If you’re evaluating which eCommerce software or platform to use for your eCommerce business, whether just starting out or looking at changing platforms, no doubt WooCommerce is going to come up in your research. Immediately the contrast between WooCommerce and Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce will jump out at you… WooCommerce is free… is this for real?
So how does WooCommerce make money?
If WooCommerce is a FREE plugin for WordPress that turns your website into a powerful eCommerce store – WHY is WooCommerce free?
Before we answer that, let’s answer the question: is running a WooCommerce store free? If not, how much does WooCommerce actually cost?
How Much Does WooCommerce Cost – WooCommerce Pricing Model
If you’ve done more than a little research, you’ll have realised that there are some costs associated with operating your eCommerce store on WooCommerce – the business model and cost structure is just DIFFERENT to providers like Shopify – who are ultimately “SAAS” businesses (Software As A Service).
Shopify’s Pricing structure is therefore relatively straightforward to a beginner. You pay a monthly fee and you rent a website on the Shopify platform.
WooCommerce’s pricing structure doesn’t exist… i.e. you don’t actually pay WooCommerce anything.
However… You DO pay a hosting provider for some web space where you can “host” your WooCommerce software.
So essentially with WooCommerce there’s the involvement of another party – the “hosting provider”.
As with Shopify, the hosting provider hosting your WooCommerce software will charge a monthly (or yearly) fee to rent some web space.
The KEY difference here is that you have complete flexibility to up-sticks and take your WooCommerce software to another software provider and do more flexible configuration of the hosting and software that makes things like expanding your ecommerce store internationally a HELL of a lot easier with WooCommerce.
Typical hosting for WooCommerce websites can be from as little as $6 a month (which is obviously a hell of a lot less than even a Shopify basic plan).
We recommend Siteground WooCommerce Hosting because it’s highly stable, highly scalable and the support is simply awesome – great for starting up, scaling and growing to 7 figures in revenue and beyond.
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