A lot of the skill in building a website which delivers results is knowing what to build and what to buy. In our view at Westcountry Media, one of the easier decisions in this line is the choice between an off the shelf ecommerce system and a custom made one. A turnkey solution is much better – in this day and age, building a brand new ecommerce system for your website is about as sensible an idea as commissioning your own custom-built delivery van.
It’s not just a matter of cost, although packaged solutions are vastly cheaper than custom built ones. The fact is that an off the shelf system is bound to be more stable and reliable, because it has had many more development hours invested in it, and has a large base of existing users to help find and fix bugs. It’s also supported by software company if problems arise or new features need to be added, whereas a custom-made system might need to be largely rewritten from scratch.
The only advantage of building a custom system for an ecommerce site used to be that it gave you the flexibility to integrate the ecommerce system with the rest of the site and to add exactly the features that you wanted. But this isn’t really an advantage any more. Westcountry Media’s preferred ecommerce system is called WooCommerce, and it is incredibly flexible in terms of the features and extensions you can add to it. It also integrates seamlessly with WordPress and is designed to blend in with the most popular WordPress themes.
The way that WooCommerce works is that you have a basic “Core” package which contains all the features needed for a relatively simple ecommerce site. You can then add “Extensions” that allow the system to handle things like shipping options, different payment options, product bundles, reviews and so on. Basically, any feature that you might ask for in a customised system, WooCommerce has an extension for. The difference is that it comes at a fraction of the cost and with better reliability.
But the real advantage of the system is that it can also deliver features which are seen by the shop-owner, not the customers. You get all the data views and analytics you might want, plus the ability to handle discounts, coupons and marketing. If you were commissioning a custom-built system, you would need to be very careful to define exactly the back-end features that you thought you needed, and changing your mind at a later date might be very expensive. With WooCommerce, the Core product has a lot of the most common user requirements and Extensions are easy to add in.
Because it’s a package we have a lot experience with, we recommend WooCommerce to our clients; we can cut development time to an absolute minimum as we know our way around all the options. It’s a proven market leader, powering something like 30% of all online stores and you can see why when you use it. There are plenty of difficult decisions to make when building your online presence, but this is not one of them.
To view some of the standard features of WooCommerce download the PDF or contact us for more details.