If you use WordPress to power your websites, you have undoubtedly heard of the eCommerce WordPress plugin WooCommerce. The plugin powers millions of shops online. It is so popular that it is used for 12% of all online shops.
Recently, many WooCommerce customers have voiced their disappointment at WooCommerce raising renewal costs from 50% to 100% without warning. Many customers noted on WPTavern
Without a doubt, the company handled the whole situation very badly. They did not speak to customers about the issue or give them a fair warning about the cost of using WooCommerce extensions in the long-term doubling.
Despite a flood of complaints, WooCommerce store owners are effectively at the mercy of Automattic’s pricing policy for WooCommerce. They are tied into the WooCommerce system and there is no viable alternative for shop owners to use.
We Need a Good Alternative to WooCommerce
Donnacha MacGloinn wrote a fantastic article on WP Mayor calling the recent price increase of WooCommerce “The Biggest Opportunity in WordPress History“. He notes that this is a chance for a company to come in and offer better support. Perhaps someone could even fork WooCommerce and its extensions in the same way that WooThemes forked JigoShop to create WooCommerce.
I am not sure what the best solution to this is, but I do believe that it is not good for the WordPress community to have one plugin dominate the market so much. WooCommerce effectively has a monopoly on the WordPress eCommerce market. It has over 3 million active installations and alternatives such as Jigshop and WP eCommerce only have 7,000 and 30,000 installations respectively.
I discuss this issue in great detail in the video below.
What Say You?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue.
Do you agree that the WordPress community needs a viable alternative to WooCommerce?
Please leave a comment below or on YouTube for the above video.
Thanks.
Kevin
Great article! We will bee linking to this great article on our website.
Keep up the good writing.
Glad you enjoyed the article. Thanks for linking 🙂
Why is everything measured by installs?
Just because you installed woocommerce doesn’t mean you are actually selling anything with it. Notice how few woocommerce plugins there are for shipping and order management? There’s a reason for that.
As a professional in e-commerce playing pre-internet to present, Woo Commerce only seems ready for a company with minimal design expectations. Getting woo to handle more than 1,000 sku’s is madness in of itself.
We’re fully invested in woo, but in our experience, open cart, zen cart and Xcart were easier to deploy, with more server options.
Woo still hasn’t delivered the “innate SEO” friendly functions we’ve always wanted.
It’s early still- I’ve only been working on this for a YEAR, 3 “developers” later, and USD $6,000 + out of pocket.
The site hasn’t even paid for our out of pocket expenses yet.
Our other online sales platforms have crushed our Woo sales, even though we pointed out main domino to it.
Woo may have 12% of installs, but I’d be willing to bet it hasn’t seen .005% of online sales revenue yet.
The companies decision to DOUBLE our yearly costs should only happen when they DOUBLE woo commerce users SALES!
Thanks for commenting. It’s good to hear from someone who has a lot of experience in this field.
I suspect you are right that the sales and profit per WooCommerce website is lower than other eCommerce solutions.
To play devil’s advocate, is that the fault of WooCommerce that sales are lower?
If lower sales are a result of their SEO setup or options etc, then that is a valid point, but I think it’s important to remember that the low entry point of WordPress and WooCommerce means that it attracts a lot of beginners, whereas more experienced shop owners may turn to alternative solutions. That could be one reason why sales are lower.
Not saying whether that is the case or not, but I do think there are a lot of factors to consider.
There are plenty of stores using WooCommerce that are doing very well for monthly sales. WooCommerce easily handles 1,000+ products.
Also WC 3.0 has CRUD classes in core now.
https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/wiki/CRUD-Objects-in-3.0
Ah. Yes. You raise a very good point here, Kevin. I’m a fan of Woocommerce. It does 99.9% of what I want it to (or have wanted it to so far I should say) either at core or via extensions. It’s easier to set up then Magento or Drupal in my experience (though you can probably thank WordPress rather than Woo for that) and I can churn out a very good ecommerce site quite quickly with it.
However, as Victor Tronko says above, it is yet to generate sales on any of the sites I’ve used it for in anything like the numbers my Magento sites have. AND I DON’T KNOW WHY.
Until a viable alternative comes along though, Automattic have little incentive to really push Woocommerce to the level it could (and should) be at.
I shall ponder on this further, thank you for raising it.
Can you think of a reason why WooCommerce is not generating the same numbers as Magento websites? Do you think this is a technical reason? Are search engines ranking WooCommerce differently?
I don’t have answers to these questions, but it is interesting that many people are not seeing good sales numbers using WooCommerce.
I’m fascinated by this observation that your Woo Commerce site has sold less than your Magento site. I’d love a chance to compare the two from and SEO and analytics standpoint and see if it’s possible to diagnose the discrepancy.
We’ve built sites in both, and Magento is a beast to build and maintain. But I hate to recommend a solution to clients that won’t result in sales.
Hi Jill
Magento: http://www.americansoda.co.uk
WP/Woo: http://www.back2bath.co.uk
This isn’t comparing like for like – Magento site has been active far longer than the other so you’re not going to get very far from an SEO standpoint. UX/site speed etc however…I *think* Magento is winnning hands down.
Let me know what you find. 🙂
Totally agree about needing an alternative. I for one am going to start evaluating the competitors more.
My experience with WooCommerce has been that it adds quite a big admin overhead, and even when you pay for add-ons you get zero technical support with the API. Much smaller plugin shops manage dramatically better support. There’s a strong sense I’m being fleeced blind by Woo. Grr.
One thing I should have pointed out in my article/video is that many people could be better looking outside of WordPress to services like Magento or even hosted services like Shopify. WooCommerce is flexible, but that does not mean it is the best solution for everyone.
ECWID is my favorite shopping cart. I have hated Woo Commerce from day one.
We have 27 clients using WC. Our average cart bills $14,787 in sales and the average renewal plugin cost was $398. Doubling that isn’t going to work on an average basis. Over the last few years we’ve been building all new “service” clients with WooCommerce and not PrestaShop as the plugins are better suited. Now, we’ll be migrating many of those folks to PrestaShop and just beefing up the plugins we have already written for PrestaShop.
A very poor decision on WooCommerces’s part. Their support is nearly worthless anyway. They spend copious amounts of time trying to convince us that things aren’t really bugs. So, we fix them and eventually they do too–this makes their plugins more costly to us. Why would we continue to pay for the bottom of the barrel service?
A real game changer here. Goodbye, WooCommerce and your poor service! Good riddance!
Thanks for explaining why you made the decision to move away from WooCommerce.
Is there a reason you went with PrestaShop over another WordPress plugin?
Hello,
We have been using PrestaShop for years. Most of out clients are using it. A few years ago we started developing some edge case carts in WC and have been marginally satisfied. Our experience is, sadly, that good support is not usually offered by any cart plugin developer. Be it PS or WC. There are exceptions! And it is a joy to work and pay for quality service. Though, these tend to be smaller needs plugins. Before PrestaShop, over two decades ago, we worked with osCommerce. A real store with thousands of SKU’s isn’t a good idea to be based in WordPress, IMO. Still, there are plenty of edge cases where it seems to fit well. Selling a few T-shirts, just a few SKU’s, a service, etc.