WooCommerce works as a plugin that gets installed and activated on an existing WordPress site, rather than functioning as a standalone platform. Once active, it adds new database tables for products and orders, a dedicated product post type, and store-specific admin screens to the WordPress dashboard, along with customer-facing elements like product pages, a cart, and checkout. Because it's self-hosted, the store owner is also responsible for hosting, SSL, and ongoing maintenance, rather than that infrastructure being managed automatically by a third party.
What Is WooCommerce and What does WooCommerce Do?
WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a fully functioning online store. In this section, let's walk through WooCommerce's core functions, then get specific about what you can actually sell on it. We'll also look at real WooCommerce costs, weighs the platform's pros and cons, outlines who it's best suited for, and other WooCommerce alternatives to look out for.
What does WooCommerce do for a merchant just starting out in eCommerce? In short, WooCommerce turns an ordinary WordPress website into a fully functioning online store, handling everything from product listings and shopping carts to checkout, payments, shipping, tax calculation, and order management. It does this as a plugin rather than a standalone platform, adding eCommerce functionality on top of WordPress rather than requiring a separate system altogether.
In this article, let's break down everything you need to know about what does WooCommerce do and who is this platform for, so you can have a guided walkthrough from day one.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that adds eCommerce capability to a WordPress website. Rather than functioning as a standalone hosted platform, WooCommerce plugs directly into an existing WordPress install, giving site owners a product catalog, shopping cart, and checkout system without needing separate software.
When learning about what does WooCommerce do, you might wonder, "Are WooCommerce and WordPress the same?" The answer is no, and we need to clarify upfront since the terms are often used interchangeably. WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used to build and publish nearly any type of website, from blogs to portfolios to business pages, but it has no native ability to sell products or process payments. WooCommerce is what gets added on top of that foundation specifically to enable selling. In practical terms, WordPress is the structure of the house, while WooCommerce is the storefront built inside it.
WooCommerce was first released by WooThemes in 2011 and acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, in 2015. Since then, WooCommerce has become one of the best eCommerce platforms, powering nearly 3.5 million online stores worldwide, as reported by BuiltWith. If you want to learn more about this platform, we have compiled an in-depth WooCommerce review, so don't forget to check out for more expert tips and insights.
What Does WooCommerce Do
So, what does WooCommerce do exactly? Think of WooCommerce as the operational backbone of your store, the part customers never see but interact with at every step, from clicking "add to cart" to receiving their order confirmation. Here's a breakdown of the core WooCommerce features to support your business growth:
- Product management: Add, organize, and categorize products with details like pricing, descriptions, images, and variations (size, color, etc.)
- Cart and checkout: Provide customers with a seamless path from browsing to purchase, including customizable checkout fields
- Payment gateway integration: Connect with providers like Stripe, PayPal, and Square to accept various payment methods
- Shipping configuration: Set shipping zones, rates, and methods based on location, weight, or order value
- Tax handling: Automatically calculate taxes based on customer location and store settings
- Inventory tracking: Monitor stock levels, set low-stock alerts, and manage backorders
- Order management: Track order status, process refunds, and communicate with customers throughout fulfillment
- SEO: Benefit from WordPress's SEO-friendly foundation, with support for popular plugins like Yoast or Rank Math to optimize product pages, URLs, and metadata
- Marketing: Run email campaigns, offer coupons and discounts, set up abandoned cart recovery, and integrate with tools like Mailchimp or Google Ads through extensions
- Security: Protect customer data and transactions with SSL support, secure payment processing, and regular plugin updates, though ongoing maintenance (backups, firewalls) falls on the store owner
Beyond these built-in functions, WooCommerce's real strength lies in its extensibility. Thousands of plugins and extensions let you add features like subscriptions, bookings, or advanced marketing tools as your store grows. This flexibility is also what shapes the range of products you can sell on the platform, which we'll cover next.
What Can You Sell on WooCommerce
Now that we've covered what does WooCommerce do on the operational side, let's look at what it enables you to sell. WooCommerce's flexibility means it isn't limited to physical goods; the platform can support almost any business model you have in mind, provided you have the right extensions in place. Here's a look at what you can sell:
- Physical products: Sell tangible goods like clothing, electronics, or handmade items, with full support for variations, shipping, and inventory tracking
- Digital products: Offer downloadable items such as eBooks, software, music, or design templates, with no shipping required
- Services and bookings: Sell appointments, consultations, or rentals using booking extensions that manage scheduling and availability
- Subscriptions and memberships: Set up recurring billing for products, services, or gated content access, ideal for box subscriptions or online courses
- Affiliate and external products: List items that link out to another website for purchase, useful for earning affiliate commissions without handling fulfillment
While the core WooCommerce plugin handles physical and digital products well out of the box, categories like bookings, subscriptions, and affiliate products typically require dedicated extensions. This is worth keeping in mind as it ties directly into the cost and complexity of running your store, which we'll explore when weighing WooCommerce pros and cons.
WooCommerce Pros and Cons
Understanding what does WooCommerce do well and where it falls short helps set realistic expectations before you commit to the platform. Here's a side-by-side look at its strengths and weaknesses:
WooCommerce pros | WooCommerce cons |
- Free core plugin with no licensing fees - Full customization via WordPress and open-source code - Complete ownership of your data and store - Large ecosystem of plugins and extensions - Strong SEO capabilities through WordPress | - Requires separate hosting and domain setup - Steeper learning curve for non-technical users - Costs can add up with premium themes and extensions - Security and updates are the store owner's responsibility - Performance depends on hosting quality and site optimization |
Ultimately, whether these pros outweigh the cons depends on your comfort with hands-on management versus wanting an all-in-one, hosted solution. If you value control and customization and don't mind a bit of technical upkeep, WooCommerce's advantages tend to win out. If you'd rather avoid maintenance entirely, the cons might weigh more heavily, something we'll unpack further when we look at actual costs next.
How Much Does WooCommerce Cost
The WooCommerce plugin itself costs nothing. It's free to download from the WordPress plugin directory and free to run indefinitely, with no licensing fee, no revenue share, and no mandatory subscription tied to the software itself. That said, "free" only applies to the plugin, not to running a live store. A production-ready WooCommerce site depends on a handful of paid essentials layered on top, and we'll break down the detailed WooCommerce pricing below.
Cost category | Typical range | Notes |
Hosting | $5-$40/month (budget to mid-tier) $50-$700+/month (managed/enterprise) | - Shared hosting sits at the low end - Managed WooCommerce or WordPress hosting from providers like Kinsta or WP Engine might cost much higher, depending on traffic volume |
Domain name | $10-$20/year | Standard .com/.net/.org pricing; some hosts bundle the first year free |
SSL certificate | Usually included | Most hosts now bundle a free Let's Encrypt certificate; premium/EV certificates run $20-280+/year if needed separately |
Premium themes | $49-$149/year | - The default Storefront theme is free; - Premium themes add design flexibility and support but with a small fee |
Extensions | $100-$900/year | Costs scale with functionality needed beyond the core plugin |
Payment processing | Depends on your payment gateway | This isn't a WooCommerce fee, but it's unavoidable. Gateways like WooPayments and Stripe typically charge around 2.9% plus $0.30 per domestic transaction |
Adding these categories together, a realistic first-year budget for a serious DIY store lands between roughly $500 and $1,000, while a fully custom, agency-built store can start at $2,000 and climb well beyond that depending on complexity. The advantage, and the trade-off, is that every line item in the table above is modular: a merchant can start close to $100-200 a year and scale spending up only as the store grows, rather than being locked into a fixed monthly plan regardless of size.
Who Is WooCommerce Best For
Understanding what does WooCommerce do in practice is the best starting point for figuring out whether it fits your business. Based on our long-term experience working with thousands of merchants, we would recommend WooCommerce for:
- Merchants who are already comfortable with WordPress or are currently managing a WordPress site
- Store owners who want full control over customization
- Businesses combining content and commerce
- Merchants who want to avoid revenue-based fees
- Businesses with in-house technical capacity or a developer relationship
On the other hand, WooCommerce might not be a good fit for:
- Merchants who want a single vendor to handle hosting, security, and updates automatically
- Non-technical founders without any developer support
- Businesses needing to launch quickly with minimal setup decisions
Best WooCommerce Alternatives to Consider
If you've read through what does WooCommerce do and decided that it's not the right fit, you might consider other WooCommerce alternatives listed below. Each takes a different approach to the same core job, running an online store, and each trades away some of WooCommerce's flexibility in exchange for more built-in convenience.
Platform | Platform advantages | Platform disadvantages | Best for |
- All-in-one hosted plan bundles hosting, security, and updates; - Predictable fixed monthly pricing starting around $29-$399+ - No need to assemble separate services | - Less flexibility for deep customization - Ongoing app and theme costs and transaction fees on lower tiers can add up over time | Merchants who want a simple, managed setup with minimal technical involvement | |
Strong built-in multi-channel selling and enterprise-grade features without needing as many third-party extensions | - Smaller theme and app ecosystem than WooCommerce; - Can get costly at higher revenue tiers due to plan-based sales thresholds | Growing or mid-size businesses wanting native multi-channel tools out of the box | |
Built for very large, complex catalogs with advanced B2B and multi-store functionality at the enterprise level | Significantly higher development and hosting costs - Steep technical learning curve, often requiring dedicated developers | Large enterprises with complex, high-volume catalog and B2B needs | |
Extremely beginner-friendly drag-and-drop builder with hosting, security, and design bundled into one simple plan | Limited scalability and customization for larger or more complex product catalogs | Very small stores or beginners prioritizing ease of setup over long-term flexibility | |
- Built-in checkout, subscriptions, and marketing tools without separate plugins - Faster setup and lighter performance footprint since checkout runs on SureCart's cloud infrastructure | - Smaller extension ecosystem and fewer payment gateway options than WooCommerce - Physical product and inventory features are newer and less mature for large catalogs | Digital products, subscriptions and courses where fast setup matters more than deep customization | |
Free, open-source core with strong native multi-language and multi-currency support geared toward European merchants | - Smaller extension marketplace - Smaller community support base - Hosting and maintenance responsibilities are just as hands-on | Merchants, particularly in Europe, wanting an open-source alternative with strong localization out of the box |
Can I Migrate to WooCommerce?
Yes. If you're currently running a store on another platform and have decided WooCommerce fits your eCommerce journey better, whether for its flexibility, its cost model, or its WordPress foundation, migrating your existing data is entirely possible without starting from scratch. Products, customers, orders, coupons, blog content, images, and categories can typically all be moved over, provided the data is exportable from your current platform.
That said, the technical part of this move is where most merchants run into trouble. Manual data transfer is time-consuming, error-prone, and can break SEO efforts if URLs and redirects aren't handled carefully. If you don't want to risk this, LitExtension is the trusted migration expert to handle that transition properly.
For straightforward moves, the Automated Migration Tool handles the transfer with minimal manual work, starting from $59. For stores with complex product data, custom fields, plugin-dependent content, or specific SEO requirements, the All-in-One Migration Service pairs you with a dedicated migration expert who manages the process end to end, starting from $169.
Every migration also comes with a Free Demo Migration, so you can preview exactly how your data will look on WooCommerce before committing to the full transfer. That combination of hands-on expertise, transparent pricing, and pre-migration testing is what makes LitExtension a safer starting point than attempting the move manually.
Let Our Experts Handle Your Store Migration!
With the All-in-One Migration Service, our experts take care of everything, ensuring a seamless and stress-free migration.
What Does WooCommerce Do - FAQs
How does WooCommerce work?
What is the main use of WooCommerce?
The main use of WooCommerce is turning a WordPress website into a functioning online store. It handles the core mechanics of selling online: displaying products, managing a shopping cart and checkout, processing payments, calculating shipping and tax, tracking inventory, and managing orders from placement through fulfillment. Beyond that, its plugin architecture also lets store owners extend into subscriptions, bookings, memberships, and other business models without changing the underlying platform.
Is WooCommerce as good as Shopify?
It depends on what a merchant values more, control or convenience. WooCommerce offers deeper customization, no revenue-based fees, and full ownership of data and code, since it's self-hosted and open source. Shopify offers a fully managed, all-in-one experience with hosting, security, and updates bundled into a fixed monthly plan, which trades away some flexibility for simplicity. In short, WooCommerce tends to suit merchants comfortable managing more of the technical stack themselves, while Shopify tends to suit merchants who'd rather not.
What are the pros and cons of WooCommerce?
On the good side, WooCommerce is free at its core, highly customizable through thousands of extensions, backed by a large and active community, and gives store owners full ownership of their data since it's self-hosted. On the other hand, that same self-hosted model means the store owner is responsible for hosting, security, and maintenance, the setup process takes more technical effort than an all-in-one platform, and costs can add up once extensions, premium themes, and managed hosting are factored in.
