Creating an e-commerce solution on a budget is entirely possible with open-source solutions such as WordPress and WooCommerce. Here are a few things to consider when building a budget solution.

Theme Choice

Ready-made themes + WooCommerce can be a bit tricky to get everything to work. When looking for combinations that work well together, first try getting all of your WooCommerce functionality together.

Install payment and postage plugins and make sure your store works with the services you are going to use. After the functionality is there, then swap to your chosen theme. Some themes will require their own additional plugins or force your checkout process to be a certain way. This can cause issues later on when updating the site.

Forget Multilingual

Forget about multilingual stores. In theory, it’s possible. The most popular multilingual plugins WPML and Polylang both work with WooCommerce, but they don’t always work well with WooCommerce.

Save yourself the headache and if you want a multilingual/multi-currency site, you will need software that’s made especially for e-commerce such as Magento or Drupal Commerce, or even my old favorite OpenCart.

K.I.S.S.

Keep it Simple Stupid. The first law of computing as far as I am concerned.

The more plugins and themes you have installed, the more issues you will have later on. Have the bare minimum that makes your site do what it should. Not only does it provide less surface area for bots to attack your site, but it also makes maintenance and updates much easier and things don’t break as often.

Prepare to Upgrade

Use your budget site to test out whether e-commerce is right for you. Ready-made themes and plugins are for sure a cheap way to test out whether e-commerce could work well for your company. However, we’d recommend once you have established your store and have regular orders coming through, you will want to upgrade to a custom theme.

A custom theme is faster than any ready-made. It’s safer because it doesn’t use excess code libraries and you can tailor it to your own needs. It’s more expensive than ready-made themes of course because it’s your own design and built to last. The theme can really make or break the site and is the difference between a 6-month web store, and a 6-year web store.

Prepare to Grow

As your site grows you will want hosting that can scale up with the needs of your site. Cloud hosting is perfect for this as you can add more resources when required. Start off with a small hosting package and grow as required. We have the perfect solution for that.

Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash.