WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce store system in the WordPress universe. The plugin is free and transforms your WordPress blog into a fully-fledged online store - all with just one click. WooCommerce is characterized above all by its simplicity and versatility. In this article, you can find out what advantages and disadvantages WooCommerce has for your online store.

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

WooCommerce is technically only the basis for a successful store. 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 store 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 store. The features of Storefront are all exclusively geared towards e-commerce.

The features of Storefront are:

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

Storefront now has a lot of premium and free child themes. So everyone can customize 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 store?

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

An enormous number of store 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)
• even external products (e.g. like affiliate from amazon).

These are the advantages of WooCommerce

Unlike many store 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 customized 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 store as your business grows. 

Overall, this model makes online stores with WooCommerce significantly cheaper than with other store systems - even if you sometimes use WooCommerce premium plugins and pay extra for them. We have broken down the WooCommerce costs for a typical store 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 store systems
• Flexibly customizable 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
• Variety of themes and layouts for individual 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 optimized 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 Germanized or the premium plugin German Market.

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

2. legal texts not included

WooCommerce does not include any legal texts such as terms and conditions, privacy policy, revocation regulations, shipping regulations, 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 points of contact:

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

You can find more good sources & resources on:


• 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 focus of WooCommerce development is 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 store theme used. This means that if WooCommerce makes an update, you should not click on the update straight away, but test your store thoroughly in a closed test environment. This is because the large number of other plugins can cause enormous problems with the store. 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

After you have considered the pros and cons of WooCommerce, it is also important to find the optimal web hosting for your store. 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. Read our article on WooCommerce hosting, in which we describe the four most important factors for your store 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 store?

Of course, WooCommerce, just like all other store 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 stores in particular. With just a few clicks, you can turn your WordPress site into a cost-effective and professional online store. See our e-book WooCommerce for professionals: Online stores with WordPress.

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