When starting your online business, you are presented with multiple platforms listing possible advantages and benefits. One of these platforms can be WordPress. Generally, WordPress is an amazing platform that houses a large percentage of the websites on the internet. However, as a business owner, you might have a more pressing question – is WordPress good for ecommerce?
While WordPress provides benefits, there are also some losses that you can gain if you choose this platform. Here, you will be able to find the various advantages and disadvantages of using WordPress. It can help you determine if WordPress is the right platform for your online business or if you should consider other options.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using WordPress for Ecommerce
As an ecommerce platform, WordPress has its share of advantages and disadvantages. From its considerably large reach to its steep pricing fees, there are several factors that you should keep in mind. Before you establish your online business on the website, here is a list of WordPress’s pros and cons that you can consider.
Advantages of WordPress
1. WordPress is one of the largest platforms on the internet.
The most obvious advantage that you can get with WordPress is the number of visitors you can get when you make an ecommerce site on this platform. With more than 25% share of the websites on the internet, it also means that there is an equally large number of demand and traffic. With WordPress, you can widen the reach of your business.
As a gigantic platform, WordPress also allows a variety of products and services to be offered. While other ecommerce platforms may sell certain offerings better, it is not the same with this website. Instead, if you can market your site properly, you can enjoy attention for your product or service no matter what it is.
2. There are a lot of plug-ins that you can use, aside from the main ecommerce plug-ins
Another great advantage that an individual can get from WordPress is that it has many available plug-ins. Plug-ins are a quality-of-life feature that can significantly improve your website. There are many to choose from, and several of the best plug-ins are free.
As an ecommerce platform, you can also enjoy the primary online business plug-ins like WooCommerce, MemberPress, and Easy Digital Downloads. Whether you prefer to sell membership subscriptions or product offerings, you can sell them easily with the available plug-ins. You can also use plug-ins to improve various elements of your homepage and product pages. Some plug-ins even allow you to see the performance metric of your site so you can see if you are reaching your goals for your business.
3. It is easier to perform content marketing and SEO with WordPress.
Perhaps the best advantage of using WordPress as your main platform is that it allows quick and effective content marketing. Since WordPress is mainly a content platform, it will be easy to publish blog posts and create new pages. With WordPress, you can easily perform the content marketing strategy to help improve the sales and number of customers of your ecommerce site.
Aside from that, it is also easier to have better SEO with WordPress. Using plug-ins like Yoast SEO, you will be able to determine what elements you need to modify. You will also have the chance to analyze the performance of every blog post and product page that you have. This will help your ecommerce site rank better on search engine rankings.
Ecommerce Plug-Ins for WordPress
With plug-ins, WordPress can gain new tools and perform more functions. If you want to use your WordPress site, there are several plug-ins that you can integrate into your site. From subscription plans to a complete ecommerce overhaul, here are the ones recommended for any business owner.
WooCommerce – This plug-in is the most famous ecommerce plug-in for WordPress. With it, you can get different solutions, including transforming your website for ecommerce, getting premium website themes, providing product pages and searches, installing payment and shipping options, and many others.
MemberPress – If you want your store to have subscription plans, this is a plug-in that you can choose. With this, you can sell not only service and product offerings but annual paid subscriptions. You can also integrate this with your existing WooCommerce shop for stronger ecommerce solutions. With this, you can offer your services as courses or tutorials with membership plans.
Easy Digital Downloads – If your online business focuses on digital merchandise and products, this can be a great plug-in to use. It will allow you to sell digital items on your site and have focused functions on helping you with your sale.
Disadvantages of WordPress for Ecommerce
1. Plug-ins can get expensive
One of the main disadvantages of WordPress is that when you use too many plug-ins, the fees can pile up. While there are excellent plug-ins that you can use for free, the most specialized ones are usually locked behind plans and subscription fees. One example of this is the WooCommerce plug-in.
If you want your ecommerce site on WordPress to perform at its best, you should integrate several plug-ins. Some plug-ins can help with SEO, headlines, analytics, payment functionalities, and load times. These are all recommended to make sure that your business on WordPress performs well. However, they can be taxing on your wallet, especially if you are just starting.
2. Compared to other ecommerce-only platforms, WordPress has more basic ecommerce functionalities
WordPress has plug-ins that can help provide ecommerce functionalities to your website. WooCommerce and Cart66 are just some of them. On the surface, you can completely transform your WordPress site to mimic the features you get from ecommerce-only platforms.
However, while it is true that WordPress can perform the basic ecommerce tasks, its performance falls short in comparison to ecommerce-only platforms. Other platforms have built-in, dedicated tools to perform various activities for ecommerce that cannot be found in WordPress. Due to this,
WordPress has less depth when it comes to certain elements.
Competitor Ecommerce Platforms
As a content platform, WordPress is the best one to use. However, as an ecommerce platform, there are activities that competitor ecommerce platforms can do better. Shopify and BigCommerce are among the other sites that have some more advantages compared to WordPress. Here are some points to consider about WordPress and how it fares against its competition.
Dedicated Functionalities
When it comes to ecommerce functions, platforms that are made solely for ecommerce have the upper hand. While WordPress can integrate plug-ins to transform content-based websites into online shops, they are far less powerful than the built-in functions that one can find with its competitors.
Ecommerce-only platforms are built immediately with product pages, payment processing, carts, and the like. These elements are also more in-depth and can do more than what one can do with WordPress plug-ins. Since the focus of competitor platforms is solely for online businesses, the tools for these sites are more dedicated.
Flexibility
What WordPress lacks in functionalities, it makes up with its flexibility. As a primarily general content platform, this website allows online businesses to do more outside what is expected from traditional ecommerce platforms. With WordPress, one can design a better website that has more general functionalities using coding and plug-ins.
Some ecommerce platforms are strict about their category pages or product pages. However, with WordPress, the design and blueprint of the store lie in the hands of the store owner. If the templates and plug-ins used do not directly clash with each other, they can be usable.
Ease of Set-Up
With other ecommerce platforms, the website being built is strictly an online shop. Because of this, it can be easy to make one. You will only need to pay the corresponding fees and click the necessary buttons. If you must build the website from scratch, it is easier with competitor platforms.
However, if one already has a WordPress site, it can be easy and effective to simply te their online business to their website. While you will have to learn how to install and use plug-ins properly, you can also customize them.
Should You Use WordPress for Ecommerce?
If you were to ask is WordPress good for ecommerce, the answer would be yes. As a stand-alone platform, it provides a lot of benefits. For one, WordPress has the largest audience and reach. There are also various plug-ins that you can use to enhance your ecommerce experience with this website. Even without proper coding skills, you can set up your ecommerce shop by browsing easy-to-follow tutorials.
However, compared to other ecommerce-only platforms, WordPress falls short. No matter how flexible WordPress can be, other sites provide stronger and more efficient built-in tools. Most of the time, these platforms also have a shop builder, so business owners will only need to modify several elements.
WordPress is an amazing platform, but it is not the best there is for ecommerce. It is a jack of all trades but master of none. It covers various functionalities that one cannot get with ecommerce-only websites, but at the cost of having weaker built-in capabilities.
