WordPress is there around for a while. No doubt that over the last decade, it had grown to the level of a great CMS, which is not only easy to use but also has advanced business features. In fact, still, a few are reluctant to use it for e-commerce website building. However, WordPress has many effective features in terms of e-commerce, and here we will discuss why to use WP as a serious e-com builder.
What is happening?
WordPress has a pretty impressive performance record in e-com. We can see that there are more than 60 million installations including about 22% of the top popular 10 million websites. WP also powers about one-sixth of the top one million portals now. This content management system has unprecedented features that WordPress powers about 50% of the CMS websites.
One obviously great and attractive thing about WordPress is that it is open source and can be freely used by anyone. The platform is built and maintained by technology volunteers from all across the globe, who are actively participating in enhancing its capabilities regularly.
Moreover, WordPress can instantly integrate with a huge number of plugins and themes and allow the developer to build any functionality or design for your website. There are thousands of free and premium themes and plugins available in the WP repositories now. For those who are new to it, a plugin is actually a WordPress speak for applications and APIs which the website developers can plug and play to your site to add any functionality.
WordPress in e-commerce
In fact, there is more than enough on WordPress from the e-commerce website building point of view. Not only for e-com sites, but WordPress is also great for bloggers and brochure websites coming as an essential part of e-com service promotions online.
There are thousands of WordPress plug-ins and themes, specifically meant for e-commerce applications. In terms of a theme, a good design expert may be able to customized and modify the available themes by including your branding elements too to create a personalized layout for your business.
In case of plugins also, there are plenty of e-commerce specific plug-ins available, which will help you build the portal features yourself to set up an online e-com business. Many of these plug-ins are free of cost and can add additional functionality to your website. With WP plug-ins for e-commerce, you can ensure that your customers as well as you as the business owner gets exactly the same both parties need.
However, everything about it is not positive though. The increasing popularity and acceptance of the WordPress content management system makes it a target for the hackers too. WordPress is trying to lessen such adverse impact on their users; however, e-commerce websites need to consider it as a serious issue and take appropriate measures to protect your website and data. In order to counter the chances for potential hacks, the infrastructure needed to be constantly updated.
Also, when your e-commerce site flourishes and you start to get a huge number of orders, it can be overwhelming to your web server also which hosts the WordPress site. If it causes your site to slow down or become unresponsive, it may ultimately adversely affect your business. There are feasible solutions put forth by WordPress with regards to e-com friendly hosting approaches, which you need to consider. The RemoteDBA.com also suggests the alternative of Magento, which is specifically woven for e-commerce applications with better features.
WordPress e-com database management
PHP is the programming languages used in WordPress to store and retrieve data from the MySQL database. There are also other databases such as Microsoft Access Cloud database etc. which integrate well with WordPress etc. Learn more about it from Hosted Virtual Desktop providers. While you first install the WordPress platform for the creation of e-com website, it will ask you to provide a database name and host along with a username and password.
Each WordPress installation including the themes and plugins send data to the default database. There are has 11 tables by default in the WordPress database. Each of these tables represents data from various sections, functionality, and features. The default tables are as below (the prefix ‘WordPress’ denotes the DB name you specify during the creation of the database.)
wordpress_commentmeta – table consisting of the metadata about the website comments.
wordpress_comments – this table holds data about WordPress comments.
wordpress_links – data to manage the blog rolls created by previous versions of
WordPress or Link Manager.
wordpress_options – table consists of the site-wide settings of WP sites like URL, email, category, posts, time, etc.
wordpress_postmeta – contains metadata about WordPress pages, posts, etc.
wordpress_posts – a table containing all posts and content types like revisions, pages, custom posts, etc.
wordpress_terms – taxonomy items on WordPress are known as terms and stored in this table.
wordpress_term_relationships – table managing the relationships between WordPress post types in the table of wordpress_terms.
wordpress_term_taxonomy – table defining the taxonomies of the terms in the wordpress_terms table.
wordpress_usermeta – consist of metadata about website users.
wordpress_users – contains information as username and password, email ID, etc.
Alternatives to WordPress in e-com
The platform of e-commerce is growing stronger in the last five years, and it will continue to ascend further. E-commerce websites consist of about 45% of the web. There is no doubt that the majority of the customers is now either making their purchasing decision or makes the purchase itself online. The estimation of global e-commerce sales now is about $1.92 trillion.
There are many e-com CMS platforms like:
No.1: WooCommerce on WordPress which powers about 32% of the e-com market.
No.2: Magento (powering 18%).
No.3: OpenCart (with 11% market share), and
No.4: Shopify (powering 8%).
Why WooCommerce on top?
WooCommerce is the feature-rich extension of WordPress. There are plenty of WordPress users who own online shops, and WooCommerce has it all to offer the most customized solutions for them. WooCommerce is also easy to be managed by everyone, and it also comes for free.
Pros of WooCommerce
Free and easy to install
Users can add unlimited products and product features.
A lot of customization options.
Comes with features like user ratings and reviews
Cons of WooCommerce
No free hosting.
Even when the plugin comes free, it will be a bit costly to set up the store and host it.
Even though there are a few disadvantages for it, there is no doubt that WordPress, powered by WooCommerce, still stands as the best platform for e-commerce website building, far exceeding the competitors.
