WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that turns a site built on WordPress into a fully functional online store. It is the most popular e-commerce solution for this CMS and powers a significant share of stores worldwide, from small sites to extensive product catalogues.

What WooCommerce offers

After installation, the plugin adds the mechanisms essential to selling: a product catalogue, a cart, a checkout process, tax and shipping handling and integrations with payment gateways. Because WooCommerce is written in PHP and built on WordPress's architecture, it draws on the same ecosystem of themes and thousands of extensions, which can add subscriptions, bookings, digital downloads or advanced reporting.

Who it is for and what to remember

WooCommerce is especially well suited where a company already runs a WordPress site and wants to add selling without migrating to a separate platform. Its advantages are full control over data and appearance and no per-transaction commission taken by a platform. The downside is greater responsibility for maintenance: updates, security and performance rest with the owner. A growing store quickly loads the server, so choosing the right hosting, caching mechanisms and database optimisation directly affects speed and conversion. At larger scale it is worth considering hosting tuned for WooCommerce and uptime monitoring, so that outages do not translate into lost orders. Planning an update, backup and monitoring strategy from the start is what keeps sales stable over the long run.