Woocommerce is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Over four million stores.

About a third of all non-big-box/amazon online shopping runs through Woocommerce installations. Much more than Shopify, which is the next biggest.

Because it’s a plugin for WP you might not ever notice a store is Woocommerce until you get the store emails that people often don’t customise much and have an identifiable look to them.

It’s fully possible to run a simple Woocommerce store without giving anyone a cut beyond your payment provider’s normal fees.

It’s not too difficult to extend; custom payment gateways and order processing hooks, inbound APIs, GraphQL etc.

If you are judicious about your install — just run Woocommerce, WP, customise one of the core themes or a well-known good theme like WP-Start or an Anders Noren theme, use the Stripe or Paypal payment gateway —- it’s pretty solidly secure, too; you’ll get automatic updates.

It’s definitely not the most fun thing to configure and administer, but it’s not Magento at least. I have never enjoyed that.

Automattic’s acquisition of Woocommerce was absolutely a blessing at the time; some of the more complex extensions to woocommerce are still paid addons, which is where they make their money (as well as payment gateway referral fees, which was a little-noticed part of the squabble with WP Engine, who modified Woocommerce to change the referrer to point to them). Woothemes (the previous owner) were unpredictable and a little rapacious; they changed their pricing in ways that caused concern (and Woocommerce itself started as an acrimonious and hostile fork of a plugin called Jigoshop).

I would really like to stop using WP over time, but I don’t think there are many better small e-commerce offerings than Woocommerce that offer that level of open-source control or cost control for people who need to run a modestly large store on a true shoestring.

I stand corrected!