More and more self-employed people, freelancers and agencies are turning to WooCommerce when planning an online store. But what can the free WordPress store system do? When should you use it and what are the WooCommerce costs for a typical store? We have the answers for you.

WooCommerce has become the most successful software for online stores in just a few years. According to industry service BuiltWith, almost 30 percent of all stores worldwide currently use WooCommerce. This is followed by well-known names such as Shopify, Magento and PrestaShop. Find out more in our comparison of WooCommerce vs Shopify.

If you rely on WordPress in your company, startup, agency or as a freelancer, then WooCommerce is a must. See our customer story about the michel und elbe online store as an example. There are several reasons for the success of WooCommerce:

The advantages of WooCommerce

Free store system

WooCommerce is open source, just like WordPress. This not only saves on expensive license fees, it also makes it easier for small to medium-sized stores to get started. At the same time, it allows agencies and freelancers to focus on the development of additional components and services.

The open source concept is also ideal for trying out an e-commerce business model for the first time. For example, as an additional source of revenue for an existing portal, or if you want to make your local store more crisis-proof. All of this significantly reduces your entrepreneurial risk as an operator or service provider when you work with WooCommerce.

Easy access and simple operation

WordPress has revolutionized the simple creation of websites. WooCommerce is just as easy to use for the most part. This also saves costs - both when initially setting up an online store and when maintaining and training employees. More on the exact WooCommerce costs later. Do you already have knowledge of WordPress? Then you'll quickly find your way around WooCommerce.

The development team is continuing this trend with the WooCommerce Product Blocks for the WordPress Editor Gutenberg. The extension allows you to integrate your products into pages and posts using drag & drop. For example, to prominently display product categories, special promotions, bestsellers or new products:

The associated components of the product blocks will be continuously expanded and supplemented with new modules. In the future, the design of product descriptions should also become much more convenient - WooCommerce still relies on the tried-and-tested standard editor here.

Scalability: How many products can WooCommerce handle?

For a long time, WooCommerce was considered a solution that was only suitable for small to medium-sized projects. But those days are long gone. Since version 3.x, WooCommerce has become increasingly performant, with optimized product tables and integrated caching functions, among other things. WordPress stores with several thousand or even tens of thousands of products are no longer a rarity, as we will see in a moment.

What's more, WooCommerce scales particularly well compared to other systems. This means that it grows with the size and requirements of your online store. To begin with, you start with the standard version, which can be set up relatively quickly. Later, you can activate or remove additional extensions (WordPress or WooCommerce plugins) depending on your requirements.

With the right maintenance, your store system will remain as lean, high-performance and manageable as possible. At least if you book high-performance WordPress hosting or special WooCommerce hosting, which can be expanded in terms of RAM, cores and storage space if necessary - if there are a lot of hits and sales.

WooCommerce becomes a professional tool

Since the latest updates, WooCommerce has been impressing with new features that are primarily aimed at professional store operators and agencies. These range from integrated payment solutions to better management of shipping costs. All in all, WooCommerce already covers the most important use cases as standard - here, too, a well-founded configuration and ongoing maintenance by an experienced service provider is mandatory if you cannot or do not want to technically maintain the store yourself.

There are now numerous extensions for special solutions such as product catalogs, B2B stores or auctions, but most of these are subject to a fee. The license costs for these usually remain in the double-digit range annually (per plugin), which keeps the running costs manageable.

A good practical example is Quagga's German-language online store for image licenses. It has been growing together with WooCommerce for many years and now contains over 40,000 products:

What doesn't look very spectacular at first requires sophisticated technical planning in the background. Not only has the database reached an enormous size due to the countless graphics, the optimization of image sizes for thumbnails, the price calculation for the different licenses and the import of extensive product data were also a challenge. However, the portal is now running smoothly and the store will soon be multilingual.

Once again, the basic requirements for professional stores are suitable WooCommerce web hosting. Coordinated plugins, regular speed and load tests (for example when using extensions for AJAX search) and a properly configured system are also essential. This is because the individual components and plugins can quickly play off against each other if WooCommerce grows out of control.

This kind of uncontrolled growth occurs, for example, when the calculation of individual shipping costs is based on countless rules and different functions. This makes a separate test environment all the more important so as not to jeopardize the live store with plugin updates and the like. The technical development should definitely be carried out by a person or agency that is really familiar with WordPress and WooCommerce.

Future-proof

In 2015, WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com. Since then, even more resources have been available for further expansion. This is particularly evident in the release cycles: at least twice a year, the team behind WooCommerce releases a major update containing important new core functions. Smaller adjustments are made on a monthly basis, central bug fixes more frequently.

Areas in which WooCommerce performed worse than its competitors were gradually optimized. This applies, for example, to the practical setup of shipping zones, the efficient management of products and innovations to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). With the last point in particular, it was easy to see that Automattic is now reacting quickly to developments that affect the European market. The widespread use of WooCommerce and WordPress as well as the huge developer community in the background offer a good chance that this will remain the case.

The market for agencies and freelancers is correspondingly exciting. Portal and store owners repeatedly report that it is anything but easy to find good service providers and external employees. Developers for WordPress and WooCommerce are in demand, so the corresponding expertise can be marketed well and at realistic hourly rates.

Own community

Countless users and freelance developers worldwide provide their own solutions for WordPress. Or they provide help and advice in blogs and forums. There is also an extremely lively community in European and German-speaking countries. It organizes itself in events such as WordCamps or local WP Meetups. The latter can now be found in almost every major city, as online or face-to-face events.

WooCommerce is not quite that far yet. Here, communication mainly takes place among the store owners themselves, for example in specialist groups for WooCommerce on Facebook and LinkedIn. However, eCommerce topics are becoming increasingly important at WordCamps & Co. The first pure user and developer meetings and meetups on WooCommerce are also gradually emerging in Europe. Raidboxes regularly sponsors WordCamps and meetups in German-speaking and European countries. Feel free to contact us at the next camp if you have any questions about WooCommerce and WordPress.

However, the WooCommerce community of developers is based almost entirely on that of WordPress. Anyone who can develop plugins and themes for WordPress can, in principle, also do so for the associated store system. What's more, there are now numerous free tutorials on WooCommerce and its extensions in every country - in the form of blog posts, e-books, podcasts and on YouTube. All of this makes it easier for beginners to get started.

The market for online stores is growing

Turnover from e-commerce continues to rise rapidly. Stores such as Amazon, Otto and Zalando account for the majority of this. However, smaller and medium-sized online stores are on the rise, as we can see from our own figures for new customer projects. Not least COVID-19 has further strengthened this trend.

You can see this very clearly in the smaller WooCommerce stores: Most of them start with a manageable number of products. However, many of them significantly expand their portfolio within a few months. The market for paid WooCommerce plugins is also growing - the scene is becoming increasingly professionalized. Accordingly, more and more agencies and freelancers are adding technical services and consulting services geared towards the leading online store system to their offerings.

Basics of WooCommerce

The facility

WooCommerce is particularly popular because you can install and set it up very quickly and with little prior knowledge. A setup wizard guides you through the most important basic settings for the basic configuration, shipping and payment methods for every new store:

A simple online store, which you can also try out immediately, can be set up in just a few minutes.

However, the devil is in the detail. WooCommerce now covers all store functionalities, and you only need additional plugins for a few areas. However, this also means that hidden behind inconspicuous sub-menu items in the WooCommerce backend are functions that can mess up the functionality of your store.

• Vouchers suddenly no longer work?
• The taxes for your products or shipping costs are calculated incorrectly?
• Are individual customers no longer shown certain payment methods?

The cause may lie in a single checkbox that is set incorrectly. It is therefore all the more important that you are familiar with the WooCommerce settings.

In order to get started with your first WooCommerce store, WordPress must be installed on your web server or on your local test system. It serves as the basis and as the superordinate content management system (CMS). You can find out more about the technical requirements in this blog post.

As already mentioned, both WooCommerce and WordPress are open source. You can use them free of charge, even to run a commercial site. Are you new to the world of WordPress? Then I recommend a good textbook for beginners. These are now available in almost all languages.

The most time-consuming part of creating an online store is entering your products. This is not due to WooCommerce or WordPress, but rather the creation of product texts, image editing, the creation of product features and product variants, the assignment of prices, meta information for search engine optimization, etc. WooCommerce provides you with your own fields for all of this information, which can also be expanded using plugins:

You already know the basic process for this from WordPress, even if Gutenberg has significantly simplified the WYSIWYG process ("What you see is what you get") for posts and pages - WooCommerce is still lagging behind here. The publication and subsequent editing of products is also similar to the maintenance of blog posts and CMS pages.

Transfer of existing data

WooCommerce comes with a set of demo data that you can install. This is particularly useful if you want to try out WooCommerce and the design of the WooCommerce theme first, or if you do not yet have any specific product data available when setting up. This is because many functions can only be tested with existing goods. The screenshots in this article were partly created with the help of WooCommerce demo data.

If your product and customer data is already available - from another store system or as a CSV file from other databases - then you can also import this into WooCommerce. WordPress comes with its own importer solutions as standard. However, you usually have to use more extensive tools for the usually quite complex store data.

In practice, WP All Import or the Product CSV Import Suite from WooCommerce itself have proven themselves here. The former is preferred by many online stores and developers due to its numerous functions:

You can find some other free tools for importing and exporting product data here.

There are special tools for individual store systems that make it easier for you to migrate to WooCommerce. For example, the FG Magento to WooCommerce plugin by Frédéric Gilles for switching from Magento. In the full version, it automatically transfers the most important data such as products including product texts, product categories, customer and metadata, vouchers, product reviews, post and category images as well as preview images.

WordPress content, such as posts and pages, can also be transferred. Particularly practical: If test data already exists in WooCommerce, you can delete it in advance at the touch of a button. All of this helps you to reduce the costs of migrating from an existing online store.

Ongoing maintenance

Despite the comparatively quick setup, you should not underestimate the effort required to maintain your online store. However, this applies equally to all store systems, not just WooCommerce. Among other things, you need to plan and calculate the following work packages well, whether as a store operator yourself or on behalf of your customers:

• The continuous updating of WordPress, WooCommerce, the plugins and your WooCommerce theme. The latter ensures the design and correct display of the online store.
• The update itself is carried out at the touch of a button or partly automatically in the background. It is much more time-consuming to test each new update on a separate system before installing it: Will there be any unwanted interactions with other plugins or the theme? Do the shopping cart and checkout in the store work as usual? Does the new version lead to a loss of speed?
• Which new functions may need to be added or replaced, for example due to legal requirements such as the GDPR? There are usually different responsibilities for content and technical implementation. However, one person must keep an eye on all legal changes and react if necessary.
• The regular and comprehensive backup of all data in the online store, if necessary restoring old versions after failures or unsuccessful updates. Raidboxes helps you here with an integrated solution.
• Checking and updating product data, texts, images, stock levels, delivery times, product links for bundles and cross-selling, etc.
• Ongoing review: What new legal framework conditions are there that require not only the technical basis, but in some cases also all content, designations, prices, taxes and other information to be adapted?

On the latter point: in Germany in particular, the legal conditions in eCommerce change very frequently. The resulting work must also be implemented promptly in order to minimize the risk of a warning.

As you can see, running an online store is by no means trivial. It requires technical knowledge as well as know-how in the areas of online law, logistics, online marketing, usability (user-friendliness), web design, search engine optimization (SEO), success measurement via Google Analytics & Co., distribution in social networks and content marketing. The latter refers to the promotion of your products with high-quality texts, blog posts and newsletters, thereby drawing the attention of Google as well as potential visitors to your store.

Very comprehensive stores - or if you operate or implement several such portals - should also be implemented with a suitable project management tool. This is also where the cost calculation for development, product care and maintenance takes place. Online collaboration tools such as Slack, Asana, Trello or Microsoft Project help you to coordinate workflows between individual employees and teams. And, if necessary, across different languages, time zones, media and distances. These apps allow you to create a more coordinated workflow for your online store by providing a unified platform for collaboration and communication.

You will not become an expert in all of these areas. Ideally, you should concentrate on a few areas, such as technical operations and web design. You can then leave the setting of products, online law and online marketing or SEO to suitable employees. Or you can have these tasks handled by a specialized agency.

WooCommerce costs for your online store

Without knowing a project in detail, it is only possible to roughly estimate the costs of setting up and running a WooCommerce store. These depend on numerous factors for each store system. To name just a few:

• Do you already have a technical infrastructure such as a domain, WordPress hosting, but also third-party systems for accounting, shipping processing or managing your customers? Does this still need to be expanded?
• How many and what types of products will be included in the short, medium and long term? Is your website already prepared for this?
• How many visitors per month and page views per minute do you expect? This is particularly important for hosting. Can there be peaks that go well beyond this, for example seasonally, during sales promotions or press coverage? In this article, we explain step by step how you can prepare your store for such peaks.
• What technical and other knowledge do you have as a store owner? How much time can you invest yourself, and what do you need to outsource?
• Can your product range be sold using standard sales processes, or do you need special solutions for personalized goods, auctions, subscription models, etc.? Are there ready-made plugins for these that completely cover your workflow, or is individual development necessary?
• Can you fall back on ready-made themes for WooCommerce, or do you want a completely independent and distinctive store design?

There are also issues relating to the organization and marketing of your online store:

• Who maintains the products? Do product texts and images already exist, or do they need to be adapted or newly created? Do you have the necessary rights to display them?
• Can the data be transferred from other systems, perhaps even automated? Or should they even be integrated into other marketplaces and portals, with WooCommerce and WordPress as the basis?
• Do you operate in a specific niche, with few competitors, or do you sell very generic goods with a low margin? The latter usually requires a significantly higher budget for marketing.
• The relevant question is: Who takes care of online marketing and search engine optimization? Which social channels should be used? How much support is required there to answer customer questions?
• Who is responsible for online law and data protection? Depending on the industry and the target countries, considerable resources are required for this, otherwise there is a risk of warnings and fines.

Agencies and freelancers have to ask their clients exactly the same questions in order to calculate the scope of a project. The requirements analysis for an online store is therefore often much more extensive than for classic WordPress projects.

New portals to be created in the WordPress and WooCommerce environment are still usually priced far too tightly - and therefore too cheaply. There are three main reasons for this:

• Quite a few freelancers in the open source environment - but even some agencies - charge hourly rates that are significantly below the usual rates in the IT environment. After deducting expenses and taxes, these are not always economical or cost-covering.
• Store and portal owners usually do not take their own working time into account. However, this is absolutely necessary for a realistic assessment.
• A professional online store usually requires paid pro plugins, at least temporary individual development, legal support and high-performance hosting. All of this costs money, but is often overlooked at the beginning.

Although WooCommerce itself also offers free extensions for important functions, others come at a price. The more specific the requirements for your online store are - for example for booking events or with an extensive member area - the higher these costs will be:

Open source does not mean "free" when you start a commercial project. As soon as you factor in your own working time (to be fair), a sum in the low five-digit range quickly becomes due before the first version of your web store can go live. For large projects, it can be significantly more. That sounds like a lot of money, but compared to typical business start-ups, it's a relatively small investment.

In addition to the initial project planning, you should also keep an eye on the ongoing operating costs of your online store. The costs for care and maintenance mainly depend on the type of products you sell, how often they need to be updated and who is responsible for the system and maintenance:

• Is your web store merely an additional sales channel to an existing retail store?
• Your product range is manageable and the products have a long life cycle?
• Can you automatically transfer product information from other systems?

Then the effort is manageable. In all other cases, you will usually need external help or additional employees, at least temporarily.

You can find more tips on WooCommerce in our 70+ page e-book WooCommerce for professionals: online stores with WordPress. It is aimed at freelancers, agencies, WP professionals and beginners. Do you have questions about how to implement a high-performance online store with the right WooCommerce hosting? Or which package you need to get started? Then let our team advise you at any time.

Featured image: Bench/Unsplash