Woocommerce Review
It’s not free, it’s not great. It will work but so will 2 cans and a piece of string. Better try one of these Woocomerce Alternatives
This isn’t a glowing Woocommerce Review. I do not hate Woocommerce. It does the job it is supposed to in an adequate way. It’s just that it is not honestly sold and rarely used for purpose.
Woocommerce is not free.
Woocommerce isn’t an ecommerce platform. It is a plugin (an afterthought) for a blogging platform. Yes it does work and you can sell things, but you can’t put a tent in your trunk and call your car an RV.
What does Woocommerce cost in 2023
Woocommerce is free to download and that is really the last free part of the whole thing. This isn’t an issue, I am more than happy to pay for an ecommerce platform. Just don’t tell people a solution is free unless it costs nothing. Ever.
Woocommerce runs on WordPress so you need hosting. You can’t use cheap shared hosting if you need to make sales. You can survive on $20 a month hosting, but to be sure your hosting is not losing you sales look at hosting around the $60/month like WP Engine or Kinsta.
You will also want to make sure you pay for a caching plugin like WP Rocket – avoid free plugins or free versions of premium plugins because they will affect your checkout and cause sales issues.
Next gripe. WordPress try and install a bunch of nonsense when you install Woocommerce including a new theme. If the average person clicks next, next, next through the default installation process they can really make a mess of their website.
More and more functionality in Woocommerce is being removed from the free install and put into plugins you need to pay for. This includes most payment providers which are now hidden behind Woocommerce Payments. Again, not an issue a lot of ecommerce platforms do this now. They just don’t do it while trying to convince users they are free.
Need to connect Google Analytics to your store. No problem, that is free. Need to track ecommerce data in Google Analytics. that will be $79/year
Want Gift cards? Seems reasonable. Please pay monthly.
In Australia and want to use Australia Post Shipping. That’ll cost you. Maybe use just a table of shipping rates to save yourself the trouble. Sorry, we saw that coming, you will have to pay for that too.
Woocommerce Payments – do I use it or avoid it
It’s fine. There is no reason to avoid it. You will pay more than if you just used Stripe directly though. Setup is simple and it will not get in your way at all, but the constant Jetpack ads throughout your dashboard as soon as you activate it (or the “tax” plugin) are tiresome.
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