People’s thoughts on woocommerce?

Hi Jack. Yes, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that enables eCommerce functions for your WordPress website. Feel free to check out the Introduction, setup and costs info, the features summary and the New Store guide and there’s lots of advice on the blog and Youtube channel.

To answer your question about subscriptions, to enable regular payments you can use the extension WooCommerce Subscriptions which is our official subscriptions extension. You can use it in conjunction with WooCommerce Memberships to provide restricted content areas in the site, purchasable in regular subscription payments. Both of those are our official extensions, sold on the WooCommerce.com marketplace.

If you have any particular questions, please don’t hesitate! I’ll happily leave the thread open so that community members can contribute.

Hi Jack,
I’ve been using WooCommerce for several years. I use it to run a store, manage a bike tour business, sell a single product and operate a non-profit. There is a learning curve, but as you learn you start to understand the power of the plug-ins available to customize WooCommerce to your own needs. I did purchase a template when I first started, as it was a great introduction to a lot of features that I didn’t even know existed. After a few years I’ve found I can get the results on my own, but the template helped me know the “state of the art”. Good luck!

Thank you @fylgjur and @johannsf that’s very helpful.

I was just wondering, if I wanted to run a recurring subscription to online content including an email newsletter as described on the memberships plugin page and video, so I also need the subscription plugin or does memberships recur? I don’t need in membership purchases, just a monthly and annual payment plan option.

Also, for email, I wondered if you recommend any particular delivery mechanism? I’m using mailchimp but would prefer not to due to the very high monthly cost.

Sorry, one last question, because I have an existing website and lots of content, I want the store to be a section of the site from the top menu rather than the entire site and homepage. Is woocommerce set up for that or is it better to start a unique instance of wordpress on a subdomain? I’d prefer not to do that.

Thank you! I’m excited about woocommerce and hope to set it up this weekend.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by deadtomorrow.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by deadtomorrow.

You’re welcome!

if I wanted to run a recurring subscription to online content including an email newsletter as described on the memberships plugin page and video, so I also need the subscription plugin or does memberships recur?

You’ll need WooCommerce Subscriptions to sell and handle recurring payments. I think in this case, it’s likely to be WooCommerce Memberships you may not need, but to restrict access to parts of the site, you would need it or an equivalent. You might find this comparison of WooCommerce Memberships and Groups for WooCommerce useful.

for email, I wondered if you recommend any particular delivery mechanism?

It all depends on your specific needs here! This documentation section explains the built-in email functions which include all the essential communication with your customers.

If you’d like more advanced features or marketing functions, we have a wide variety of extensions that cover different types of mail solutions. You might want to take a look at Follow-Ups for instance.

If you have any specific needs in mind email-wise, I’m happy to take a closer look!

I want the store to be a section of the site from the top menu rather than the entire site and homepage.

Yes, WooCommerce is ideal for this. You’ll want to check whether your chosen WordPress theme is WooCommerce compatible and there’s some guidance here on this. It integrates seamlessly into the theme and creates store pages which just slot in alongside the rest of your content.

The Setup Wizard will automatically create your store pages for you if you wish, and this can result in an unexpected look if you’ve already been working on the site, so I’d suggest backing up first if you try it – here’s more about how this works.

Thank you for all of your time @fylgjur that is very helpful. I will read all of that documentation first before asking anything else as I suspect I’ll find all of my answers.

I have installed it and it looks and works great. The only thing it has done is broken the header and menu of my theme, but I will look into that.

I’ll read more about memberships and subscriptions before deciding which to buy.

Thank you! It’s exciting to finally have a store of my own ??

Ah that’s good to hear! My reply was a bit of an info dump so do feel free to ask more specific questions.

I’m going to mark this current thread as resolved – but if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread. Or you can contact us at WooCommerce.com > My Account > Support. You may need to create an account before you can access that page.

And of course congratulations on your new store!