What WooCommerce Is Good At, and What It Costs

The trade in one sentence

WooCommerce is flexible and yours; hosted platforms are constrained and managed. Which is better depends entirely on whether you want control or want it handled.

There is no universally right answer here. There is a right answer for a business with unusual requirements and a different one for a business that wants to sell things.

Where WooCommerce wins

• Unusual product types, pricing rules or checkout requirements
• Deep integration with your existing systems
• No per-transaction platform fee
• Full data ownership and no platform lock-in
• Content and commerce in one place, which suits content-led selling

What it costs you

1. Hosting appropriate to a shop, which is not cheap shared hosting
2. Security and updates as your responsibility
3. Plugin licences, which accumulate
4. Development for anything beyond the standard
5. Downtime risk that is yours to manage

The plugin problem is worse in a shop

Payment gateways, shipping calculators, tax handling, subscriptions, bookings — each is a plugin, each updates on its own schedule, and each can break checkout.

This is why staging and tested updates are not optional for a store.

Realistic running costs

That is often comparable to a hosted platform once everything is counted, which surprises people expecting WooCommerce to be free.

Frequently asked questions