Setting up an e-commerce store doesn’t have to cost you tens of thousands of rands, by making use of free software like WordPress and the free WooCommerce plugin by Woothemes you can have an online store set up for next to nothing.
Ever since Woothemes forked the Jigoshop WordPress plugin and rebranded it as WooCommerce the plugin has grown in leaps and bound, now a totally different product since it was forked, WooCommerce makes it easy for just about anybody to start an online store for free.
What makes Woocommerce stand out from the multitude of other free e-commerce plugins available today is it’s third party extension directory. Woothemes has teamed up with some of the best WordPress plugin developers out there to write extension to extend the functionality of the WooCommerce plugin.
Everything from payment gateways, marketing opt-in plugins, to communication plugins makes WooCommerce one of the best supported free e-commerce plugins available today.
Woocommerce comes ready out of the box to allow you to sell products on the internet for free, however for a small fee you have to choice to extend the functionality through the use of many of the third party extensions available. These extensions require no programming knowledge to operate, simply upload it and change some settings in the backend to suite your need and you’re done.
For instance settings up an online store in South Africa with Woocommerce is as easy as it comes, with third party plugins to accept payments through most of South Africa’s payment gateways like MyGate and PayFast, shipping methods for shipping through the South African Post Office and Speeds Services Couriers, instant SMS notification through South Africa’s leading SMS message provider Clickatell, the ability to sell digital products hosted on your Amazon S3 cloud, and marketing op-in email subscriptions through AWeber. There is even a plugin for up and coming musician that enables them to give users the ability to listen to samples of their music before they buy it.
When it comes to design Woothemes has also not skimped, offering a multitude of easily customisable free and paid WooCommerce enabled themes. All customisations is done through the very user friendly Woothemes control panel making changes to layout and colours easy with the click of a button.
For under R4000 you can have a full featured e-commerce store up and running, that has the looks and features of a custom developed e-commerce site that would easily cost you in excess of R20 000.
If you are considering setting up an online store, why not have a look at WooCommerce and the plugins available to help you sell beautifully.
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