If you’re a business owner who has been trying to establish a presence online, you’ve probably heard of the eCommerce store building tool, WooCommerce. So why are most eCommerce businesses using it? In this article, we’ll take a closer look at this popular platform and help you assess if you need to hire a WooCommerce developer in Sydney for your business.

What is WooCommerce?

For starters, it’s an open-source WordPress plugin. To use it, you need to build your online store using WordPress. The WooCommerce plugin can then be installed to handle all the eCommerce functions of your website.

The base plugin is free to use and provides basic functions for a new online business. Once your store expands, you will want to purchase paid extensions to enhance the customer experience. Paid extensions allow you to add features like integrating more payment options or add currency converters.

Why Use WooCommerce?

For an eCommerce site that will require various functions and rely on SEO for traffic generation, it is recommended to set up your store with a site builder that is optimised for these factors.

WordPress paired with WooCommerce ticks those two boxes. Together, these tools offer great flexibility and functionality when building an eCommerce site. Let’s see why many businesses and experts have found success with WooCommerce.

SEO Made Simple

Nailing SEO can be crucial to the growth of an online business. Knowing effective keywords is important, but optimising for SEO is not just about repeating key phrases on your blog articles anymore. It also requires keeping your blog readability, site speed, and backlinks in check.

You’ll find businesses of all sizes using WordPress for many reasons, one being its ability to make optimising for SEO simple. Before publishing content, WordPress helps you make sure all the elements of a search-optimised piece are in place, such as a unique meta description and a few external links. the best free plugin to use for this is Yoast.

When you design your online store with WooCommerce, you can benefit from the advantages of publishing content with WordPress. Plus any savvy WooCommerce developer will advise and help you to ensure your content is optimised.

Customisation Options

Customisability is one of the greatest benefits of using WooCommerce in building a digital store. It isn’t packed with thousands of themes, but it enables you to fully edit content and code to suit visual and functionality requirements.

There are two ways to customise your website with WooCommerce:

1) By using a plugin
2) By using a child theme

Using a WooCommerce plugin allows you to make minor modifications to your site even without a working knowledge of CSS. The WooCommerce Marketplace has thousands of them. This customisation option is helpful for business owners who plan on building a simple site without the need of a developer’s help.

For businesses that need to perform major tweaks on a popular theme, WooCommerce enables users to access or create a child theme. This function allows you to modify themes without the risk of future theme updates ruining your store’s layout and functions.

WooCommerce is definitely the perfect choice for a store builder if personalisation and SEO are important elements in your success strategy. If you’re already considering hiring a WooCommerce Developer to help you achieve a higher level of customisation, here’s how you can find skilled developers in Sydney.

Finding a WooCommerce Developer in Sydney

The WooCommerce website has a built-in hub for all business owners that are looking to collaborate with WooCommerce Developers or WooExperts – design agencies that are verified to be knowledgeable and capable of building stores with the platform.

The page provides a detailed list of WooCommerce experts along with their experience, expertise, and the projected costs of their services. You’re able to filter the list to only show agencies in Australia. The list also shows the city address of a WooExpert, making it easier for business owners to collaborate with ones nearby.

Unfortunately, WooCommerce closed applications to become a WooExpert as of 2017 so you might miss out on newer skilled businesses. Therefore the best way is to ask colleges, partners or even clients for a recommendation. Those that have had good experiences will happily refer you to their WooCommerce developer in Sydney. You could even find a store that you really like the look and reach out to that business to ask who developed their site.

If you have a very low budget, you can also search for listings on various freelancing websites such as Fiverr or Upwork. There are plenty of skilled WooCommerce Developers who work alone and can take multiple clients at a time. However, a word of caution: quality levels can be extremely varied and because you are dealing with offshore developers not businesses in your local city (like Sydney), if there are problems, you may just stop hearing from your developer.

Choosing a WooCommerce Developer

There are several promising agencies and WooCommerce developers in Sydney but how do you who to give the job to? We’ve compiled a list of attributes to look for when hiring help with your WooCommerce website.

To determine the skills and experience you’ll need from a WooCommerce Developer, plan your site requirements and marketing strategy before hiring in Sydney

Developing an online store for a service company can be different from building a storefront for physical goods. You want to hire a team or individual who has experience building a store similar to yours.

Figure this out by looking at a developer’s portfolio and by adding questions about their design process in your interview. If you require heavy customization for your site, ask if the developer writes their own themes or not. Here’s a rough process you should follow to ensure your WooCommerce Developer is worth hiring:

Project Direction

To gauge a developer’s capability, be ready with your site requirements before doing interviews. A reliable developer will be able to discuss a plan once a client has explained their needs.

For eCommerce sites, website security should be a priority. Your developer must be able to plan around handling sensitive customer data and administrative logins. An oversight in this area could be seriously detrimental to a digital business.

Discuss the design or what themes the developer recommends using for your site and get an idea of how they would lay out the store for optimal customer experience. Keep in mind to ask how the developer plans to implement inventory management and payment gateways. Additionally, make sure the person or team you’re hiring has a plan for backups in case anything goes wrong.

Lastly, don’t forget to discuss the cost of hiring their services. Most developers offer service packages that may include marketing for your business. If you only need help with a specific task, be on the lookout for developers that can offer customisable web design packages.

Post-Project Availability

Various issues regarding data and updates can come up after a project has concluded. Be sure to talk through your developer’s terms and charges for tasks that need to be attended to post-project, like broken links or changes to a theme.

Now that you’ve taken a closer look at WooCommerce and learned how to find assistance, start drawing out your plans for your online store so you can determine the skills you’ll need in a WooCommerce Developer. Remember that execution is just part of the entire process, and your results will just be as good as your vision.