Yesterday, Lorraine wrote about WooCommerce a new eCommerce tool for WordPress.  Today, our intern Drew shares his experiences with the tool

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been researching e-commerce tools and plugins for  WordPress. My favorite, and the one I’ve spent the most time with, is WooCommerce by WooThemes. I’ve been impressed by the plugin’s ease of use. If you can write and publish a blog post on WordPress, you possess all the technical know-how needed to set up your website’s shopping cart with WooCommerce.

It’s really easy to get started.  When activated, the plugin will automatically install the necessary pages. The back end of the plugin is designed to match the look and feel of the WordPress user interface.

Woo Commerc WP Settings1

The plugin offers extensive shipping options, including the ability for the store owner to define cost per product, free shipping, shipping rates by nation and weight. In addition to shipping options, WooCommerce’s tax settings allow the flexibility to handle commerce worldwide.

The main function of an e-commerce plug in is to sell products online, and WooCommerce allows the user to sell both physical and digital products. The plugin also supports variable products, group products, and affiliate products. I really like how easy it is to set up variable products with different options and categories. With just a few clicks, variables can be added to any product.

Variable Product Midwest Telephone

Sample Variable Product

WooCommerce supports a large amount of payment gateways through extensions available on their page here.  Other features include cross-sells and up-sales and inventory tracking.

Unfortunately, it was a little confusing differentiating between product types in WooCommerce. It wasn’t difficult to figure out once I spent some time in it, but I had to create a sample product of each type to learn the differences between them. For someone more experienced in e-commerce, this probably isn’t an issue, but there could have been more explanation next to the product options for newer users.

Overall, I was impressed by the ease and simplicity of the plug in, especially compared to some of the other plug ins I looked at.

Have you used WooCommerce? What is your favorite e-commerce plug in?