Marg WooCommerce

Since it's a WordPress plugin, you have much more control over customization, look and feel than you do with cloud-based solutions like Shopify.

The WooCommerce base software is virtually useless without purchasing dozens of pricey "extensions", but you only discover this gradually, after you've invested a lot of time into setup and integration. It's like they've perfectly designed it to milk the maximum amount of money from their customers.

Our company literally has ONE product. So, we thought the WooCommerce base software would be enough to let our customers purchase it from our Wordpress website. We were wrong.

We sell our product two ways, with a "buy it now" price or with a "pay monthly" option. Well, it turns out that in order to do a monthly plan, we needed to buy the "Subscriptions" extension--at a cost of $199/year.

OK! Next, we wanted to create coupon codes. So we went to the "Coupons" section of WooCommerce to create coupons, but they don't work with subscriptions unless you buy the "Smart Coupons" extension--another $99/year. I bought this extension after a very long support chat session with WooCommerce support, which seems to exist solely to sell you extensions. And, after paying for it and installing it, it actually didn't do what they said it would do. They did refund me, though. But now we're forced to use DIFFERENT coupon codes for the "buy it now" and "monthly" options. Imagine the nightmare of having to advertise two different coupon codes for the same product, and expecting your customers to know which one to use based on how they pay for it. But WooCommerce unfortunately is unable to use the same coupon code for two different types of products. But they said they'd be willing to take my money to create a "customization" to allow this!

Next, since we have only one product, we wanted to just create "Buy Now" buttons that take the customer directly to checkout, rather than having them click on a cart button, view a "cart", then click "checkout". Oh, you want to do that? That will be another $39/year for the "Quick Buy Now Button" extension.

Since we have affiliates who drive customers to our website, we wanted to be able to track their sales so we can pay commissions. How do we enable that? You guessed it! $129/year for the "Affiliate" extension.

Need to ship via UPS or USPS? That will be an additional $79/year for the "USPS Shipping Method" extension and anoher $79/year for the "UPS Shipping Method" extension. At least DHL offers their own extension for free!

Want to integrate Google Analytics? That will be $79/year. Want to export your customer and order data? $79/year, please! Seeing a trend here?

Keep in mind that many of these extensions are incompatible with each other (like coupons not working for subscriptions). Also, some are unstable. I installed the Affiliates extension and it immediately crashed my entire website. I had to get an engineer to remove the plugin over FTP to restore my site.

On top of all the money you spend on extensions, it seems that WooCommerce has deliberately made their platform extremely inflexible. Most platforms allow you to make small changes with configuration options, but with WooCommerce you need to hire a developer to create a "customization". And guess what? The folks at WooCommerce's "support" chat are happy to put you in touch with their Customizations department, who will happily take even more of your money to do simple things like changing the order of the checkout form. I even asked them how I can set up my WooCommerce so that my checkout form looks just like the one on WooCommerce's own extension store. The answer? You need to pay us to customize it. That's right, not even WooCommerce's OWN STORE is possible without customization. In fact, I had four interactions with WooCommerce support chat, and in EVERY case they suggested I buy an extension or pay for a customization.

So, if you choose WooCommerce because it's "free and open source", keep in mind that you'll likely have to spend at least a thousand dollars to get it to do basic things. And you could easily spend a lot more.

Compared to that, a $40/month subscription to a cloud-based hosted web store platform doesn't seem so bad.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?