Our team is still proud of our recent recognition as a top e-commerce developers in Canada by Clutch. As a result of this achievement, they reached out to interview us on our expertise in the field. I was thrilled to talk to them about the strengths of WooCommerce and provide my insights.

Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform designed for agencies and buyers in the IT sector. Beyond company profiles and client reviews, they also produce research on website builders such as e-commerce platforms. There are many things to take into account when creating an e-commerce store before deciding what platform to use. As I said:

“E-commerce comes down to the basic requirements—whether someone is selling physical or digital products, figuring out shipping, payment and tax options and so on. It requires a bit of planning upfront, but, as with anything, we need to dream big and start small. It’s a different story for bigger companies, but those may be the ones who need to take the biggest leap of all—adapting to the paradigm of online selling, versus retail locations.”

With all this in mind, clients typically come to us to start a store from scratch, build out new features and extensions or upgrade the platform. While there are many great options out there, we are believers of open-source technologies and work exclusively with WooCommerce.

“WooCommerce is open source, which makes it highly customizable and flexible. Compared to software like Magento, it’s also quite lean, without a lot of technical debt…It’s still a young platform—having been released in 2011—but it’s already a massive part of the e-commerce market. More than 30% of all e-commerce sites are using WooCommerce.”

However, as with any development and design project, there are always areas to be cautious. I highlight this by sharing:

“WooCommerce provides a lot of power, but it can be daunting for non-technical people. Since there are so many extensions available for it, installing a badly written one can easily take an entire store down. People without a lot of good technical talent, or ones who don’t want to invest too many resources in the technical side, should use something like Shopify. For truly basic stores, Squarespace can be an option. These eliminate technical hurdles and keep things simple.”

Thank you to Clutch for thinking of SAU/CAL and including us in your research. We were happy to share our knowledge with you. Check out the full interview for more great information!