WooCommerce or Instagram?
It makes sense to believe that Instagram would be the better platform when it comes to selling your products online. After all, they have roughly one billion active users each month. That’s one of the reasons why Instagram is the most popular social network worldwide. Just imagine getting just a small piece of that pie when it comes to traffic to your products. That’s a ton of traffic and a massive amount of sales.
Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. While you do have the potential of generating a good amount of traffic there are some things to take into consideration when you want to sell your products online. Some of these things include security, features, ease of use, SEO friendliness, scalability, and so much more.
While there are many great reasons for selling on Instagram there are many more reasons for building an online store with WooCommerce. Utilizing Instagram to bring your potential customers to your WooCommerce store is going to be your best option and here’s why.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a free WordPress eCommerce plugin that allows you to transform a WordPress website into a full-fledged online store so that you can easily begin selling products online. One of the great things about this is that you do not need to be a web developer to build your website and create a store that you can easily manage.
This shopping cart offers flexibility and tons of features so that you can create and manage your online store effortlessly. There are several vital features that you’ll have such as inventory and tax management, secure payments, and shipping integration. You’ll also have access to plenty of plugins to simplify many aspects of your store’s SEO, layout, upselling, cross-selling, and more.
There’s no doubt that WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress. Its ability to integrate offers limitless customizations and also provides outstanding SEO for eCommerce websites.
WooCommerce or Instagram?
Here are just a handful of reasons why WooCommerce is the best option for building an eCommerce store:
- WooCommerce is an open-source plugin and what this means is that you can audit, modify, or extend the code.
- WooCommerce is very user-friendly and you won’t need to hire an expert developer to build or manage your online store.
- WooCommerce has a ton of free and premium “plugins” that allow you to add new functionality to your store without hiring a company. You do not need any technical knowledge to install these plugins.
- WooCommerce works on all devices, so it doesn’t matter if they are shopping on a smartphone, desktop, or tablet.
- WooCommerce has a ton of “themes” that allow you to build your store without any web design or graphic design experience. You even have control over how your store will look by making simple changes without any technical knowledge.
What is Instagram Shopping?
Instagram Shopping is a way of selling products to potential customers using Instagram. They provide a set of features that simplify the process of making products discoverable in Search & Explore, sharing products through posts, and stories organically. And also promoting through ad campaigns. While this sounds like it would be a great way to promote your products there are some downsides to using Instagram shopping as your only way of selling your products.
10 reasons why selling on WooCommerce is better than selling on Instagram
Reason 1: Advanced Inventory Management
If you run a store you’ll need to effectively manage your inventory. You don’t want to sell products that are out of stock, nor do you want to continue buying products that aren’t moving fast enough. This is why inventory management is a huge part of running your business successfully. You’re able to keep track of stock levels, find best-selling products, see trends with certain products, and more. Managing your inventory is probably one of the most difficult aspects of managing your online store.
But with WooCommerce’s inventory management system, it’s much easier to track stock levels and get updated reports of items that have been refunded and purchased. You’ll get notifications of items that are running low or out-of-stock. And if the items are out of stock it will automatically hide these products from the store.
The ability to easily manage refunds, orders, emails, and everything else that is necessary to run a successful online store is what makes WooCommerce one of the most popular platforms.
Reason 2: Effective Analytics
E-commerce analytics is an essential tool that gives you an in-depth look into how well your online store is performing so that you can make the necessary changes to improve its functionality, and performance and ultimately increase your sales.
With WooCommerce analytics you’ll be able to identify where your customers are coming from, what items they are purchasing, and even what they are doing once they hit your store. This type of customer activity and detailed information helps you stay connected with your customers and create the ultimate experience for them.
You won’t get this type of information with Instagram Shopping.
Reason 3: Storefront Customization
How your store looks plays an important role in how your visitor navigates through your website, and whether or not they purchase or leave your website without making any purchase. A high bounce rate can affect your SEO efforts. A bounce rate is determined by how long someone stays on your website. When people quickly leave your website this will increase your bounce rate and decrease your ranking with the search engines because your website is seen negatively.
WooCommerce, unlike Instagram, allows you to not only create a visually enticing storefront for the visitor, but also creates an easy-to-follow navigation for the search engines and the visitor. These are the things that are necessary to convert your website, visitors, into paying customers while increasing your chances of getting higher rankings with search engines.
Plus you are able to customize your storefront to make it look exactly how you want it to look even if you are using one of the free or paid themes. By customizing these themes you are branding your company easily and ensuring that your store stands out from other websites.
You will not have this type of customization options or themes to choose from with Instagram shopping.
While some customizations may require some professional help from WooCommerce development companies like WooNinjas, many of the customizations can easily be modified on your own such as adding your logo, products, images, and more.
There are more than 40 free themes that can choose from that are supported by WooCommerce, and will offer you many great features and customizations for your storefront that will exceed your expectations.
Reason 4: WooCommerce is Search Engine Friendly(SEO)
SEO plays an essential role in getting listed in the search engine results and generating target traffic to your online store. Getting ranked in the search engine requires some work. WooCommerce offers a search-friendly platform that helps to improve your results from titles of the products, alt image tags, breadcrumbs, navigation, and more.
Of course, the platform alone isn’t going to be enough to get your products and website ranking in SERP. In order to better utilize the platform, you’ll need to be sure that you include alt text for your images, write a meta description for every product, optimize the product titles with keywords, use unique content for every product and page, as well as add additional SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO to ensure your store’s performance is good.
Reason 5: Easy installation and user-friendly
Setting up WooCommerce is not difficult. You simply download the plugin and install it into your WordPress within seconds. You will need to fill in the information associated with your products, such as shipping, and payments, and add products to create your store.
As with Instagram Shopping, you’ll need to choose to onboard by setting up your shop in Commerce Manager or a supported platform. Once you do this you’ll need to wait between 1 to 2 weeks for Instagram to give shopping approval.
While this isn’t very difficult it can be time-consuming waiting for approval after setting up your store within the Instagram app. Not having complete control over your own store isn’t a good way to run your business and limits you in many aspects that might prevent you from scaling your business later on down the road.
Reason 6: Create Trackable Ads To Increase ROI
Understanding your ROI or Return on investment helps you to determine if what you’re doing is worth it. You wouldn’t want to spend $5 to earn $4. By determining the profitability of an expenditure you’re able to take the guesswork out of your decisions and determine how much profit you are generating, how you can improve your campaign, and understand the value of your conversions.
One of the most valuable actions for marketers is the ability to track purchase values and conversions. It’s the most crucial aspect to keep track of your return on investment, increase your profits and put your efforts into the areas that are bringing you the money.
WooCommerce makes this simple by integrating with Google Analytics.
Reason 7: Ability To Create Sales Funnels
Creating funnels for products is the best way to turn prospects into leads. A good sales funnel is like having a sales team that works 24/7 guiding the prospects’ thought processes, challenges, and decisions. Every single eCommerce store needs to set up sales funnels.
And with Woocommerce you can easily make multiple sales funnels. With Woocommerce you can create your sales funnel easily with a number of plugins and when coupled with the powerful analytics you can optimize your sales funnel to sell more.
Reason 8: Store Customer Data
Building a list of paying customers is an important part of generating income. Instagram Checkout doesn’t require customers to enter their email addresses to purchase an item. With WooCommerce you choose what information you want to get from your customer so that you can use it later on down the line to send coupons and deals. The goal is to build a relationship with them.
Reason 9: Transaction Fees
WooCommerce or Instagram, which has better fees? WooCommerce does have transaction fees but they are far less than Instagram. Instagram has a selling fee that is 5% per shipment or a flat fee of $0.40 for shipments of $8.00 or less.
With WooCommerce you pay 2.9% + $0.30 for each transaction made with U.S.-issued credit or debit cards.
Reason 10: Geolocation support
While geolocation isn’t essential per se, it does, however, offer plenty of benefits that will allow you to better connect with your customer. By utilizing geolocation you will be able to automatically geolocate customers and provide them the information that is specific to their location for example the correct tax rates and shipping methods. But there’s so much more to this. You can also only display products, categories, pages, and more that are specific to a region or country.
WooCommerce vs Instagram
Whether you are leaning toward WooCommerce, Instagram, or something else, getting your business online doesn’t have to be difficult. Determining the best platform to use is often the most difficult aspect. But there’s no doubt that selling on WooCommerce is going to help you dramatically improve many aspects of your business. Scalability, tracking, SEO, and constant improvements based on real information is the key to building a profitable and successful online store.
And remember there’s no reason why you shouldn’t utilize Instagram in your business. It’s a great way to generate traffic to your store and brand your company. Thankfully WooCommerce can easily be integrated with Instagram to aid in selling more products, improve branding, and get people talking about your products through paid ads or posts on your story.
At WooNinjias, we’ve been helping companies get their WooCommerce store set up by utilizing the best plugin stack and specific customization to set you up for success. Our team of expert WooCommerce developers can take your vision and transform it into reality.
