Top 5 Reasons Why WordPress is Excellent for Ecommerce

“We want to make it easy for anyone to sell online independently, without being locked into closed, centralized services — to enable freedom of livelihood along with freedom of expression.”

Those are the sentiments of WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg regarding the 10-month old acquisition of the most popular eCommerce platform on the internet: WooCommerce, which is now, officially, a member of WordPress family along with likes of Jetpack, Longread.com, etc.

The acquisition itself speaks volumes for eCommerce related strides WordPress is ready to make. But here are 5 more reasons why it’s the perfect time for you to open your online store on WordPress:

1. Seamless Integration with 3rd Party Services

With or without the almost completed JSON REST API adoption, WordPress will make it way easier to work with 3rd party tools and services on the internet.

Since a WordPress.org website is completely yours, you can opt for a WordPress development company and specify all the services you want to work with: from ERPs, analytics, optimization, social media, special payment gateways, et al. WordPress will accommodate you without breaking sweat. It will grow and evolve with your store.

It plays well with others, and you reap the benefits. Other platforms aren’t nearly as nice.

2. Highly Customizable, Easily Manageable Stores

Even if you aren’t a native WordPress user, you and your staff are guaranteed to have an easy time getting familiarized with the platform.

On top of the effortless learning curve, there are features you will like:

• User Roles

Default user roles like admin, editors, contributors, etc. aside, you get the freedom to create custom user roles in WordPress and assign them responsibilities (official term: ‘Capabilities’) exactly as you want. Example: If you want a role called Store Manager in a multi-site network that can add products but not tamper with customer reviews, you can have it so.

• Themes and Widgets

There’s practically no end to the number of themes available for WooCommerce.

Storefronts can be customized by developers who are moderately familiar with WordPress, CSS, and PHP without fuss through child themes. Widgets enhance interactivity and give your users more things to do.

• Admin Dashboard
Even before JavaScript-powered interfaces became a thing or Calypso was launched, WordPress dashboard was known for its nigh incomparable simplicity, responsiveness, and user-friendliness. Adding eCommerce doesn’t change that at all.

3. Conversion Rate Optimization and UX

Anyone can optimize Performance, enable social sharing, enhance SEO, and automate marketing on WordPress with a few plugins and a bit of sense.

Combine that with your professional designers/developers capabilities and a whole army of free and dirt-cheap tools available for the purpose of enhancing user-experience, and you get a store which truly encourages selling.

4. Localization and Accessibility

In a global market, you can’t assume everyone talks in your language. Your message is received when you’re talking in a language your diversified audience understands.

WordPress and WooCommerce are making leaps of progress in these fields. Countless developers contribute by translating WordPress itself into as many languages as possible upon each major version release. The most popular plugins and themes receive the same treatment.

WordPress also makes it a point to follow the W3C standards to encourage websites to become accessibility-friendly. Combined with the user-friendliness of the platform in general, makes sure your storefront remains highly visible, accessible, and comprehensible to everyone you wish to reach.

5. Security

WordPress haters like to harp on this. Everyone who uses the platform knows better.

• WooCommerce and PCI Compliance:

PCI compliance depends on the store owner, not just the platform in question. Regardless, WooCommerce does its part by giving you options to enforce SSL and WordPress logins for enhanced safety. The plugin also never stores card details from payment gateways.

• Two Factor Authentication

It will no longer be a plugin and is ready to be rolled out with the next version of WordPress in April 2016, which will make your login access points nigh impenetrable to brute force attacks.

• Outdating XML-RPC

With JSON REST API, the outdated XML will become moot, and all security vulnerabilities associated with the bulky, tedious API will vanish.

• A step ahead

WordPress is as secure as you make it. As long as you remember to harden WordPress security at all levels you’ll be fine.

EndNote

It’s fast, flexible, affordable, easy to learn, simple to manage, it gives you all the control over everything in your online store.

What more could you want in an eCommerce platform?