What is it?

WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms. It is a great choice if you already use WordPress and would like to extend your site with an e-store functionality.

In the moment of writing, WooCommerce had 28% of market share of all online stores according to the official website or 22% according to BuildWith.

Distribution for websites using eCommerce technologies by BuildWith

Because of its popularity, it is a technology certainly worth attention. In this article we will focus on the WooCommerce REST API, which allows you to get even more from it, all the technical details can be found here.

Who is using it?

WooCommerce was downloaded 60,404,294 times. Some of their best customers can be found in showcases or in customer success stories. Maybe we don’t find some big and worldwide popular services there, but for sure a lot of them started using WooCommerce. When they reach some scale, they switch to bespoke solutions, dedicated to their business model and requirements.

What are the benefits?

Installation is extremely fast and easy. All you need is WordPress and you can install WooCommerce as a plugin. After activation, you can use step-by-step configuration to customise it to your use case. However, the platform comes with sensible defaults, so you should be ready to go from the start.

The number of extensions is enormous. This platform is based on an open source platform – WordPress, so it mostly inherited its working model .

You can write your own extensions or buy the ones created by third-party developers. The most popular plugins connect you with different payment gateways or shipping companies.

REST API is available for you with simple configuration. You can connect your app or third party integrations, using builtin endpoints.

What are the risks?

WooCommerce is a well written piece of software. However, third party plugins can compromise its security if they are not carefully crafted.

You need to remember to update both the core WordPress product as well as any plugins that you have installed on a regular basis.

Use cases

Let’s focus on WooCommerce REST API use cases.

Integration with a warehouse. If you also have a traditional store and your warehouse is managed by another system. You are probably manually keeping both in sync. This comes with costs as someone needs to move data from one system to another. It’s also prone to errors. Using the REST API we can create a solution that will keep both systems synchronised which will save you time and money.
Migration from another system – if you are in the process of moving entirely to the web and your data is held in an old system or files (CSV, EXCEL etc). We can create a migration script that will move this data to WooCommerce.
Marketing automation. Depending for example on the level of stock of certain products in the store. We can automatically post some marketing content, like Twitter posts, Newsletters etc
Mobile app integration. WooCommerce is a great solution for a web purposes. But some eCommerce shops have also dedicated mobile app. In this situation, when apps are not using same back end, they can be connected and synchronised using REST API.
Integration with voice. Alexa and other voice devices are getting more and more popular. Why not connect your eCommerce with it? People will be able to order in your shop with their voice. We can implement the whole flow with payments connected from the beginning. Can you imagine someone sitting in front of his fireplace and saying “Alexa order GoPro Karma”? Don’t you want to be the first to serve this order?

What can we do for you?

The examples above are only the tip of the iceberg. We specialise in building and servicing REST APIs. If you have any ideas about how we can help you, feel free to contact us via the form below.

Thanks,

Filip

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