WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the open-source commerce platform for WordPress. It turns a WordPress site into an online store with products, variations, a cart, checkout, taxes, shipping and order management. Because it runs inside WordPress, the store and the rest of the website share one admin, one design and one set of content tools.

WooCommerce gives the store owner control of the checkout, the data and the costs. Owners choose their payment provider, their host and the extensions they need, from subscriptions and bookings to product bundles and shipping integrations.

What WooCommerce handles

• Simple, variable, grouped and downloadable products
• Payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal
• Shipping zones, rates and tax settings
• Coupons, customer accounts and order emails
• Extensions for subscriptions, bookings and marketplaces

What a healthy WooCommerce store needs

A WooCommerce store is a WordPress site with money moving through it, so updates, security and backups matter even more. Extensions should be kept current and tested on a staging copy before they reach the live store. Backups need to include the database, since orders and customers live there. Hosting needs enough resources for cart and checkout pages, which cannot be fully cached.

Product data quality also affects marketing. Clean titles, descriptions, images and identifiers feed Google Merchant Center for Shopping ads and free listings, and they power email flows in tools such as Klaviyo.

When WooCommerce fits

WooCommerce fits businesses that already use WordPress, want to own their store data and hosting, or need custom store behavior that a hosted platform does not allow. Businesses that want a fully hosted store with less upkeep often prefer Shopify.