Building a virtual store, (also called building an internet store or developing an online shopping site), refers to the construction of websites aimed at buying and selling products or services via the Internet.
This can include retail stores, marketplaces (multi-seller trading arenas) and online auction sites. But e-commerce is not just shopping sites.
Many times we also implement e-commerce sites for the management of internal business inventory departments, including data exchange to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions.

E-commerce website development differs from normal website development in that the development should include many products, clearance options and inventory management.
On such sites, a lot can go wrong and it is necessary to choose a website development company experienced in developing e-commerce sites with experience in the various platforms and with a portfolio of such sites.

There are many e-commerce platforms available for developing an e-commerce website, including:

• Shopify : A cloud-based platform that allows users to easily set up and manage a basic online store.
• WooCommerce</ a>: An open source plugin for the WordPress content management system that turns a WordPress website into an online store.
• Magento: An open source platform for large e-commerce businesses.
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud: An enterprise-level cloud-based e-commerce platform that offers powerful features and integrations for large, complex businesses.

Soon we will upload an article detailing the advantages and disadvantages of each of the platforms.

What is woocommerce – some background

• WooCommerce is a popular e-commerce platform that allows users to easily set up and manage an online store. This is a plugin for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system.
  Woocommerce was released in September 2011 by a team of developers called WooThemes as a plugin for WordPress, and became very popular, because it was simple to install and manage.
• Later in May 2015 WooThemes was bought by Automattic the company that owns WordPress.com
• Today Woocommerce is developed and maintained by hundreds of developers around the world, both from the Automattic company, and from the global WordPress developer community.

In 2015, statistics showed that the percentage of online stores using WooCommerce is over 30% of all online stores.

Since the acquisition of Automattic in 2015, WooCommerce has continued to capture significant market shares and become the leading e-commerce platform on the Internet.

According to a survey by the company Builtwith WoCommerce is statistically the most common e-commerce system.
It accounts for 23% of all online stores on the Internet, Shopify accounts for 27%, but this includes free e-commerce sites that simply no one has ever bothered to disable, and tiny sites that sell one product.

When you look at the 1 million largest websites in the world, WooCommerce takes a 27% share, while Shopify drops to an average of 21% and Magento, which is considered the most professional tool, takes a share of only 8% .

As we reduce the sample to larger sites, it seems that Magento’s share increases, Shopify’s share decreases, while WooCommerce’s share remains stable at 25% – 30% of the market.</ span>

The reason why Magento disappears in the sample of all e-commerce sites and grows as the sites grow, is that the development in Magento is the most professional, and also the most expensive.

A project that can be carried out in Magento with a budget of NIS 200 thousand, in most cases it will be possible to carry out on the WooCommerce system around a quarter of this budget,
Therefore, those who apply for development in Magento are the largest companies that are able to spend such budgets for both development and ongoing maintenance.

among the websites made in Woocommerce you can find huge companies: ryanair, HBO, Payoneer.com, and even pornhub

What we do with woocommerce

As a professional development house, most of our woocommerce applications are relatively complex or scalable websites
(Sites whose commercial forecast is to develop in additional functional directions, and therefore need to take into account future characterization of add-ons).
We approach the development of a woocommerce website first by characterizing a functional system and complete processes.

Among the sites we developed using woocommerce you can find large marketplaces, sites with product builders (building a custom product according to the surfer’s requirements) and sites where there is a variety of products that are fundamentally different from each other.

For example: A website that sells both concert tickets, accommodation, and guided tours in different languages.
On a website of this type, it is necessary to take into account a very broad product specification that will support all these options, because tickets for concerts are a product with a basic date inventory (each date has a different number of tickets and seat selection),
On the other hand, accommodation is a product in which the availability of the stock, the dates for purchase must be coherent (if I want a hotel room for 3 days, it cannot be that this room is not available in one of them), the calculation of the transaction price is carried out in different logics for each product, and there must be a full interface to the inventory system since There are other sales channels such as an order center, agents and more…

 

E-commerce sites in the international arena sometimes need a different api connection to logistics centers depending on the buyer’s address, different clearance characteristics, different purchase tax calculation, shipping fees, clearance form language and more.

In addition to all these, we also need to consider a security model.
Although the users’ credit data is never saved in the site’s system, e-commerce sites are a much more attractive target for hacking because they include a database of customers, purchasing habits and a lot of information that can be used by the potential hacker, so it is very important to keep the information stored on the site and secure it well.

Backups of an e-commerce site are usually more frequent, because in the event that the site needs to be restored from a backup, we want the most recent backup, otherwise we may lose transaction data from the time between the retrieval and the backup The last one.

How do you choose a company to build an online store?

Most e-commerce websites also include process automation, such as synchronization with an ERP system to retrieve inventory and cost data, or transmitting orders to a central system.
Thus, a store or chain that sells products to customers at a point of sale needs a real-time update of the available stock of each item in order not to receive orders for a product that has just run out of stock or that has already been ordered by one of the branches.
For such sites where so much can go wrong and affect the income of the business – it is important to know how to choose the right company to open e-commerce sites.
Ask yourself:

• Do I know how much work is required for this type of project?
• Do I have goals and objectives? Do I know roughly how much I will sell? Who is the target audience?
• What will my digital presence look like? Will the site support this?
• Did I take the measurement into account? Am I sure that the site will support results monitoring perfectly?
• On which platform will the site be established? Is the perfect platform suitable for developing e-commerce sites?
• Does the development company provide me with support and help?

In conclusion:

Building a virtual store is a process that requires thinking about many aspects, and experience both in characterizing systems of this type, and in their implementation.

We at EOI have a wide specialization in the subject of electronic commerce in all respects, and we will be happy to provide service to any project during its construction or maintenance phase.
Among other things, we handle e-commerce sites that have been hacked, slow sites, or problems of instability.