Aarrrggh not another one you're thinking. The internet is full of these posts, and it is usually written by someone pushing their own barrow.

Well I kind of am too, as I develop for WooCommerce, however I certainly don't think WooCommerce is the right fit for everyone. Often when talking with potential clients, I'll even recommend their best bet is to use Shopify.

So rather than tell you about the differences in the platforms, and the pricing (there's a bunch of info on that elsewhere) I'm going to explain why I develop for WooCommerce from a developers point of view.

The simple answer ; clients come to me wanting me to build something for them around their business. To give my clients exactly what they want, I need a platform that is infinitely flexible and customisable. I'd be offering my clients no value at all if my default solution was to just shoe horn their business and business model into a rigid system.

So it is all about flexibility and customisability

I've got control over all aspects of SEO and being based on WordPress a good content marketing is really easy to achieve and make work effectively.

I've also got flexibility when it comes to choosing the right payment gateway that suits the clients needs. Shopify can get a bit expensive and restrictive there, especially if customers have high value, low margin products the fees can really take a good bite out of the bottom line.

Performance, backups, and reliability are also in my court. With the right technology stack I can get a WooCommerce site super fast and reliable, plus making offsite backups and exporting order data and customer data is trivial.

Not to mention I can also make the site look the way that works best for the client and the clients customers.

And then there's different types of e-commerce. It's not all about selling t-shirts and hats, WooCommerce allows me to offer solutions for bookings, deposits, subscriptions, software downloads & licensing and many more.

If it revolves around facilitating a transaction between two parties using the internet, chances are we can build it with WooCommerce.