If any one intends to expand an eCommerce store, it is worthwhile trying WooCommerce plugin, instead of going for specialty apps in the first hand. More so startups operating a shoe string budget should try them to boost their business.

WooCommerce by WooThemes is a free WordPress plugin. It was introduced in late September 2011, WooCommerce now has 1.6M downloads from across the globe.

It is an open-source platform provides users with a feature extensive, yet hugely user-friendly experience. These features make it greatly suitable for ecommerce startups to get a feel for online business in a way, which is easy to digest, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

WooCommerce fits the bill of eCommerce startups because of the following reasons:

WooCommerce is totally free

There are numerous high quality ecommerce CMS currently, available in the market. All of them aimed at helping merchants to sell online easily and innovatively, but the catch is the cost sting it carries, but believe it or not WooCommerce is free.

# Despite being free to download, WooCommerce offers several features. It is also extremely flexible both by nature, and via the additional of extensions.

Flexibility in WooCommerce plug in

It is more suitable for startups because of whole lot of flexibility it offers. So merchants can easily deal with their products without having to know a lot of technical side of things.

# Products can be categorized, given sale prices, independent attributes, and more. Additionally, WooCommerce stores are capable of selling physical, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate/external products.

# Not only Ecommerce, use your WordPress blog too

The users need not go beyond their comfort zone when building their online store, users can build a fully functioning store within a professional website, alongside an integrated blog. All of these dimensions of a business’ online presence are harnessed in one place, and presented together seamlessly, and it’s all thanks to WooCommerce being a WordPress based platform.

User friendliness of Woocommerce plugin

WordPress is a the hugely popular CMS. It supports over 51% of the top million websites currently in existence, and so it would be fair to say that many ecommerce startups will have had the pleasure of using WordPress, for any online project. It being a WordPress plugin, existing users of the platform will benefit immensely from being able to recognize the user-friendly WordPress interface. That kind of familiarity when building an online store could easily save time and confusion, whilst bolstering creativity.

# Customization Options

It is not a rigid platform. There is a lot of room to customize and tweak online store to a level of uniqueness.

There are 39 different WooCommerce enabled themes. Once a theme has been selected, one can work on pre-set CSS styles and colour themes, tweaking the code and experimenting with the special features which each theme offers.

# Professional Yet Simple

WooCommerce is a professional online store solution, users can find detailed order tracking and customer engagement tools, which allow merchants to view past and open orders, update delivery statuses, apply discounts and so forth. In fact, tax settings, inventory management, shipping options, coupon codes and pretty much everything else you need for a professional ecommerce setup, is part of WooCommerce, right out of the box.

# Availability of easy analytics

A core tool to be used by any website owner, is their analytics tool. Many ecommerce startups may not know how to apply an analytics system to their website, Its analytics system makes a wide array of statistics crystal clear. All data like like total sales, sales by date, average order totals, individual customer statistics and much more are all neatly presented via graphs.

# Apps Galore

There are several hundreds WooCommerce Extensions available, most of which are free. Using these extensions, one can find applications relating to accounting, payment gateways, marketing, reporting and more.

# Room For Growth: With WooCommerce modifying templates is easy whether users want to do so directly via the theme files, or whether you use the many hooks & filters. It also has various APIs ready to be used for building extensions, along with an extensive documentation library, so that users can get to know how WooCommerce works, inside and out.

# WooThemes: WooCommerce is tailor made to suit ecommerce startups because of WooThemes.

WooThemes has stellar WordPress themes, extensions and plugins, including WooCommerce. They are reliable and exceedingly professional with both their products, and their support system. WooThemes users can benefit from community forums, video tutorials, and more.

These are good reasons why one should strongly consider using WooCommerce plugin to propel ecommerce project to success.