital products — books, music, movies, applications, games, online courses etc. Building your business around electronic goods may be a great idea, as their availability is practically unlimited once you create it and operational costs are low. You don’t have to send physical packages or rent a physical storage. All the features needed for advertising and selling are provided by WooCommerce and WordPress.

The process of building your online store with WordPress and WooCommerce

Developers from Soft Gorillas always select tech stack, additional plugins and extensions based on project requirements and customer expectations and needs. We explain how do we build online store with WooCommerce.

Workshops with the customer

First, we need to understand your business ideas and vision, requirements and expectations for this particular project. To build an e-commerce website with WordPress & WooCommerce is not an easy task. Online store is nothing like simple, informative webpages. It consists of various features chosen carefully based on the customer’s business model, types of products, strategy and more. That is, why the workshop stage is essential for our project’s success.

During the series of meetings with our designers, developers and consultants, you will tell us all there is to know about your vision of this specific online shop. We will gather the first list of the basic and additional features and try to imagine this e-commerce website and all the possibilities it should offer to the end users. Once your vision will be already in our heads, we will think which of the WooCommerce and WordPress extensions we’ll need to make your business dream come true.

Planning

As the workshops stage is more creative and it is more about brainstorming and exchanging ideas, the planning stage ends up with defining the official requirements for your project. Of course that list can change during the project (some other solutions can be picked instead of those originally selected or some new ideas can be leveraged). We also decide on deadliness for each part of development (creating designs, testing, launching). This way, our business customer can come up with a marketing strategy and start to promote future online store in social media, to increase demand and make the market ready for the new, modern online shop.

We involve our customers in planning the development process. After all, it is their vision and idea, and they can already have some plans of their own. We want to cooperate with our clients as close as it is possible because we believe that is the only right way, to go through the development process and deliver unique, high quality websites and applications.

Design and development

Customer’s engagement in the process of creating designs enables our team to meet the expectations fully. We use all kinds of tools that improve communication on the project. All design and features have to be approved by the client. We leverage all our experience gained during previous projects to suggest the right solutions that will allow the online seller to overcome future business challenges that he may encounter and gain advantage over competitors.

Regular meetings are essential for the e-commerce project’s success. We will send you updates on made progress, but it is also crucial for you to participate actively and provide us with feedback on what is already done. Don’t hesitate to ask us questions — not only about the e-commerce website we build for you using WooCommerce and WordPress, but also about other important matters, like development cybersecurity best practices we follow or tools we use in our day-to-day’s work.

Testing and launching

We want to make sure, that all bugs are spotted and taken care of, before your WooCommerce-based online shop will be launched. Thanks to the testing phase, we can identify potential challenges and prevent problems. Our most experienced testers will assess your e-commerce website’s performance, security and more, before the ends users will get access to it. That will positively affect your end users’ experience. Then, when we will be sure, that all features work properly, we’ll plan and carry out the launching phase and help you to move the project to your in-house team (if you so desire) and provide you with all the technical documentation and support you’ll need.

Improvements

We try as hard as we can to predict all the challenges you may face in the future, but it is common that there is a need for slight modifications on the project. Additionally, if your business grows fast, you may shortly realize, that you require some improvements and new features (for example additional payment methods). We will be happy to help you scale your solution and assist you in overcoming potential challenges.

Why should you build online store with WooCommerce?

Building your online store with WordPress and WooCommerce will be an exiting adventure. Participating in that process will allow you to better understand the world of e-commerce technology, potential problems that online sellers encounter and advanced solutions that can be leveraged to ensure the highest end users’ satisfaction. We are glad you are considering developing your e-commerce website with Gorilla Commerce. You can read our WooCommerce. Contact us to tell us about your vision and learn more about our e-commerce website development services.