WooCommerce Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
When it comes to choosing the right eCommerce platform for WordPress, it's the most rock-solid, safest choice for any long term use based on my experience from over a dozen store launches. - The plugin is frequently updated, compatible and tightly integrated with WordPress (as WooCommerce was purchased by WordPress' parent company in 2015) - The core WooCommerce plugin is freely available to install, which would work for many small, generic storefronts. - Offers the largest selection of third-party plugins/extensions available for WordPress ecommerce. - Wide out-of-the-box support with popular third-party WordPress themes. - Relatively easy and fast to set up, with good documentation; offers a few free starter themes via the WooCommerce store. - If you're willing to pay, WooCommerce can do just about anything and integrates with almost anything. - The WooCommerce core plugin is built mostly barebones (using extensions to add functionality), which brings better speed and less bugs. - Good customer service support and detailed documentation for their paid WooCommerce add-on extensions. - Offers very powerful Zapier support (requires a paid add-on). I've never had any point where I've considered using another online store platform with WordPress, or even one of the many non-WordPress hosted ecommerce website subscription solutions.

Cons
- WooCommerce extensions are surprisingly expensive and also subscription-based, requiring an annual fee. Inexpensive third-party alternatives exist, but there is risk involved. - Building an extended "platform" such as a membership site / offering subscriptions (for example) can require multiple paid WooCommerce add-ons that rack up hundreds of dollars in annual fees. - WooCommerce mobile app tools do exist, but do not offer much functionality beyond sales reports. - Highly customized WordPress stores using a lot of plugins are at an increased risk to see major conflicts and performance degradation, and troubleshooting can be difficult.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I love that Woocommerce is on Wordpress, and that it supports third-party plugins. They offer a slew of plug-ins themselves. This enables you to build in the features you want, and not have very much added bulk and useless features taking up space on your server. It's almost ridiculously simple 90% of the time, with little need for assistance. On the rare occasion that you might need it, they have a lot of documentation for the program itself as well as their plug-ins. Their customer service is helpful the majority of the time. For a while they would take 1-2 days to reply to an email, and only had email support as an option, but in the past 6-12 months they added live chat and made the experience 100% better. They've even stepped up their game in being more proactive about their support than they used to be also. If you want to have complete control over the look, feel, and data of your site, I highly recommend that you go with Woocommerce.

Cons
Their plug-ins are a bit pricey. To be fair, they only have an annual fee, but they are a bit steep depending on the feature that you want. It would be a lot better if they charged a single annual fee or monthly fee, and allowed unfettered access to all of their plug-ins. That way, you wouldn't have a different annual billing date for each of those little extra features you thought of adding later on, nor would the cost be so astronomical. There are often third-party alternative plug-ins, but the issue is that Woocommerce's plug-ins usually work best (as they should since it's their platform). Additionally, implementation of requests for new features on any plug-in or Woocommerce itself seems to be rather slow, and they don't take suggestions via customer service, but rather via forum and user voting.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
WooCommerce forms the backbone of our e-commerce website and we've been using it for around five years at this point. It handles a high quantity of orders with ease and its customization options are so far-reaching that if you can dream of a plugin for the system, it probably already exists or is under development somewhere (this may have something to do with its integration into Wordpress). Recently, we've been utilizing the Subscriptions feature to more accurately manage our customers' accounts, and this feature is particularly useful for recurring transactions. Coupons are easy to create and keep track of and WooCommerce can also be linked to external systems for more accurate monetary calculations and other relevant business features.

Cons
Reporting within the system does leave something to be desired. We've found that the reporting dashboard is fairly limited, particularly for more advanced metrics that can be found in systems like Quickbooks. However, as noted above, the system can be linked to other systems using plugins and various connectors, so it's possible to extract that detailed sales data if need be. On occasion the sheer amount of customization options can be overwhelming, as well, though this is a better problem to have than a system with too few options. The various plugins just need to be managed in a coherent fashion to ensure site stability.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
What can I say about WooCommerce? It is the best DIY solution for anyone wanting to create a store online of their own - and on their own. And if you don't want to DIY, there are plenty of people offering to do it for you at very low cost. What is great about WooCommerce is it integrates seamlessly with WordPress and the basic functionality in order to makes sales is totally FREE. Of course, if you want to enhance your store and have a really professional-looking one, there are so many plugins/themes both free and paid, that can help you achieve that. And not only that, WooCommerce is always updated so that it stays secure and cutting edge. Everything you need to build a store online is already available in WooCommerce.

Cons
Integration with Paypal is not really good. When you need to create a specific checkout page with the specific logo of your store showing on that page, you need to setup an entirely new Paypal account just for it. Paypal used to support multiple Custom Checkout logos under one single Paypal account, but this changed late in 2016. Besides this issue, WooCommerce support takes a while to reply, if you email them with an issue, although paid help is readily available from numerous online WordPress/WooCommerce experts, so you are never really stranded.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Woocommerce is free and easy to use, so as a business owner I was able to take the time to learn how to use it and create my own website with Wordpress and Woocommerce. I have no web design background, but was able to learn thru google and helpful articles and videos. As a platform, Wordpress is built to be easy to use and have made it simple for developers to create and sell useful plugins. Woocommerce is a great add-on to Wordpress and has allowed me and others to create beautiful and effective shopping carts. If we had to pay someone to custom create and maintain a site for us it would have been tens of thousands of dollars.

Cons
Because Wordpress is a free base and countless developers can create their own plugins, there can be a lot of conflicts between plugins. Especially when there are essential or major updates to Wordpress or Woocommerce. This can have a huge impact on a website, and you need to be prepared to test major updates before they go live. One update once changed the entire structure of variable products and created hours and hours of work on the backend for us. You would not see this with a contained shopping cart (like 3DCart), but that's because you pay more for the other services. For the price, Woocommerce is unmatched.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10