If you are looking to build a website that offers a shopping cart system for customers to place an order, then look no further than WooCommerce (a plug-in capability of WordPress). WooCommerce is the most popular open source shopping cart system in the world and dominates the shopping cart space with over 40% of all shopping cart sites running on the WooCommerce platform today. WooCommerce is a free open-source software solution that does all the heavy lifting of an online ordering system, but does require some help if you want the shopping cart system to work the way you want. WooCommerce does rely on themes and plug-ins to provide much of the finer adjustments and layout on how the shopping cart system will look and feel. This article will dig into the basics of WooCommerce and the minimum requirements needed for it to work with ManageMore.
What are WooCommerce Plug-ins?
A plug-in, also called add-on or extension, adds functionality to WooCommerce without altering the main application itself. Plug-ins are developed by the WordPress team or third party developers and are intended to improve or change the standard behavior of the WooCommerce shopping cart to better adapt the ecommerce experience to your customer needs.
What are WooCommerce Themes?
A WordPress theme represents the design of your website. Themes install and integrate with WooCommerce in a similar way that plug-ins do, but provide a more robust library of capabilities that focus primarily on the appearance aspect of WooCommerce. It can control everything from colors, to fonts, to the entire layout. In essence, what you see when viewing the front-end of your site is shaped by the theme. The more robust themes also introduce advanced features that typically eliminate the need for many third party plug-ins. There are 100+ woo themes available today and picking the right one is the first step in ensuring a fast and flexible website layout. In this article, we have done the homework for you and provide a list of the best themes to use for a B2B shopping cart site.
Do I need Themes / Plug-ins for WooCommerce to work correctly?
WooCommerce, like most ecommerce shopping cart systems, are designed for a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) order experience out-of-the-box. If you are a wholesaler, your website will need a B2B (Business-to-Business) layout and this will require adjustments to the WooCommerce system. To build an effective B2B shopping cart site quickly that resembles the features customers are used to seeing from giant shopping cart suppliers like amazon.com, walmart.com, homedepot.com, etc. you will definitely need an appropriate WooCommerce theme and a few extra plug-ins, depending on your objectives. Fortunately, these add-on applications are extremely affordable to implement and average around $50, in most cases.
IMPORTANT: There are thousands of plug-ins and themes for WooCommerce and many are free to use. However, we recommend you consider the paid versions mentioned in this article only. Please use plug-ins sparingly as they can cause performance issues and are sometimes incompatible with each other and the latest WooCommerce version. DO NOT simply install all the plug-ins mentioned in this article either. You need to consider what is important for your site and then choose the theme or plug-in that provides the functionality you are looking for.
DISCLAIMER: ManageMore is not responsible for the effectiveness of any theme / plug-in mentioned on this webpage other than the ManageMore Connector plug-in. The other plug-ins mentioned are supported by third party developers and we make no claim of reliability or fitness for a particular purpose. Each third party plug-in should be verified to be compatible with the latest version of WordPress and WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Costs to Consider (Other than ManageMore)
As mentioned already, the WooCommerce system is open source and free to download and use. However, there are separate costs you need to be made aware of.
- Web Hosting Provider: You will want to host your WooCommerce system with a reliable and proven company. Hosting costs vary based on performance needs. In general, expect a midrange unmanaged hosting plan to cost somewhere between $20-$50/mo. Larger distributors with a more active customer base (100+ web orders per day), should expect a more powerful dedicated hosting plan that will cost around $100-$200/mo. Click here for recommendations on the selecting the best hosting providers.
- Theme and Plug-in Costs: No two WooCommerce sites are ever alike. Many of the nicer WooCommerce capabilities do come from third party WooCommerce developers. Most of these third party plugins range between $30 to $75, accordingly. Expect the combined theme and plug-in fees to set you back between $100 to $300 collectively if you are wanting to build a super nice shopping cart site. At minimum, ManageMore will require a few specific plug-ins to be present for your backend business software to properly integrate with WooCommerce.
REQUIRED WooCommerce Add-Ons
The following add-ons (i.e. plug-ins and themes) are required or very likely needed for a well laid out WooCommerce shopping cart site to work with ManageMore. Some of the products listed here will need to be purchased from the respective Developer shown below and prices are subject to change from each perspective company. Prices listed here are just to provide a general idea of the costs involved and are subject to change from the developer.
| Plug-In | Developer | Minimum Version | Required | Price | Plug-in Purpose |
| WooCommerce | WooCommerce | 7.4 | Yes | FREE | This is the main plug-in for WordPress that adds Shopping Cart functionality to the WordPress product. It is free! |
| ManageMore Connector | Intellisoft | 4.5.2 | Yes | Included with Econnect Module | This is our main plug-in which interfaces ManageMore Business Software to WooCommerce . This plug-in does all the magic of synchronizing ManageMore inventory, available quantity, customer specific pricing, payment processing, order status, customer account info and more. This plug-in must be downloaded from the link provided and manually installed on your WordPress site. For installation instructions, see our article on Installing the ManageMore Connector plug-in |
| Wholesale Prices Premium | Rymera | 1.26.5 | Yes | $49 | This plug-in is required and works with ManageMore to provide your business a powerful B2B shopping cart solution. You must download and install the free Wholesale Prices plug-in by Rymera, prior to registering this required plug-in. |
| WooCommerce Brands | WooCommerce | 1.6.38 | Likely | $39 | The brands extension plug-in by WooCommerce allows you to create brands for your shop. Assigning brands to your products will allow you to design a less cluttered category menu layout (eliminating mega-menus) by providing an additional filter option on your shop page or sidebar to narrow in on products by brand name. This plug-in provides a better shopping cart experience for the end-user and is often required for businesses that carry many different brands within a particular product category. |
|
Ultimate Member WooCommerce Extension
|
Ultimate Member | 2.6.9 | Likely |
$40 |
This plug-in manages the electronic customer registration process for your site and works hand-in-hand with the built-in ManageMore Web Registration process. |
| Ajax Product Filter |
Recommended: |
3.1.4 | No | $45 |
This plug-in is recommended if you decide to utilize brands or product attributes with your products. It provides many ways to display and configure your shopping cart site with options of filtering products by brand, product attributes, tags, prices, and other custom taxonomies. There are several popular product filter plug-ins in the woo marketplace, but we recommend this one due to its performance, feature set and product support. |
| Product Variation Table Plug-In | Recommended: PVT by WPXtension |
Likely |
$40-$75
|
If you have many variation products in your inventory and you operate a B2B business, then a product variation plug-in is needed for a better user shopping cart experience. B2B orders tend to be large and often involve the user purchasing many variations of a similar brand. Products that contain variations such as flavors, colors, sizes, etc. are better suited as a grid layout for easier selection by the user. A product variation table (a.k.a. PVT) plug-in accomplishes this for a WooCommerce store. The most flexible plug-in we have found to date is called “Product Variation Table” by WPXtension. |
|
| WooCommerce Theme | Varies | Yes |
Free to $100 |
A WooCommerce Theme sets the tone for your website identity and can have a big impact on your site performance. To learn more about themes, click here or play it safe and choose a popular and very lightweight Astra Theme with hundreds of templates to choose from. |
Security Plug-ins (RECOMMENDED)
Security plug-ins identify vulnerabilities and protect your site from hackers. Please consult with your hosting provider to determine if security plug-ins will work effectively with your server. Some hosting providers already provide very effective security tools that can block rouge IP addresses before traffic hits your WooCommerce application.
Here are our top recommended security plug-ins (choose only one):
WordFence by Defiant
Wordfence provides an effective Web Application Firewall (WAF) that identifies and blocks malicious traffic. This plug-in is quite popular with most WordPress users. It checks core files, themes and plug-ins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It also compares your files with what is in the WordPress.org repository, checking their integrity and reporting any changes to you.
Sucuri
Sucuri is a cloud-based security solution that you can rely on to ensure the security of your WordPress site. It offers a Web Application Firewall to protect your site from hackers and DDoS attacks. Moreover, it will constantly monitor your site and notify you when there are potential vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it helps to boost your site performance with a CDN service. Also, you will get access to malware removal without any limits.
IQ Block Country by Pascal
iQ Block Country is a plugin that allows you to limit access to your website content. You can either allow or disallow visitors from defined countries to (parts of) your content. This plug-in adds an additional layer of security to your site by stopping visitors from doing harmful things and limiting the countries that can access your site.
Cache and Server Optimization Plug-ins (RECOMMENDED)
Cache plug-ins help with optimizing resource usage. The benefits of these plug-ins include faster load times, low resource usage, and enhanced user experience. However, it is critical you speak with your hosting provider to ensure that a caching plug-in will work effectively for your ecommerce site. In some cases, your hosting provider may already provide server-level caching (e.g. WPEngine, Kinsta) or a service like Cloudflare that has page caching enabled. Please consult with your hosting provider regarding the best caching plug-in and performance plug-in to use in combination with whatever the hosting provider is also offering for the fastest ecommerce site possible.
Here are our top recommended performance boosting plug-ins:
Cloudflare by Cloudflare, Inc.
Speed up your WordPress site by up to 300% with Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin. APO allows Cloudflare to serve your entire WordPress site from our edge network of over 250+ data centers worldwide ensuring fast & reliable performance for your visitors no matter where they are. NOTE: Many hosting providers include this service at no additional charge.
Redis Object Cache by Till Kruss
A persistent object cache backend powered by Redis. Supports Predis, PhpRedis, Relay, replication, sentinels, clustering and WP-CLI. Object caching is a type of server-side caching and can be used in conjunction with other memory caching plug-ins that do not employ any object cache logic. Object caching stores database query results that have been loaded for faster retrieval on subsequent queries. This end result is a plugin that replaces the built-in WordPress object cache with a more persistent cache that helps server performance.
W3 Total Cache by BoldGrid (IMPORTANT: Choose only one Cache Plug-in for your site)
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
WP SuperCache by Automattic (IMPORTANT: Choose only one Cache Plug-in for your site)
cache plugin generates static html files to increase website performance. After a html file is generated, your webserver will serve that file from cache to reduce server processing requests.
WP Rocket by Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier (IMPORTANT: Choose only one Cache Plug-in for your site)
This cache plug-in is accepted by the top Managed WordPress hosting sites. It automatically handles cache preloading, CSS/Javascript optimization, and database optimization. It also works seamlessly with any CDN provider you’re using.
WP Fastest Cache by Emre Vona (IMPORTANT: Choose only one Cache Plug-in for your site)
Simplest Cache system to implement which generates static html files to speed up WooCommerce page rendering.
WooCommerce Store Plug-ins to Consider
WooCommerce Store Plug-ins are essential for making a great looking shopping cart in the fastest time possible. There are thousands of free and premium plug-ins to choose from that offer a multitude of enhancements to the WooCommerce application.
Click here for an article that goes over our top recommended plug-ins.
