WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform built as a plugin for WordPress. It turns a WordPress website into an online store, adding product catalogues, a cart and checkout, payments, shipping, taxes and order management, and it powers a very large share of the world's online shops. Its appeal comes from WordPress. Millions of sites already run on WordPress, and WooCommerce lets them add commerce without moving platforms, keeping content and products together on one site with full control over design through themes. Because it is open source and self-hosted, there are no platform transaction fees or monthly licence fees for the core plugin; merchants own their store, data and code, and can customise anything. The ecosystem is enormous. Thousands of free and paid extensions add subscriptions, memberships, bookings, product bundles, marketplaces with multiple vendors, advanced shipping rules, accounting integrations and payment gateways for almost every country. WooCommerce Payments and integrations with Stripe, PayPal and others handle checkout, and modern block-based themes and checkout blocks have improved design and performance. WooCommerce is developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. That flexibility comes with responsibility. Merchants must arrange hosting, keep WordPress, themes and plugins updated, manage security and backups, and ensure performance as traffic grows. Costs for premium extensions, hosting and developer help can add up, and conflicts between plugins are a common source of problems. Store owners without technical help often find a hosted platform simpler. Alternatives include Shopify, the leading hosted platform where infrastructure is managed for you; BigCommerce for hosted commerce with no transaction fees; Squarespace and Wix for design-led sites with built-in stores; Magento Open Source (Adobe Commerce) for complex, larger stores; and Medusa or Saleor for headless open-source commerce. Choose WooCommerce when you want full ownership and flexibility, already use WordPress, or need customisation a hosted platform cannot provide. Choose Shopify when you would rather not manage the technology.