AccessAlly vs. WooCommerce: a comparison

Our fans tell us AccessAlly allows them to sell better and earn more from their online courses and membership sites. We think you’ll love AccessAlly’s power features, along with its’ sophisticated interface.

But you might be wondering if you need to use both WooCommerce AND AccessAlly? Which one is right? This comparison guide will show you that it’s not all or nothing, and help you design your ideal tech stack.

Although WooCommerce is free, most people tend to require additional paid add-ons and themes. There are nearly 2000 themes, and over 1400 add-ons and extensions, some paid and some free.

For example, you might need a plugin to connect WooCommerce to your email marketing platform (like InfusedWoo or WPFusion), one for subscriptions, one for abandoned cart follow-up, another for dunning, and one more for memberships.

With AccessAlly, you’ve got everything you need in one plugin to handle a seamless checkout process from payment, delivery, and integrated email automation.

More importantly, you don’t need to worry about how everything connects together or keeping all of the various add-ons and plugins up to date as things shift.

WooCommerce comes with a standard look and feel for its’ shopping cart, so you can immediately start taking payments. But if you want to design something that matches your brand, you’ll need to invest in a Woo specific theme or custom development.

With AccessAlly’s order form designer, you can decide what fields you want to collect during the check out process… and style the forms to match your brand and colors.

The mobile-first designs mean that your customers can buy from any device, and experience a smooth transaction that builds trust in your brand.

You can also include AccessAlly’s flexible order forms on any page, and have customers walk through a 3-step check-out or a fast-track one page check-out, it’s up to you!

There are a ton of 3rd party add-ons for WooCommerce that allow you to set up and manage abandoned carts… but each one will mean adding another tool to your tech stack.

With AccessAlly, you’ve got built-in abandoned cart follow-up which you can customize through your existing email marketing platform… so you can have the best stats about your sales and marketing efforts.

WooCommerce allows you to create coupons, but if you want to run evergreen promotions you’ll need to purchase another scarcity-style add-on.

With AccessAlly you can create any number of coupons, including ones that are generated for each person and set to expire after a set time. This makes it easy to have an effective funnel that converts.

WooCommerce has a huge international user-base, so you will find many paid add-ons for offering multiple currencies and languages.

You might be noticing a trend here: AccessAlly has this functionality built in. AccessAlly allows you to pick a default currency, but also offer different currencies on the same order form for international customers.

That way you can cater to different client bases, and even switch the default language of your order forms and website to match the target language of your ideal clients.

Currently AccessAlly is available in Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

With WooCommerce’s subscription add-on, you can start to take recurring payments and subscriptions easily.

But what happens when someone’s payment fails or you need to follow-up and make sure that clients update their credit cards on file? There are more paid add-ons to do it with WooCommerce.

With AccessAlly, recurring subscription management is simplified because it’s built-in and it integrates with your email marketing system.

You can easily set up email automations to have people come in and update their credit cards, or even remove access to the content they’ve purchased if they don’t.

AccessAlly also works with PayPal recurring subscriptions, and allows you to notify clients that their access will be revoked when they cancel, too.

With WooCommerce, the focus started off on selling physical products. Now with WooCommerce Memberships, you can sell access to digital content… and with (yes you guessed it!) a paid add-on you can implement a bulk membership option in WooCommerce.

AccessAlly allows you to sell bulk licenses or group access where an administrator can invite their teams or families, directly.

AccessAlly also allows you to design the “member management” dashboard to your liking, including custom operations to kick off automations directly by group administrators.

In this case, a team leader would be able to see student progress, quiz results, and even notes or questions asked.

AccessAlly Pro also makes it easy for students to upload homework attachments, like PDFs, Word documents, or other files for the administrator.

With WooCommerce you’ve got a slew of options to track your metrics, from Google Analytics integrations, to monthly paid SaaS options that range from $49/month to $249/month.

Your data is available to analyze, you’ll just need to decide which add-on or platform you want to use to visualize your most important metrics.

AccessAlly has its’ own built-in metrics dashboard, which means you can keep track of all your most important sales and marketing numbers.

See the conversion rate from free to paid members, look at churn and retention, and your predicted revenue month to month.

You decide how to design your metrics dashboard with the drag and drop editor, you can break things down by product or show overall trends.

• • You’re a developer who is comfortable installing and maintaining multiple plugins, add-ons, and themes
  • You need a bare bones membership site, and don’t plan on adding learning management, gamification, or member directories
  • You enjoy duct-taping solutions together, and using a lot of different plugins to achieve your goals
  • You don’t need a ton of customization for the look and feel of your order forms

• • You want everything to work seamlessly from one end to the other (payments, courses, and memberships) with as few plugins as possible
  • You know keeping your client information centralized inside your CRM will help you scale
  • You’re looking to create an amazing customer experience, that’s functional, profitable, and helps you stand out in the marketplace