An online store on WooCommerce with wishlist, comparison, quick view and abandoned-cart emails built in, looked after every month. No platform fee and no commission on what you sell — and every shop I have delivered runs on it.
A hosted platform charges a plan, and often a slice of the orders on top. At ten sales a month nobody notices. The arithmetic changes at two hundred, and by then moving is a project rather than a decision.
WooCommerce is WordPress, so the shop and the site are one thing rather than two systems pretending to talk. You hold the domain, the files and the database, and the person who built it is the one who maintains it.
I build both, so there is nothing in it for me either way. Woo is not the answer for everyone, and saying so is the only reason to trust the times I say it is.
The build, the hosting, the updates and the edits in one figure, and every payment comes off the price of the shop. What moves it is what the shop has to do — not how many products you put in it.
“Daniel set up our store and SEO completely. Within 3 months we were selling consistently online — he handles everything.”
“Our old website was years behind the business. Daniel rebuilt it from scratch and now runs our SEO — one point of contact, and things move without chasing.”
The software is. What you pay for is hosting and somebody to look after it, and both are in the monthly. What you never pay is a fee to the platform or a slice of your orders.
Five products, loaded properly, as the template. You add the rest, because you will be editing them long after the build. If you would rather not, product pages written for search are ten a month as an add-on.
You keep everything. Domain, files and database are handed over and the shop moves to any host you like. Nothing is switched off to force a renewal.
One person, and that is the offer. A WooCommerce development agency puts an account manager between you and whoever writes the code. Here you brief the person building it, and that same person is on the hosting, the updates and the change you send on a Tuesday.
Yes, within reason. Custom fields, checkout changes, shipping rules and connecting the shop to what you already use are part of the work. A bespoke plugin or a migration from another platform is quoted on its own, because the effort is in the data rather than the design.
Not if it is built properly and maintained. It is slower when it is neither, which is the honest reason hosted platforms exist. Maintaining it is what the monthly buys.
WooCommerce is the platform. These are the decisions around it.
One call. Whether Woo or Shopify fits how you actually sell — and I will say so even when the answer is the one I do not build as often.
