The Bottom Line
WooCommerce is a plugin that enables you to transform a WordPress website into an online store. Its basic version is available for free, but it is highly customizable with its large array of extensions. For example, with WooCommerce extensions, you can accept online bookings, sell subscriptions and accept recurring payments. You can choose from a large selection of shipping companies from FedEx to Royal Mail, create a coupon referral program, accept pre-orders, sell online courses and more. Extensions vary in price, but range from $0 to around $249 each.
Keep in mind that because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, you will need to invest some time to learn WordPress as it’s not the most user-friendly content management system (CMS). However, it is one of the most customizable and therefore versatile CMS on the market. It will also require you to purchase a domain name, an SSL certificate and web hosting separately and many businesses opt for a premium theme in order to build a great online store with fewer design customizations.
Who should use it
WooCommerce is the best e-commerce solution for those who are looking to build and manage a highly customizable and versatile online store.
WooCommerce Pros & Cons 2022
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is the leading, free eCommerce store system in WordPress. With just one click, this plugin turns your WordPress blog into a fully equipped online store.WooCommerce stands out through its simplicity and versatility.
Like WordPress itself, WooCommerce offers a complete economy of custom plugins and themes and is convincing with its simple modular structure.The rapid development of WooCommerce started in 2011 when WooThemes developed WooCommerce in addition to its famous themes and plugins as a WooCommerce emerged from the then very famous plugin Jigoshop and became the most successful store system in WordPress in the same year.
In 2015, as a logical consequence, WooCommerce was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and gradually integrated into the WordPress economy.
WooCommerce – the basis for your online shop
WooCommerce is technically just the foundation of a successful store. At WooCommerce.com you will find a variety of premium and free plugins such as those from payment service provider Stripe, Amazon Pay and Klarna, with which you can extend your store to suit your needs.
Storefront’s features are all dedicated to e-commerce.
Storefront is characterized by.
- Optimized for WooCommerce
- Fully responsive design
- Basic settings options through the theme customizer
- Many child themes and plugins to extend the theme
Storefront now has many premium and free child themes. Therefore, everyone can customize the theme to their liking.
Is WooCommerce suitable for your shop?
WooCommerce is ideal for small and medium-sized companies who manage their stores and Internet presence independently and on a limited budget.
WooCommerce allows to set up a large number of store types, for example.
- Physical products (e.g. jam or home-knitted scarves)
- Digital products (e.g., own books or patterns)
- Tickets (e.g. concerts, seminars or conferences)
- Protected membership areas (such as online training)
- Even external products (such as Amazon affiliates)
WooCommerce: Advantages & Disadvantages
Advantages of WooCommerce
Compared to other shop systems available on the market, WooCommerce has the following advantages:
- A high scalability and low shop costs compared to other shop systems
- Quick set-up via the WooCommerce wizard, knowledge of HTML and CSS usually not necessary
- With WordPress the use of a full-fledged content management system (CMS)
- An almost endless variety of free and paid plugins & themes:
– You can find free WooCommerce plugins in the official WordPress plugin directory.
– Paid WooCommerce extensions can be found at WooCommerce.com or Codecanyon.
– Here is a list of the most important plugins for WooCommerce.
– Free WooCommerce themes can be found in the WordPress theme directory.
– Paid WooCommerce themes are available, for example, at Themeforest. - A completely own “WooCommerce-economy“, which has developed next to WordPress . Thus the further development of WooCommerce is as good as guaranteed.
- There is a huge international WooCommerce community that you can interact with:
– in the WordPress support forum
– in the Facebook group “WooCommerce Help & Share “
– in the Facebook group ” Advanced WooCommerce” - As a rule, it is still more cost-effective to use WooCommerce Premium-Plugins than other shop systems.
- For WooCommerce there are numerous connections to accounting systems, POS systems and warehouse management systems
Disadvantages of Using WooCommerce
As much as WooCommerce looks perfect, it still has a few shortcomings that some users might find hard to overlook.
1. It’s WordPress Specific
WooCommerce is still a plugin; hence you cannot use it in sites that WordPress doesn’t host. Such terms make it hard for already established businesses that would like to use WooCommerce because it means they’ll need to remake their website.
2. It has Many Expenses
While it’s free to download and install WooCommerce itself, some extensions might require payment so your site can operate at optimum capacity. This is its biggest con because it makes it feel like there are hidden costs for business owners.
For example, if you want a secure payment gateway other than Paypal, you’ll have to foot the bill. Most of the extensions will require subscriptions meaning that you’ll deal with the stress every year. They can take you back anywhere from $39-249$, depending on how advanced you want your store to be.
WooCommerce Statistics
How Many WooCommerce Users Are There?
As of 2020, there are over 3.8 million active WooCommerce stores.
How many websites use WooCommerce in 2022?
The answer is at least 5+ million stores, as this is the number of active installs of the free WooCommerce plugin.
However, this isn’t entirely accurate. This is the highest number of “active installs” listed in the WordPress plugin repository, as the exact number was removed in April 2017.
After the update to the WooCommmerce plugin was released, there were about 400,000 downloads of the plugin through automatic updates. This gives us a clue as to the number of actively managed stores. The total number could be higher.
We can get more clues about the exact WooCommerce stats. The exact number of WooCommerce downloads is published on the WooCommerce.com homepage. I’m not sure how often this statistic is updated, and it may include plugin updates as well as new installs. The current number is 207,406,616. Check back regularly to get the latest numbers on WooCommerce downloads in 2022.
BuiltWith reports that in July 2022, there were 6,322,323 websites using WooCommerce, or 46,398 of the top 1 million websites worldwide. That’s 0.3% of all websites, or 4.64% of the top million websites. That’s a fairly large percentage, but not huge.
What percentage of online stores use WooCommerce in 2022?
Looking at Built With’s data, we see that WooCommerce’s current market share in 2022 is 25% of the top 1 million websites using eCommerce technology.
As a comparison, WooCommerce’s market share is 26% in 2020.
As you can see, WooCommerce is ahead of Magento and Shopify as the most popular choice among the top million eCommerce sites. This is especially good because the top sites in the world are more likely to have larger budgets and custom or enterprise solutions, while WordPress and WooCommerce are most popular among smaller sites. At the same time, I know that many large companies are now using WordPress and WooCommerce.
I find it very interesting to compare WooCommerce usage statistics with other eCommerce platforms. It makes the numbers more realistic and helps us understand the true market share of WooCommerce in 2020 and into 2022. I’m always surprised to see how far ahead WooCommerce is compared to other eCommerce platforms. shopify is also growing steadily, but WooCommerce is still the market leader.
How many WooCommerce themes are there?
It is impossible to know how many specialized WordPress themes include support and styling for WooCommerce. This is because many WooCommerce-enabled themes are sold on independent websites and small marketplaces. Here are some WooCommerce statistics from the larger theme providers as of September 2022
- There are 1,300 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest.
- WordPress.org theme directory has 1504 WooCommerce themes.
That gives us over 2,804 from just two of the larger companies. Of course there are some duplicate data in between, the same theme served at both ThemeForest and WordPress.org. Also, if you include other theme marketplaces and independent theme companies, the total number will be much higher.
Clearly, there is no shortage of options when it comes to choosing a WooCommerce theme for your website design!
How many WooCommerce plugins are there?
As with the theme, it’s impossible to provide an exact number of how many WooCommerce plugins there are. Here’re what we found:
Strangely, the official WordPress.org plugin directory doesn’t let you filter by WooCommerce plugins. However, a quick count shows that
- There are well over 1,453 plugins with “WooCommerce” in the title.
- CodeCanyon markets 1,455 WooCommerce plugins for sale.
- WooCommerce.com sells 770 official WooCommerce plugin extensions.
The true total of this statistic would be much higher because a large number of websites sell eCommerce plugins independently or through smaller marketplaces. For example, we sell our own WooCommerce plugins through our own website, so popular plugins like WooCommerce Product Table are not even included in this number.
How many new websites are installing WooCommerce in 2022?
It’s easy to get the latest figures on the number of websites that are newly installing WooCommerce if you know where to look. An up to date figure for this WooCommerce stat is available at all times on the WooCommerce page in the WordPress plugin directory.
At the time of writing (November 2022), WooCommerce has been downloaded 1,499,722 times in the last week. That’s pretty incredible and shows how quickly WooCommerce is growing.
