Are you considering WooCommerce for your online store? Then you're in good company. WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a complete online store. Nearly half of all e-commerce systems W3Techs finds on the web are WooCommerce, which makes it the world's most widely used store platform by number of stores.
In this guide, we explain what WooCommerce is, whether it is really free, what a store actually costs to run, and how it compares with Shopify on price and ownership. You'll also learn how to set up payments and shipping, how to make the store visible in Google and AI search, and how we build WooCommerce stores ourselves.
What Is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is free, open-source software that you install on WordPress. WordPress is the tool behind 40.3 percent of all websites in the world (W3Techs, September 13, 2026). Think of WordPress as the foundation and WooCommerce as the shop you build on top of it.
With WooCommerce, you can sell physical goods, digital products, services, and subscriptions. You decide how the shop looks and works. All content, all customer data, and the entire solution belong to you. No provider can shut down your shop or change your terms overnight.
Open source means the code is open and free for everyone. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, leads the development. In addition, thousands of developers from around the world contribute.
How Big Is WooCommerce?
The size of a platform says something about safety. A solution with millions of users doesn't disappear overnight. The numbers from W3Techs as of September 13, 2026:
- WooCommerce is used by 8.0 percent of all websites in the world.
- It accounts for 47.8 percent of all e-commerce systems W3Techs detects. No other platform comes close, including Shopify.
- Among the very largest online stores, however, Shopify is more common.
- WooCommerce gets a new version roughly every five weeks. Version 11.0 shipped on August 4, 2026, and 11.1 on September 3.
We'll say it as it is. WooCommerce has the most stores, while Shopify dominates among the biggest brands. For small and medium-sized businesses, both are safe choices. The difference lies in price, control, and freedom. We'll come back to that further down.
Is WooCommerce Free?
Yes. The WooCommerce plugin is free, open source, and stays that way. Nothing changed in 2026 except the rumors. What you pay for is everything around it: hosting, a domain, any paid extensions, and a fee per sale to whichever payment provider you choose. That is the same model as WordPress itself.
The confusion comes from WooCommerce.com, which sells paid extensions and hosting bundles next to the free plugin. You never need them to run a store. You need them when a specific feature, like subscriptions or bookings, is worth more than the yearly fee.
The Benefits of WooCommerce
You Own Everything Yourself
The shop sits on your own web hosting. You own the code, the design, and the customer list. If you want to switch agency or provider later, you take everything with you.
No Fixed License Costs
WooCommerce itself costs nothing. You only pay for web hosting, domain, and the add-ons you choose yourself.
Thousands of Plugins and Templates
Need integration with accounting, email, or inventory? There's usually a ready-made plugin for it. The same goes for design. You choose a ready-made template or get a custom design made.
The Shop Grows With You
You can start with ten products and end up with ten thousand. WooCommerce handles both, as long as the web hosting keeps up.
What Does a WooCommerce Store Cost?
The software itself is free. That doesn't mean the shop is free to run. Here are the usual costs:
- Domain: around $10 to $20 a year.
- Web hosting: from around $10 a month for small shops. Larger shops need faster servers and pay more. Read more about fast WordPress hosting on Norwegian servers.
- Template (theme): free, or up to around $150 as a one-time purchase.
- Plugins: many are free. Paid plugins often cost $50 to $200 a year each.
- Payment: providers charge a fee per sale. WooPayments charges 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per US card transaction, with no monthly fee. Stripe and PayPal sit in the same range.
- Help from an agency: the price depends on design, integrations, and number of products. We give a fixed price before we start, after reviewing the catalog and the systems the store has to talk to.
If you set everything up yourself, you can get started for a few hundred dollars a year. If you want help with the entire setup, see how we help you start an online store.
Payments: Cards, Wallets, and Buy Now Pay Later
WooCommerce does not process payments itself. You connect a provider, and the checkout does the rest. Three kinds cover almost every store:
- Cards and wallets: WooPayments (built on Stripe), Stripe, or PayPal handle Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Pick one, not three.
- Buy now, pay later: Klarna and Afterpay let customers split the payment. They lift conversion on more expensive items, and charge the store a higher fee for it.
- Local favorites: every market has a payment method customers expect. In Norway it is Vipps, used by 4.6 million people. In the Netherlands it is iDEAL. Check what your customers use, and add it. Missing the local favorite costs more sales than any fee.
All of these have official WooCommerce plugins. You need a merchant agreement with each provider before you can take payments.
Shipping
WooCommerce ships with flat-rate, free-shipping, and local-pickup options built in. For live carrier rates and labels, add a shipping plugin: WooCommerce Shipping for USPS and DHL in the US, or the plugin for your national carrier. The customer sees the shipping cost and pickup point at checkout, and you print the label from the order screen.
Correct shipping setup is one of the easiest ways to reduce abandoned checkouts. Show the cost before the last step, offer pickup where it exists, and never surprise anyone on the payment page.
SEO: Get Visible on Google
WooCommerce inherits the good search properties from WordPress. You control addresses, titles, and descriptions on every single page yourself. With an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math, you get even more control.
The tools don't do the job alone, though. Good product texts, fast pages, and a clean structure determine whether you end up at the top. Start by doing keyword research, so you know which words your product pages should target. If SEO is new to you, first read our guide on what search engine optimization is. If you need help, see our SEO optimization service.
AI Search: Get Recommended by ChatGPT and Google
More and more people find products through AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI overviews. It's no longer enough to just rank in regular search. The shop must also be easy for AI to read and cite.
With the WebMCP standard, the store can also give AI agents tools for product search and price checks. We explain WebMCP and show how we use it ourselves.
WooCommerce gives you a good starting point. The platform automatically adds structured data to your products. Structured data are small labels in the code that tell Google and AI what the price, stock status, and ratings are. Clear answers, honest product texts, and up-to-date information increase the chance of being recommended.
This field is called AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. Read our guide on AEO optimization, or see how we work with AEO for customers.
Security and Maintenance
WooCommerce and WordPress receive regular security updates. That's good, but it requires someone to actually do the updating. An unmaintained online shop becomes an easy target over time.
This should be in place from day one:
- Automatic backup every day.
- Regular updates of WordPress, WooCommerce, and all plugins.
- Firewall, strong passwords, and two-factor authentication.
WordPress has built-in tools for privacy, such as export and deletion of customer data. This helps you comply with GDPR. The responsibility, however, lies with you as the shop owner, not with the software.
If you'd rather not think about this yourself, a maintenance agreement takes care of updates, security, and monitoring.
WooCommerce vs Shopify
This is the question we get most often about online stores. In short: choose WooCommerce if you want to own everything yourself, keep fixed costs down, and have full freedom to customize the store. Choose Shopify if you want everything delivered as a package for a fixed monthly price, and accept giving up control.
| WooCommerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| License | Free | Basic $39/month, $29 on annual billing. Grow $105, Advanced $399 |
| Hosting | Your own, from about $10 a month | Included |
| Card fees | WooPayments 2.9% + $0.30, no monthly fee | 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic with Shopify Payments |
| Third-party payments | No extra fee | 2% extra on Basic if you use another provider |
| Ownership | Code, data, and customer list are yours | You rent the store. Data can be exported, the store cannot |
| Maintenance | You or your agency | Shopify |
| Customization | Anything can be changed | Within what Shopify allows |
Shopify prices are from shopify.com on September 13, 2026, and WooPayments fees from WooCommerce's documentation. The math for a small store: Shopify Basic on annual billing costs $348 a year before you sell anything. A WooCommerce store on good hosting costs about the same, but then you own it. On a $20 sale, both take about $0.88 in card fees. The difference is the $29 a month, and the 2 percent Shopify adds if you ever leave Shopify Payments.
Both can become great stores in any market, with local payment methods and local shipping.
How We Build WooCommerce Stores Ourselves
We build and run WooCommerce stores every day, and develop our own WordPress plugins such as Text to Speech for WordPress. Three stores from our client list show what that looks like in practice.
- VuggeBaby: WordPress and WooCommerce on PHP 8.4, LiteSpeed for performance, FluentCRM for email, and a dedicated tracking server for conversion data. The store was rebuilt module by module while selling at full speed, with no downtime.
- Harney & Sons (harney.no): premium tea sold to Nordic customers. We handle SEO, AEO, and operations for the WooCommerce store, including a dealer program for business customers.
- IoPT Norge: books and course material sold in a WooCommerce store on the same website as the course registration. One login, one system.
What Actually Goes Wrong in the Stores We Take Over
The disadvantages of WooCommerce are the same every time, and they are rarely WooCommerce's fault.
- Nobody has updated. WordPress, WooCommerce, and thirty plugins, two years old. The first job is always to update in the right order on a staging copy.
- Too many plugins. Three that do the same thing, two that fight each other. We usually remove a third.
- Hosting is the bottleneck. A store on $5 shared hosting takes four seconds to load the checkout. Customers leave before they pay.
- The tracking lies. Conversions are counted twice or not at all, so the ad budget is steered by guesswork.
All of this can be fixed. But it is why we recommend a maintenance agreement from day one, not after something has gone wrong.
Is WooCommerce Right for You?
WooCommerce works for most, but not for everyone. Here's our honest assessment.
WooCommerce is a good choice if you have or are planning a WordPress site, want to own the solution yourself, want to keep fixed costs down, or need customizations beyond the ordinary.
Consider another solution if you don't want to deal with maintenance at all, and would rather pay a fixed monthly price for a ready-made package.
If you're unsure whether an online shop is the right step for your business, feel free to read 10 reasons to start an online shop and our 12 tips for starting an online shop first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into an online store. It accounts for 47.8 percent of all e-commerce systems W3Techs detects (September 2026).
Is WooCommerce no longer free?
WooCommerce is still free, and the plugin has never had a license fee. What costs money is hosting, a domain, optional paid extensions from WooCommerce.com or other developers, and the per-sale fee from your payment provider.
What does WooCommerce cost?
The software itself is free. You pay for domain, web hosting, and any paid plugins. A simple store you run yourself often costs a few hundred dollars a year. For comparison, Shopify Basic costs $348 a year on annual billing, before fees.
What are the disadvantages of WooCommerce?
Someone has to maintain the store: updates, backups, and plugins kept in order. Performance depends on your hosting, and too many plugins make the store slow. With Shopify you avoid this, but you pay more over time and do not own the store.
How much does Shopify take from a $20 sale?
On the Basic plan with Shopify Payments, the card fee is 2.9 percent plus $0.30, so about $0.88 on a $20 sale. Use another payment provider and Shopify adds 2 percent on top, another $0.40. WooCommerce with WooPayments takes the same $0.88 and nothing extra.
Which payment methods work with WooCommerce?
Almost all of them. WooPayments, Stripe, and PayPal cover cards and wallets, Klarna and Afterpay cover buy now pay later, and most local methods, like Vipps in Norway or iDEAL in the Netherlands, have official plugins. You need a merchant agreement with each provider.
Is WooCommerce better than Shopify?
It depends on your needs. WooCommerce gives more control and lower fixed costs. Shopify is quicker to get started with, but costs more over time and gives less freedom.
Do I need technical knowledge to use WooCommerce?
You can get far without coding, but you need to enjoy learning. Payment, shipping, and security require a bit of effort to set up. Many get help with the setup and run the shop themselves afterward.
Is WooCommerce safe?
Yes, as long as the shop is maintained. Keep WordPress, WooCommerce, and the plugins updated, take backups, and use strong passwords.
Summary
WooCommerce is the world's most used online shop solution measured by number of shops, and for good reason. You own everything yourself, the fixed costs are low, and it works with every major payment provider and carrier.
The price of the freedom is that someone has to maintain the shop. So plan operations and security from day one.
We at Mementor build online shops on WooCommerce and develop our own plugins for WordPress. See how it works in practice in the IoPT Norge case study, where books are sold in a WooCommerce store on the same website as the course registration. Considering WooCommerce for your business? Contact us for a no-obligation chat, or read more about how we help you from idea to first sale.
