Woocommerce: The fake friend for small businesses
Let’s say it from the start, Open Source solutions such as Woocommerce, Magento or OpenCart, are not for everyone. I will use this article to break some myths spread by the community about free online shop solutions.
Here is, in summary, the points of the article:
- The two main solutions to create an online store
- Myth #1: With Woocommerce, you will be the owner of your website
- Myth #2: Woocommerce is Free and you will never pay anything
- Myth #3: Woocommerce is the most used so it’s necessarily good for you
- Myth #4: If you don’t use Open Source, you will not be able to use cool plugins
- Myth #5: With Woocommerce, you can customize your shop to infinity
- Myth #6: SaaS solutions are not well optimized for SEO
- Myth #7: Woocommerce is easy
The two main solutions to create an online store
- The Open Source solution
- The SaaS solution
Woocommerce (or the Open Source), for which user ?
If you plan to use an open source solution such as Woocommerce, you must be a self-taught person with advanced knowledge of computer code or hire an agency to build your online store.
If you don’t belong to both categories, but you want to be able to easily manage your online store without paying a fortune, Open Source is far from the right solution.
Create your Woocommerce shop yourself
When we sell online, time is precious. Indeed, who has time to lose in the update of his solution? Or in search of a solution to an incompatibility between your plugins? Who has time to lose in a complicated and unintuitive interface? How are you going to optimize your shop for search engines?
Create your Woocommerce online store by a web agency
And your web agency, she sold you the virtues of Open Source, its super personalization and Woocommerce?
However for each update or new plugin added, you will go through the agency is a waiting time more or less long and spend money for each change!
Even if the “plugin” Woocommerce is free, every modification or revision will be charged. And yes, for many technical reasons, it will not be possible to make these changes yourself … So calculate your ROI (return on investment)!
Create your shop by a friend or a self-employed worker
Bad idea. What happens if your friend or contact is on vacation? And that he can not solve your serious problem only a week later? What happens if your web hosting goes down in peak traffic? What happens if your Woocommerce is hacked? What if you update your online store yourself and this causes a “blank page” problem?
So many questions that are unfortunately often forgotten in “contracts” with knowledge or self-employed. In addition to making your online store unavailable for a certain number of days (no sale during this period), the repair will of course be charged.
Even if it’s cheaper (well I hope it will charge you less), think about it.
The SaaS solution, for which user?
In the best of all worlds, what a merchant wants is to sell online as quickly as possible. AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE! Why ? Because time is money. With a SaaS solution, you’ll be able to add your inventory quickly, easily and focus your efforts in marketing and selling your products and services.
SaaS offers a ready-made and already functional solution, ready to use and accept sales, optimized for search engines and often easy to use.
And in addition, you can create a free online store with a 14-day trial.
Focus on marketing your online store
With SaaS, you won’t waste time on looking for plugins (often incompatible or with security issues) and your efforts will be focused on what matters most to an online store: marketing and SEO.
Some myths to break
Myth #1: With Woocommerce, you will be the owner of your website
Yes and? This is an argument that does not validate the efficiency or ease of use of a solution … In fact, you will certainly use an emailing solution such as Mailchimp or CyberImpact no? And these solutions are proprietary and no one is offended, is it? And for the hosting of your shop, you will rent a space on a server … a proprietary solution. 😉 In your next financial report, will it be marked that you have a property ownership of a website and that holding 1 million lines of code will increase the value of your business? No. In short, sell online and own the source code of its solution, we do not care.
Mythe #2 : Woocommerce, it’s free!
Oh… Really? Let’s do a little math together:
The real cost of Woocommerce :
- Optimized and fast hosting = $ 45 CAD at WP Engine (Must roll anyway!)
- Template cost = $ 50 to $ 100
- Installation and setup of a multilingual Woocommerce installation (say our time is worth $ 20 / hour – I know you’re worth more!) = About 1 week (I’m averaging here) = 40h X $ 20 = $ 800
- Time to understand the full interface of Woocommerce (a few hours but I don’t count it)
- Time to update the plugins and realize that the new update causes a technical problem. We will say once a year to be nice (you will have to find a developer) = 200 $ (if the problem is quickly resolved quickly)
- Time to fix the hack urgently because you bought a template as cheap as possible but also installs plugins with full security holes = about $ 200 (once every 2 years if you are lucky)
- Cost of Woocommerce plugins (and their annual updates) = $ 750 CAD / year. (Impossible to have a functional solution without their plugins)
- Technical and telephone support = Non-existent
- Etc.
Myth #3 :Woocommerce is the most used so it’s necessarily good for you
“It’s not because Toyota is the world’s largest car manufacturer that we all have to buy a Toyota.” and as for the automotive industry, on the web for each company there is an ideal solution. And for small businesses, Open Source and Woocomerce is almost never the right one.
You need to know your needs and find out what you really want to do with your time and money.
Myth #4 : If you don’t use Woocommerce, you will not be able to install cool plugins
False!… Did you hear about Google Tag Manager ? With this webtool (available on Panierdachat), you can instal all the cool plugins that you wish. 😉
Install Hotjar, Facebook Messenger, ConvertBox, Leadfox, Crazy egg, etc.) easily and for free.
Myth #5 : With Woocommerce, you can customize your online store to infinity
Possible but at what price? In this expression, it is implied that you will have to use a layout system in a layout system … (ex: Divi) Not very effective that. Since Google wants to have lightning fast web sites to download, have you thought about how much overhead you will add to your slow installation? How many additional queries are added to your pages just to be able to edit your visual? You should know that the faster your online store, the better search engine positions you will get. The speed of an online store is proportional to the experience of your visitors. The faster it is, the more sales you will make! (BTW, all online Shopping Cart stores are using a Content Delivery Network to speed up the download of online stores)
SaaS platforms like Shopify are having problems
Yes possible. But know that there is always at least one engineer back who can resolve the situation quickly without it costing you more! Which is certainly not the case with Woocommerce … How much will it cost you with a developer in emergency mode?
Myth #6 : SaaS platforms are not well optimized for SEO
True for most. Shopify is indeed recognized for not being good for multilingual online shops. Technically, your urls are all identical in French as in English. So how do you want Google to index your store if it does not know which language to promote? Or otherwise, you will have to open two accounts at Shopify to get an “almost” viable solution but it will cost you more than double … not to mention the purchase of a plugin to perform this manipulation! And so it is for other solutions as Shopify.
Panierdachat aka the SEO good exemple.
Unlike Shopify, shopping at Panierdachat is optimized for search engines (SEO) in both languages.
The fact that Panierdachat is Canadian, the solution was designed from the outset to be bilingual. Merchants do not have to open two separate accounts or double the costs to enjoy a multilingual solution. Urls are unique to each language and search engine optimization is far superior to Shopify.
Myth #7 : Woocommerce, it’seasy
Oh really ? That changed ? True for webdeveloppers but certainly not for the merchands.
Try it and tell me. 😉
Woocommerce in brief
In this post, I wanted to highlight the disadvantages of using Woocommerce for small businesses. But of course this solution is very powerful and very interesting for web workers but certainly not for neophytes.
Woocommerce is for self-taught people, programmers or web agencies. In terms of costs, they will definitely be superior to a SaaS solution such as Panierdachat. The savings argument using free Woocommerce for a serious online merchant does not hold water.
Panierdachat, a real solution to create your online store easily
Have you seen the Panierdachat interface, clear and intuitive? I invite you. Really, we put a lot of effort into building something good and clear for our customers. The geek team is perfecting the solution every day and this translates into a very high rate of satisfaction with the platform.
Don’t have your online store yet ? Open an account on our easy-to-build e-commerce platform!
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Micheal Villeneuve is the President and founder of Laradev. Laradev is certified in Laravel development, specializes in universal application, and offers training and support.