In most cases when people are about to start an e-commerce website they think about Opencart, Magento, Prestashop and Shopify as their CMS options. If you ask them why they don’t consider WordPress, they’ll provide many of the following reasons:
- It lacks scalability
- It can’t handle too much traffic
- It’s tailored to blogs and isn’t a good e-commerce platform
- It lacks backend support for sales reports and inventory management
- It doesn’t support ERP integration
- And finally, it’s vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Now let’s justify the accuracy of these arguments. I gladly want to tell you that except ERP integration none of these arguments sticks in front of the strengths that WordPress has. Let’s talk about them step-by-step:
- Scalability and Traffic Handling: If WordPress wouldn’t have been scalable then Techcrunch and Mashable type websites wouldn’t be running on it. As far as traffic handling is the concern, I want to tell you that these sites get millions of visitors everyday and WordPress CMS installed in the servers of these sites serve them with great efficiency.
- Tailored to blogs: This is a wakeup call for all the guys who still think that WordPress is tailored to blogs only. Gone are the days when WordPress was made for bloggers only. Now it has been proved again and again as a powerful platform for sites of all types. Whether they’re article directories, corporate websites, classified sites or social networks, WordPress is being used everywhere successfully. 63% of websites hosted on a CMS use WordPress, which is a huge amount.
- E-commerce features: For starting an e-commerce site on WordPress you’ll have to install WooCommerce plugin. Now, this plugin comes with a lot of features and remaining features can also be installed with the help of some other free and paid plugins.
- Vulnerability to security threats: Some people say that WordPress is an open source platform so it can be hacked easily. Well, tell me one thing – which other e-commerce CMS isn’t an open source platform? Can you please name any? If not, then how’s it different from others? In fact, it has the largest community of developers who contribute to its security by finding bugs and developing fixes for them. Updating WordPress core features is as easy as clicking a button. Plus, if combined with BuddyPress then it becomes a much more powerful e-commerce platform even for large scale e-commerce sites.
WordPress for e-commerce has great potential and opportunities. However, no website is currently utilizing a good part of these opportunities.
