WooCommerce: The advantages & disadvantages of the popular shop plugin

WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce shop system in the WordPress universe. The plugin is free and transforms your WordPress blog into a fully-fledged online shop – all with just one click. WooCommerce is characterised above all by its simplicity and versatility. In this article, you will learn about the advantages and disadvantages of WooCommerce for your online shop.

Like WordPress itself, WooCommerce offers its own complete plugin and theme economy and impresses with its simple modular structure. The rapid history of WooCommerce began in 2011 when WooThemes developed WooCommerce as a shop system plugin alongside its well-known themes and plugins. WooCommerce emerged from the then very popular Jigoshop plugin and became the most successful shop system in WordPress in the same year.

In 2015, WooCommerce was then acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, as a logical consequence and gradually integrated into the WordPress economy. Today, according to BuiltWith, over 3.3 million websites use the popular WordPress plugin.

WooCommerce – The basis for your online shop

WooCommerce is technically only the basis for a successful shop. On WooCommerce.com you will find a variety of premium and free plugins, such as the plugins for the payment service providers Stripe, Amazon Pay and Klarna, with which you can expand your shop according to your needs.

In addition to the standard WordPress theme “Twenty Nineteen”, there is even the standard theme “Storefront”, which was explicitly developed for the use of WooCommerce. The basic theme impresses with its absolute simplicity and offers an excellent basis for setting up a shop. The features of Storefront are all focussed exclusively on e-commerce.

The features of Storefront are

• Specially optimised for WooCommerce
• Fully responsive design
• Basic setting options via the Theme Customiser
• Many child themes and plugins to extend the theme

Storefront now has a lot of premium and free child themes. So everyone can customise the theme to their taste. If you want to invest a little more, you should take a look at the most popular WooCommerce theme “Flatsome”.

Is WooCommerce suitable for your shop?

WooCommerce is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that manage their shop and website independently and only have a limited budget available.

An enormous number of shop cases can be created with WooCommerce, for example:

• Physical products (e.g. jam or home-knitted scarves)
• Digital products (e.g. own books or patterns)
• Tickets (e.g. for concerts, seminars or congresses)
• Protected member areas (e.g. for online training courses)
• even external products (e.g. like affiliate from amazon).

These are the advantages of WooCommerce

Unlike many shop systems on the market, WooCommerce is available free of charge – this is probably the biggest advantage of the solution. The software is open source and has a modular structure.

WooCommerce can be expanded and customised almost endlessly with themes and plugins – WooCommerce plugins and themes are available both for free and for a fee. This way, you can start immediately and gradually expand your shop as your business grows.

Overall, this model makes online shops with WooCommerce significantly cheaper than with other shop systems – even if you sometimes use WooCommerce premium plugins and pay extra for them. We have broken down the WooCommerce costs for a typical shop in more detail in the magazine.

The German market for WooCommerce has only just begun to grow and is constantly expanding. There is also already a huge international WooCommerce community with whom you can exchange ideas for support – for example in the WordPress support forum, or in Facebook groups such as “WooCommerce Help & Share” and “Advanced WooCommerce”.

These are all WooCommerce advantages at a glance:

• High scalability thanks to modular design
• Low costs compared to other shop systems
• Flexibly customisable via numerous extensions and plugins (free and chargeable)
• Quick setup and easy installation via the WooCommerce wizard (without knowledge of HTML and CSS)
• Large international WooCommerce community for support
• Wide range of themes and layouts for customised design (free and chargeable)
• Continuous further development and own “WooCommerce economy”
• Fully-fledged content management system (CMS) in combination with WordPress
• Steadily growing market in Germany
• Numerous connections to accounting systems, POS systems and warehouse management systems (e.g. Lexoffice, Billbee or Sevdesk)

WordPress with WooCommerce: these are the disadvantages

Unfortunately, there are also a few disadvantages that you should be aware of when using WooCommerce. I would like to explain what these are below:

1. not made in Germany

WooCommerce was developed in the USA and is therefore not optimised for the German market. This means that if you want to sell your products on the German or European market, you need another plugin, such as the free WordPress plugin Germanised or the premium plugin German Market.

Both plugins make your shop legally compliant in Germany and Europe. They supplement your WooCommerce shop with a variety of additional functions, such as invoice PDF, delivery note, VAT output in the right places, calculation of price per unit, cancellation price, legally compliant checkout, etc.

2. legal texts not included

WooCommerce does not include any legal texts such as terms and conditions, privacy policy, cancellation policy, shipping terms, procedure directory, etc. as standard. The plugins mentioned in point 1 or legal text providers such as IT Rechts Kanzlei, Händlerbund or Protectedshops can help here. See also our article on making WooCommerce legally compliant.

3. manageable German WooCommerce community

The German-speaking WooCommerce community is a very small community, which can sometimes lead to problems when looking for a little help. In this case, I recommend the following contact points:

• The German WooCommerce Facebook group
• The WooCommerce forum on wpde.org

You can find more good sources & resources at:

• WooExpert – Here you can also find online training courses on WooCommerce
• MarketPress Blog – Very good beginner articles on WooCommerce

4. focus on the US market

The development of WooCommerce is focussed on the US market, which unfortunately leads to problems from time to time with feature requests or adjustments to the current legal situation. The two plugins mentioned above or the legal text providers can help here. In the event of major legal changes (such as the GDPR), you should therefore pay particular attention to whether WooCommerce or other extensions will make adjustments here. It is therefore always worth taking a look at the WooCommerce Make Blog. There you can follow current adjustments to the WooCommerce plugin, beta versions, release candidates, etc.

5. test first, then update!

However, the biggest disadvantage lies in the update policy and its dependency on the other plugins and the shop theme used. This means: If WooCommerce makes an update, you should not click on the update straight away, but test your shop thoroughly in a closed test environment. This is because the large number of other plugins can cause enormous problems with the shop. The reason for this is that most plugin and theme developers are not so quick with their updates.

By the way: Raidboxes has its own staging system with which you can test all your updates in peace and without disturbing the live site. Wondering how this works? In our help article on staging, we explain exactly how to work with it.

Technical requirements

Once you have considered the pros and cons of WooCommerce, it is also important to find the optimal web hosting for your shop. This is because WooCommerce usually requires a lot of resources, such as a 128 MB WordPress memory limit. If you also use a plugin such as WooCommerce Subscriptions, you will quickly reach the limit with standard hosts. It’s best to read our article on WooCommerce hosting, in which we describe the four most important factors for your shop hosting in detail.

The current system requirements for WooCommerce:

• PHP version 7 or higher
• MySQL version 5.6 or higher or MariaDB version 10.0 or higher
• WordPress memory limit of at least 128 MB or greater
• SSL certificate

Conclusion: Is WooCommerce the right choice for your shop?

Of course, WooCommerce, just like all other shop systems, also has certain disadvantages. Nevertheless, we believe that the advantages – such as the cost factor or the growing WooCommerce ecosystem and community – outweigh the disadvantages at the end of the day.

For this reason, WooCommerce is the best choice for small to medium-sized shops in particular. With just a few clicks, you can transform your WordPress site into a cost-effective and professional online shop. See our e-book WooCommerce for professionals: Online shops with WordPress.

What do you think of WooCommerce? Have you already had experience with the WooCommerce plugin or other shop systems? I look forward to your comments, tips and feedback!