Well, that’s my first post on Medium and the first thing I’d like to share here is my passion and work with WooCommerce. The story actually started spontaneously a few months ago and finished by the public presentation at WordPress Singapore Meetup in November 2015. Here we go…
It was over a year ago when me and my partner discovered WooCommerce system and found it a quite “flexible” and easy to setup eCommerce system. It’s open source and WordPress community was a quite open to new members like me :). eCommerce by that time in my mind was just about “Google Analytics” and increasing the conversion rate. In reality, it was not simple as I thought, so I spend over a year to dig deeper to WooCommerce, eCommerce and things around it to understand better that niche.
“Ecosystem”, “WooCommerce ecosystem” is the combination of products + services + people around it. To be precise, it’s 6 major things I’ve discovered
- The community
- Themes
- Plugins
- Learning / Tutorials
- Services
- WooCommerce Showcase
Community
Let’s start with the community. The core framework of organization or product is the people. People build the product and move it forward to the progress. Depending on the community we can see how far the product will grow. Thankfully, WooCommerce community is a quite active and there a lot of spaces to meet “WooCommerce buddy” whether it’s Wordcamp, WooCommerce and WordPress meetups or social media groups such as Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. In this post Jenny shared interesting research about WordPress / WooCommerce communities. I personally started being more active in Advanced WooCommerce facebook group. Facebook is a quite popular here in Vietnam and it’s easy to be connected to WooCommerce community. Thus, I’ve chosen the group where I’d like to share my knowledge and result of research. My first post in that group was about “eCommerce pages” on the website and many people expressed the interest in that topic, so rest assured I’ll provide more deep insight about eCommerce and WooCommerce in the near future.
Themes.
Storefront is a quite good starter theme for any WooCommece users. The total amount of child themes for Storefont is rising and it’s a good signal. We can track the progress and popularity from WordPress repository which (dated 8 Jan 2016) has reached 40,000+ active installs. However, around it there are many and many WooCommerce compatible themes from different authors on ThemeForest or independent web development teams.
I mentioned ThemeForest. Well… number says a lot, it’s about 430+ themes. There were the rising trends from freelancers / development teams with making WooCommerce themes instead of WordPress themes for Creative Studio / Portfolio / Business / Blog. Even some big Magento guys started making WooCommerce themes such as RoadThemes author. They actually started the business with Magento themes and Elite Power User under author PlazaThemes from a long long long…. time ago. I had a talk with its founder and he shared the thoughts that it’s really hard to make money from Magento Themes. The problem is the market is oversaturated and the growth of Magento was slow comparing with other eCommerce platform. However, it’s another story which I’d update later on.
I mentioned the word “oversaturation”, do I? It’s also noticeable in WooCommerce themes niche on ThemeForest. The latest theme from CommerceGurus guys was about Business called “Broker”. Checking the portfolio and you can see sales trends of these guys. CommerceGurus area a quite active in Ireland and recently shared the interesting slides about Life as a WordPress and WooCommerce Themer.
About independent WooCommerce themes makers, for now, it flashes in my mind guys from Your Inspiration Themes.
Plugins, Learning / Tutorials, Services, and other stuff … enough talks, just check the official video which has been recorded by a friendly WordPress Singapore Team. It’d tell you more then just a few words above. Enjoy watching!
WooCommerce Showcase.
With Showcase I’ve found a few places. The main showcase in on WooThemes.com site. What I like mostly there is the clear filter which helps you to filter website based on categories. For each item you can find information about the author who custom made this project, and the list of WooCommerce extensions. The list of extensions is a quite useful, so you can easily build the similar concept website. I would suggest to add some alternative options, so we can see more solutions to solve 1 problem.
That’s end for now… I’ll be writing more with my finding and research.
