The platform you select for your online store has a major impact on its functionality (for both you and your users) and scalability. While hosted platforms like Shopify offer convenient store setup and management, hosting your e-commerce store on your own website gives you better options for customization, user experience, store branding, and capturing customer data. Expand’s platform of choice for our clients is WooCommerce.

Why Host Your Own Store with WooCommerce?

• Enhanced Customization: Full control over your site’s design and features. The design elements you set for your website can automatically populate throughout your store. Having a consistent brand ensures that your users have a seamless shopping experience – which is crucial when it comes to increasing sales conversions. WooCommerce provides access to thousands of plugins to help make your store work specifically for your needs. You can utilize plugins that integrate with WooCommerce for anything from creating a calendar to book appointments (great for restaurants or doctors’ offices), to providing your customers with real-time rates from shipping providers like UPS, USPS, or FedEx (which is great for anyone trying to ship products). Here are some useful links to help you build your own online store:
  • WordPress (https://expandhq.com/wordpress) – A website publishing tool gives you an interface to create websites without having in-depth coding experience. WordPress has the largest market share for content management systems across the internet.
  • Avada from Themefusion (https://expandhq.com/avada) – Provides pre-build designs for webpages and store layouts, as well as a simplified user interface to make it easy to design your site. This one is an absolute MUST, and we install this on every website we create.
  • WooCommerce by Automattic (https://expandhq.com/woocommerce) –Software that builds the backend structure for your store. Once you download this program, you can browse the WooCommerce Marketplace which allows you to shop for plugins to accomplish the goal(s) you need to achieve on your site. Plug-ins on this store are vetted so you can feel confident that you will be purchasing functional products; whereas, purchasing solutions direct from a company’s website might leave you with a glitchy feature that does not integrate well with your other plug-ins. Here are a few of the plug-in developers that we’ve had success with for our customers.
    • Pluginhive (https://expandhq.com/pluginhive) – This company has been our go-to for any customer needing to use appointment booking features, or shipping options. Their team typically responds within a few hours, and they are willing to review every aspect of your configuration to ensure that you are set up properly.
    • FunnelKit (https://expandhq.com/funnelkit) – FunnelKit’s Cart for WooCommerce gives your store the cart button that follows users throughout your site. It allows shoppers to quickly see what’s in their cart, quickly move to check-out, and/or to redirect to the shopping page to add more items. FunnelKit has a large suite of plug-ins that can also streamline the user experience and maximize conversions.
    • SkyVerge (https://expandhq.com/woocommerce) – This company’s membership plug-in is the best on the market for the price. Setup your memberships to unlock content, other products, or to give exclusive discounts on products.
    • Automattic (https://expandhq.com/woocommerce) – The same company that created WooCommerce has also created a suite of great plugins. Some of our favorite plugins from this company are the subscription and payment gateway plug-ins. There are cheaper versions of these out there, but after wasting dozens of hours with other companies trying to get software to work correctly, we finally decided to spend the extra money for Automattic and we haven’t went back since.
• Data Ownership: Gain direct access to customer data, essential for informed decision-making. Both hosted solutions like Shopify and WooCommerce have advanced data gathering capabilities; however, much like the design comments above, the WooCommerce solutions offer more options to customize your data flows.
  • Complete Access to Customer Data
    • With WooCommerce, your store and all its data (e.g., customer details, purchase history, and analytics) are stored on your own server. You own the database and have full control over how the data is collected, stored, and used.
    • Hosted solutions, on the other hand, manage your store’s backend and data. While you can export, you’re dependent on the hosted platform for access and may face limitations in terms of data structure or customization.
  • Customizable Privacy Policies
    • WooCommerce allows you to tailor how you collect and manage customer data. You can integrate with various privacy tools or design unique consent processes.
    • Hosted solutions impose certain standards for data collection, which may not align with your business needs or local regulations.
  • Data Security and Backup Control
    • Since you control the hosting environment with WooCommerce, you decide how to secure and back up your data. This independence allows you to implement stringent security measures.
    • On a hosted platform, you rely on their security protocols, which can be robust but beyond your direct control.
  • Freedom from Platform Policies
    • WooCommerce users are not subject to platform-specific rules regarding data usage. This flexibility ensures you can leverage your customer data for advanced analytics or third-party integrations without restrictions, just be careful of local regulations.
    • Hosted solutions may impose limitations, such as restrictions on using certain third-party apps or features tied to their pricing tiers.
  • No Vendor Lock-in
    • With WooCommerce, your store data stays with you, even if you decide to migrate to another hosting provider or platform.
    • On a hosted platform, exporting your data can be more complex, and some aspects (like themes and functionality) may not be easily transferable.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Advantages: Improve your site’s ranking by driving traffic to your domain, not a third-party URL. When you host your store with a company like Shopify and have your website hosted with another provider, the host store will provide you with web addresses within their environment where you direct customers to shop. Your site’s Google ranking is highly dependent on maximizing site traffic so pushing traffic to another site could significantly reduce your ranking in search results.

There are many options to choose from when building your store but just make sure the platform you choose has visually appealing and intuitive layouts and the marketing tools you need (like discount codes and information gathering) to convert customers in the following Tips.